No Matter How Much I Resist

I imagine you must imagine yourself
Elsewhere and else-one
In order to write,

Because only in the imagination

Do images rush, gliding over the lawn
Like dreams, always unfulfilled
By the outreaches of touch.

What else then is literature,
If not the dream of life?
Letters from another country
That haunt our waking hours
With these dreams, the passion of all that is all
But unseen?

And it is in this becoming that the body resides
Most truly in the fostering of mind;
Gathering the wilting perspicacity of time,
We dally: we do not have long.

But there is always another sentence, another
Symbol scribbled or scratched or pressed
Into the wax, and time to watch it cool, time
For another appeal. Maybe our fate

Is in the seal, but seal is sealed into the wax
Before the impulse of our fingers can go lax.