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Terminus Suspended in the music slow and powerful, like seahorses deep within an ocean swell, I hung and rose and fell; glimpsed mosaics of coloured weed and tangled coral webs; tumbling in a rainbow dream, the diamond-crusted roof radiated effulgence like larnbent milk; and the seconds stalked fastidious on stilts of coils elastic and the minutes filled the bins and the magnets of my mind and the engine of the years drew my carriages of laughter, my carriages of tears, past an empty-echoed siding where the hollow-shadowed memories shunt their rusting axles, or stand at rest by buffers where a creak or clank may startle denizens of rust and weed and useless points; past the picture of a brook with rocks amid a pined spinney, such as someone quite forlorn might have written in a dream; past the graveyard of cars, metal and rubber, like a monster's vomit, uncovered, hung with flies; past the courtyard fenced with wire filled with bricks, blocks and cylinders, objects of their trade in piles like a sudden place of turds, till, companioned by wires' multimusic of full esoteric chords on poles, we had come to the plain on an undeviating rail, we had come to the plain of snow and ice where time's engine laboured into particles, left me walking on the sky, on my back my secret sacks with tape recordings of the songs, motion pictures of the acts of apostles of my time; crammed on microfilm secreted in the dots of my original MSS, explicit dimensions of the scene of the crime, measurements made with compass and inches; locked in little labelled bottles with precisely fitted stoppers, vials of toffee and vinegar and seawater and retchings; sealed cotton saturated with roses and with filth; and, prized pride, coded in millions of groups of binary digits fixed in the modulation of certain molecules extended on a random access device, a lover humid on my breast. On the long expanses of the plain, from the noon of Polaris to the craggy ice-cliffs of fog bound Antartica, where the three ice-women roll their eyeball along the darkness, and above the sky, the centaur chases the cross, the ocean of oxygen lay frozen, still, silent. In outer space the suns boiled and glowed with fluid light. With crying fingers on an endless wall I stood in the snow with my treasures: I had left the key along the train. Some conclusion must be made, or at least essayed; for the distant suns' receding and the round limits' fading encroach the compass of my endeavour. The wings of the horizon spiral Polaris. Some conclusion must be made, or at least essayed. The hollow thud of clods on the coffin cover falling, the chuckle of bones, clean eyes in the morning's joy and living body's embrace. Here there unit all I not I. Love morning death night. I had not the pictures: but dreams arose in music speaking with the void, silver mounting notes accumulated on poles, music shifting like a mighty work, an ultimate rhyme of a million spaces, wheeling helical through eternity's polishings, a note that cries like a single sheet of light through all the galaxies and time. krm