But the Tobacco Show Owner has come to the door and stands there now.
I look at him, straining my half turned neck,
Straining my half-blind soul.
He'll die and so will I.
He'll leave his signboard, I'll leave my poems.
After a while his signboard will perish too, and so will my poems.
A little later the street will die where his signboard hung,
And so will the language my poems were written in.
Then the spinning planet where all this happened will die,
In other satellites in other systems something like people
Will go on making things like poems and living under things like signboards,
Always one against another,
Always one thing as useless as another,
Always the impossible thing as useless as the real thing,
Always the fundamental mystery as certain as the sleeping surface mystery,
Always this thing or that, or neither one nor the other.
But now a man's gone into the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?)
And the plausible reality of it all suddenly hits me.
I'm getting up, full of energy, convinced, human,
And about to write these lines, which say the opposite.