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    Premise: one exists alone,
    Within a system of increasingly mild ideals
    —The good of love, the greater good of dreams—
    Abstracted from the musings of the grown-up child

    That somewhere, in a scene above the sky,
    Lies smiling. Anxious to begin
    Before the will can answer and its passions fly away
    Like sparrows, he lays aside his cares and

    Lets the world come, lets its shapes return,
    Its mirrors answer and its angels roam across the narrow
    Confines of the page. Like friends
    Estranged by distance and the inwardness of age,

    The spaces between letters become spaces between lives,
    The fact of pain begins to seem unreal, the trees
    Begin to seem too distant; the imaginary self,
    Concealed from the world, begins its cry

    Yet remains empty—as though it could contain
    No tenderness beyond its own, and no other love
    Than that concealed in its own reflection, hovering
    On the threshold of age, between two lives.

    John Koethe