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A LETTER Looking out of the dark of the town At midnight, looking down Into water under the lighthouse : Abstractedly, timelessly looking For something beneath the jetty, Waiting for the dazed, silent flash, Like the painless explosion that kills one, To come from above and slide over And empty the surface for miles— The useless, imperial sweep Of utter light—you see A thicket of little fish Below the squared stone of your window, Catching, as it passes, The blue afterthought of the blaze. Shone almost into full being, Inlaid in frail gold in their floor, Their collected vision sways Like dust among them; You can see the essential spark Of sight, of intuition, Travel from eye to eye. The next leg of light that comes round Shows nothing where they have been, But words light up in the head To take their deep place in the darkness, Arcing quickly from image to image Like mica catching the sun: The words of a love letter, Of a letter to a long-dead father, To an unborn son, to a woman Long another man's wife, to her children, To anyone out of reach, not born, Falling 2 6 9 Or dead, who lives again, Is born, is young, is the same: Anyone who can wait no longer Beneath the huge blackness of time Which lies concealing, concealing What must gleam forth in the end, Glimpsed, unchanging, and gone When memory stands without sleep And gets its strange spark from the world. 270 ...

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