In faintest clues to that lost future
How might our meanwhile outlooks feature?
Dim distillation that releases
Endless potentials for the species,
Though all too soon perspectived on
Dark outposts of oblivion?

Back from those caves, at least we find
A muse-mode in the human mind:
Part poetry emerging now, part history,
The message it seems to impart is, "Try
To filter realities, out through past blunders
To a smooth flow". Is that beyond us?

                  *****

Of course one's read a lot of memoirs
And always found the trouble with them was
Their pasts remained a jungle-viewed
From afar, from above-in any case skewed.
So try one's own experience,
Deploy some data, sense by sense,
Strange, fluent input from behind
The flat stage-scenery of the mind.

Visual. -In various lights displayed
Solar and lunar, shape or shade,
Their fine particulars all found
In the sky and the sea, by the stream, on the ground.
So it's not just the mind's eye that follows
The weaving flight of swans and swallows,
Starlit horizons, sunsets on
Plynlimon or the Parthenon-
And women-sometimes in the nude
Or other poses of pulchritude
-One of them keen to show she owns
White pearls like satin cherry-stones.
(Miniscule? Yes-to balance the huge
Spurts from one's cranial centrifuge...)