NARCISSISTIC EVENING PROSPECT: SANTIAGO DE CHILE

Now may I tell you something I have often wondered?    
which seems to me the very type of unambiguous statement;
the earth has existed for many years past,
even at that hour when the land seems haunted,
and there exists at present a living human body which is mine.

And because schizophrenia's grown old from birth
and I've grown old with her,
an uncanny motion of the sun appears and reappearing
in a water
as in a fair glass
and in a straight line;
in water that is stirred or moved
within still water, I see this soft white cloud of
nightmare cruel as the wolf''s quair,
and in fright recognise this language without difficulty
this Chilean affair.

Before the gates of hell
or the entrance to a lane
below the fields; above,
the drone of nameless insects
or an aerodrome:
landscape fading before the fading room.

And because a lady
(for of her we never hear of him) and because,I say,
a lady asks me, unsleeping,
which of us early wakers would watch over
the great basin of the Empire,

I tell of an evening affect in the language of the dark surfaces
of scripture, hovering over gleaming frogspawn pond life
embogged in the billowing Andes, cut through by the motor road.