Certain edges – the sun, the moon, the grassy blade –
have long composed this intuited world,
so as to suggest an unacknowledged master,
to whom I am a sop among apprentices,
an orderly of optical delights
taking inventory in the convex larder,
planning, in a retinal shorthand, this rummage
of surfaces and their fit disclosures,
intriguing at letters in the ear’s ample conch.
Never once has he shown his face, this minister
of eternity’s centralized commerce,
this demurring Hughes, entrepreneur of shadows
at the solstice’s illicit Vegas, where players
gather at a dozen sprawling tables,
casting their dice along a granite domino.
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