288
Preoccupied and happy, I had fi shed
Well through a June day on Commotion Creek
And had my limit; now the water rushed
In shadow, mostly. Almost at the lake
I climbed the bank, tired, quiet. There he was.
He happened; total; there. He barely lay
A fi nger long -- bone mouth and ruff and claws,
The plated body, and shock on shock, the eye.
And once I turned, all I had been stayed there
Whole in a gaze where no more could occur.
the daimon's advice
So you of the slow-changing room
That each day you had wakened in
To be your own, provisional,
Slyly-known fellow, tried the sill,
Slipped out, renounced what you had been,
To tamper with this sourceless calm.
How long ago? you ask. But time,
The even circling round a center,
Has nothing here to circle through.
Where movement's neither false nor true,
To turn is not to leave, or enter,
But to stand, tenser yet, the same.
No, you must practice unconcern.
It will not do to glare, and call
Thunder to break from lightning-crack
That the world, at once, come densely back --
You'll owe to some stray, prose detail
Your unremarkable return.