Progress

1972 has passed out of speech,
Or it has passed back into speech:
It is spoken again.

I am the living mind you fail to describe.
That you fail to describe,
Writing, as you did,
That I am the living mind.

We could go on like that between us,
Surpassing each other like the waves
Of the incoming tide.

Think about this for a moment:
The water is always receding or moving forward,
But it must leave a place to go back into its place
Until it returns – this is the continent,
The shore, this is the cycle of death and life,
Dispersing through the metaphor.

Adrienne, when I speak,
I think of a flood of words,
Like the Tiber overflowing
As Horace imagined,
Only the island of the world’s generations
Has nowhere to go, no paradise
Lost to poetry and thought.

My point is that when I think again
That I am the living mind you fail to describe,
I think neither forwards nor backwards to a time
Bequeathed no living mind, an unmind undermined
By the tides of our restless kind.