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white river poems 345
or individual missteps
leading off -- rather: I was
like a rider that has lost
a stirrup, his own movements
disintegrating, invaded
and replaced by the surges
and the joltings of his mount.'
And adds, with resignation,
`No matter how I appeared
to others in that bad time,
and no matter what I said
or did, that's what it felt like.'
3
what happened: nathan meeker's words as
recovered from the records
Meeker: `The world of events
entangled in opinion
is what we're going to see.'
I say, `One historian
says history is lived forwards
but written in retrospect,
so we know the end before
we consider the beginning,
and never can recapture,
wholly, what it was to know
the beginning only.'
*
He:
`And neither could I do so.
It's a man the story changed
who's left to tell his story;
then, telling a story is,
itself, another story,
* The historian is C.V. Wedgewood (as quoted by Dean Acheson in Present at the
Creation).