Say to me, questioner, merely what you would say.
You who cherish my semblance for a day!
You who render so carefully an idiom
denied to you in thought and in word and in deed,
mastering an unwritten trivium
whose ciphers flash in the shadows and then recede.
I, who wait upon a quantity of stresses,
attend you at your first and last request,
but lose myself in rituals and in guesses.
Do not think, for that, that my attempts are in jest.
For the scene is played out at a dozen
stations which flicker as in an early Chaplin.
And the tramp who bears a cross wrapped up in muslin
creates the spaces in which things happen,
not at the end, but in the margins of the frame.
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