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O advance me an evening's rest!

He thought, raking back

The thin strands of his dullblonde hair,

Inclined over his soup. Its white steam,

Pluming, bent to him as he exhaled.

“The doctor returns to find his house in order.

All instruments in their set places. Instruction

That leads down practice

Out of abstraction. Behind the house,

In the long darkness, overrun with wildgrasses,

His wooden shed,

The project of a lost summer, subsides gently.

Starlings have built their nest under the eave.”

He thought on his parable ;

Thought, resting the spoon on the tablecloth,

Of the empty house of the stare. Fallow,

That mind's-corner. Fallow,

He asserted. Barren as heaven now may be :

Its starfactories still, its great loud mechanism

Dormant. The blue feather

Floating out upon the flood. Our memory.

The soup was hot and nourishing. He calmed

And thought of his dream,

Of the dark, spare child that had come to him.

Come build in the empty house, he intoned.

He passed an hour at table

And read Corinthians, drowsing over his wine.