It was as if we weren’t really free to deplore
this bad manner of unskilled presumption,
as if we were alternately animated
and enervated by a recent memory loss
which tricked us into asseverating
the poverty or wealth of what we were left with
as we groped along the strand assembling objects
that long had been divested of their names.
What business was it of ours to make more or less
of losses we could barely feel, let alone know?
We had a pleasant walk, at any rate,
on beaches that seemed to stretch on without purpose,
never finding the things we thought we remembered –
or if we did they were simply tossed back
into our collection of odd and nameless things.
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