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 happening 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.