Howard Nemerov - Holding the mirror up to nature lyrics

Some shapes cannot be seen in a gla**, those are the ones the heart breaks at. They will never become valentines or crucifixes, never. Night clouds go on insanely as themselves though metaphors would be prettier; and when I see them ma**ed at the edge of the globe, neither weasel nor whale, as though this world were, after all, non-representational, i know a truth that cannot be told although I try to tell you, "We are alone, we know nothing, nothing, we shall die frightened in our freedom, the one who survives will change his name to evade the vengeance for love..." Meanwhile the clouds go on clowning over our heads in in the floodlight of a moon who is known to be Artemis and Cynthia but sails away anyhow beyond the serious poets with their crazy ladies and cloudy histories, their heroes in whose idiot dreams the buzzed circles like a clock.