The man walked down gradually under the handholds.
The time it takes to spy the letters and mark them.
In this whiteness of lights the words seem to
inch into each board of page. Either that or this
is the most colored light I have ever seen, by.
By rights, I should know enough to be bored by
all this. But that I will never be. My smile
a curvature of unknown enclosure. Disclosed
only to be what’s known?, then I’ll scribe
just what’s left out in a day. Those piercing
places where the unknown joins as neatly to more
of itself as the what’s only studied. Make it all up
out of the world as the world once made up of itself.
Try at the glass, at the opening space, at the
full and windward and colored to the last.
Ed. note: With thanks to Geoffrey Young, publisher of The Figures, the press that published Coolidge’s Odes of Roba in 1991