Recognition
I stopped reading and looked up
and around the bedroomÂ
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 happening without consciousness.
But 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.