Was this the heavenly scale?
Could I live a bit longer,
just eighty-five times over
(or were I eighty-five now
repeat that some thirty times)
it would be glowing again
this brilliant comet that
cannot keep to its orbit,
refusing to be trapped there,
that runs races with itself:
gets to the half-way mark,
and returns in mid-career
like a child in a sulk
or a poet whose soul is hurt,
now happy, now unhappy.
Celestial train of the cosmos:
it’s the spectacle I love
not the similes you offer.

How touched they were, and he himself how saddened,
how well he understood the situation,
and did I think his daughters, who had been
through similar things, might they perhaps regard
the deterrent example of my personal poems
as personal deterrent? What I think
albeit at the wrong moment as usual,
is I've let the spirit of the age escape
in a dangerously user-friendly form,
I think the whole thing is a pack of lies,
that what I said bears only a passing likeness
and differs from me at certain crucial points
(I justify myself, as most do, by admitting
exaggerations meekly ) - I think
that poetry is not a melancholy Sunday
but working weekdays, precise, to be endured.