in the midst of my mournful devotions; that time when I cherished a leaflet of quartz, at gaze in a lifetime's vocation. I ranged in the markets of avarice where goodness is bought for a price, breathed the insensate miasmas of envy, the inhuman contention of masks and existences. I endured in the bog-dweller's element; the lily that breaks on the water in a sudden disturbance of bubbles and blossoms, devoured me. Whatever the foot sought, the spirit deflected, or sheered toward the fang of the pit. So my poems took being, in travail retrieved from the thorn, like a penance, wrenched by a seizure of hands, out of solitude; or they parted for burial their secretest flower in immodesty's garden. Estranged to myself, like shadow on water, that moves through a corridor's fathoms, I sped through the exile of each man's existence, this way and that, and so, to habitual loathing; for I saw that their being was this: to stifle one half of existence's fullness like fish in an alien limit of ocean. And there, in immensity's mire, I encountered their death; Death grazing the barriers, Death opening roadways and doorways.