XXXIII

If tonight it rains, I would withdraw
a thousand years from here.
Better a hundred, no more.
As if nothing had happened, I would imagine
I am still becoming.

Or motherless, loverless, without the insistent
kneeling to spy the pure, innermost
pulse,
on a night like this, I would be combing
the vedic fibre,
the vedic wool of my final end, devil's
sign of having held
by their nostrils
time's two disconsonant clappers in a single bell.

Taking count of my life
or accounting that I am still unborn
will not be enough to deliver me.

What has not yet arrived will not be, but
what has come and already gone,
but what has come and already gone.