Recognition

I stopped reading and looked up

and around the room from a corner chair,

feeling some sort of meta-experience,

a sudden glimpse of life in the moment,

myself in a final, fixed phase of existence

that had been going on without consciousness.

Then I could see, inside and out,

a widower waking into a world

he occupied automatically, an automaton

in a stream of facts, not buffeted by them 

but not making them either, just one of a number

of peripheral variables a person of substance

passing through might more or less half-notice.