I’d reached the silver river’s other side
And wanted badly to tell what I’d found
Among the mushrooms there, so long denied:
My shadow face, more real than my first wound

But bloodless as a death-defying stone.
Was this the mask I’d doffed or never donned?
Was mine the finger pointing at the Moon,
A dark to which I could not be but blind

Until the tyrants of identity
Had taken graceless flight? Upon that shore
I made a study of nonentity:

Of earth bereft of earth, air void of air.
I said: To Hell with building Heaven here,
And then I woke, and saw I’d built a fire.