Recognition

I stopped reading and looked up,

around the bedroom from a corner chair,

feeling a sort of meta-experience,

a glimpse of myself and life in the moment,

me, in a fixed, final phase of existence

that was going on without consciousness

till then, till now.

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 either,

just one of many peripheral variables

a person of substance passing through

might more or less half-notice.