With Sir Thomas Browne

Defend me, Lord. (That I’m calling you implicates No One. It’s only a word from the drill the disengaged can use, and this evening of dread, I write it.) Defend me from me. They have also said this, Montaigne and Browne and a Spaniard I don’t know; something stays in me amid all this gold that my darkening eyes still decipher. Defend me, Lord, from an impatient appetite for becoming marble or oblivion; defend me from being what I have been, the one I have been irreparably. Not from the sword or the blood-stained lance but, oh, protect me from expectation.