Was it you who sat up writing in the summer night?
Was it you who feared poetry won’t solve a thing?
Yes. Despair lay on the water.
Yes. Ghost widows carried books
& vanished
Behind the apple trees…
**
Memory: a girl, her dress yellow as a buttercup…
Behind her, the green chill of the Baltic…
**
Politics in my time is much the same as in Voltaire’s day:
Off with his head; let him keep his head
But live exiled; rail against him;
Read his books in secret.
**
Catherine the Great did not die under a horse.
It’s not even a good story.
**
Livelier dreams do not always await the dreamer.
A principle problem.
**
Then there are the oldies:
The shirt in my dream was from my childhood. It had dreadful stripes. I wore it in the hospital, blind child, alone in a ward. The damned thing came back last night. You can count on the Id.
Planet of the Blind 