The Circle-That-Looks-Like-a-Line

I am the Watcher, and me nothing eludes.

I live behind the mask of things,

My breath is world-wither, and a chance shot form my eye-sockets confounds the God of Illusions at Its imbecile pastimes,

I stand within Time’s crumbling walls and weave at Eternity’s looms the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line.

I am leagued with the Sphinx, and her secretive mumblings I alone understand.

I am the footnote that explains that old undecipherable palimpsest called Life,

And it is for me the drum beats—the deadly intoning drumbeats that the mummer Man jigs to.

 

Briskly Man in his morn steps forth, guards up.

He bows, he smiles, and his eyes, foci of his myriad lusts seek in the dust for the thing that slipped, eel-like through his fingers in the yesterday.

At night, within his locked and barred room, his hope-fattened face dismantles.

His eyes grow knotted troubled lights, jaws sag—weary, or, weary is he!

Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!

 

· · · · · · · · 

 

Yea, I am the lidless, dispassionate Eye that pierces the murk and the mist—

My tears are a laughing,

My laughing a weeping—

I watch and I wait and record,

Brooding over my soul, that dried lava-stream and granary of volcanic dust;

Brooding over my brain, that mirror of the implacable trivial.

 

· · · · · · · ·

 

I watch, I record and I weave at Eternity’s looms the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line