Recognition

I stopped reading and looked up

and around the bedroom from a corner chair,

feeling some sort of meta-experience,

a glimpse of myself and life in the moment,

me in a fixed, final phase of existence

that had been going on without consciousness.

But now I could see, inside and out:

a widower waking into a world

he occupied automatically,

an automaton in a stream of facts,

not buffeted, but not participating in,

just one of many peripheral variables

a person of substance passing through

might more or less half-notice.