between sea and sky. And the sun
is balancing on it as it has always done,
its cloak of colours just beginning to run

across the blue. I think that time is short
and the line tight, strong enough to support
the minute as it dances from port to port,

that the good thing is here, hard as it may be
to see it, and though it is never free
to guarantee that the story ends happily

we have enough rope and string to suspend
our lives from. We watch suns rise and descend
and notice precisely how the colours blend

in that bowlful of seconds we hold in our hands,
full of fins and scales and feathers, and strands
of bright hair like blessings and reprimands.
 
 
 

2.
I see a room. In it some four or five are asleep.
Each wears a handkerchief over his or her face.
One of them squats by the fire.

He sneezes again and again. He holds his handkerchief
up to the fire and the steam rises from it.
I want to use the Hungarian word: sistereg
for the noise it almost makes, for the stillness
that is not quite still, for the breath that elevates
and collapses every chest, for the sound of the leaves
in the garden, for the fire, the air clearer and clearing

and I don't know whether the thing I am seeing
is a comedy or death at its most pacific,
and how would I tell the difference?
and whose story it is I am telling?