Here is my page, half darkness, half silence, hoping
To find at last the way to you I could not find.

It contains all my boredom, sickness, and desire,
Those things I said in drunkenness, in rage or love.

Like water, it holds its drowned who are without names.
Like time, it was just a way of passing the time.

It lied now and then—I confess—for your pleasure:
Some misguided aim of overcompensation

For what was not only enough but too much.
Reliance upon language was its undoing. . . .

But someday it will be all that is left of me.
Death bothers its margins like gulls along some shore.

Tucson, ArizonaMarch 20, 1990

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 Number 1, on page 30
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