Still Life with Stranger

Come on, Ulrich, the great octagon of the sky is passing over us. Soon the world will have moved on. Your love affair, what is it but a tempest in a teapot? But such storms exude strange resonance: the power of the Almighty reduced to its infinitesimal root hangs like the chant of bees, the milky drooping leaves of the birch on a windless autumn day— Call these phenomena or pinpoints, remote as the glittering trash of heaven, yet the monstrous frame remains, filling up with regret, with straw, or on another level with the quick grace of the singing, falling snow. You are good at persuading them to sing with you. Above you, horses graze forgetting daylight inside the barn. Creeper dangles against rock-face. Pointed roofs bear witness. The whole cast of characters is imaginary now, but up ahead, in shadow, the past waits.