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It is not easy to create emptiness.

What should you tip it into? A deserted square,

Possibly by moonlight? Time is the perspective

Rendering its depth where melancholy toys with metaphysics

In some abstracted kind of way. Emptiness

Recalls all the lost entirety which can just be

Filled with things, things raining down on one,

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In Leonardo’s case. In Durer’s, plethora of aids

Helping the muse to ponder as to what the end may be

To pondering that emptiness within. A road which simply

Ends at a river’s bank. Here one waits, immobile,

For the non-existent ferry, which, being out of the frame

Cannot be said to exist. When we saw the deer,

Having got lost enough to do so, did I not also hear her

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Who I scattered there? Long indeed have I lain dead

In such an earth as can rightly be said to perish

That a new earth may rise from the depths, were its waters

Not simply bottomless. By cold rains have I been beaten,

And by many dews made wet. Snow has covered me

In its drifts, and yet I am not emptied of regret.

Emptiness waits for the ferry, here by a river to be crossed:

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