It is not here, the external world.
There is only the senses' veil.
The amusements have dropped like stiff leaves
To a bare and endless field.
We are nothing without their glint.
I am left a scarecrow in the void,
A kind of display, in the twists of the straw,
Of what once filled the air with meaning
But now makes less fuss than a ghost
Or the wind over empty spaces,
The voice that filled its clothes
Now flows through distant grasses.
Summer lies dead on the ground.
The dry light spreads blindness
As a kind of mourning, the sheet
Brought over the eyes.
Here is a place filled with feeling
Where all that almost realized goes
In monumental shadows and distorted lines,
Hope's final sublimation.
The man who lives here carries a bag
Stuffed with what's left of the earth.
I do not share, even that, when he offers,
The dust is still too much like home.