Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—why are they no help to me nowI want to makesomething imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eyeseems a snapshot,lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,heightened from life,yet paralyzed by fact.

All's misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of

Vermeer gave to the sun's illuminationstealing like the tide across a mapto his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,warned by that to giveeach figure in the photographhis living name.