On a Letter Not Written

For a flock of daybreaks, for a few threads

on which the fleece of life is snarled

and then wound out

into hours and years—is it for this the dolphin in twos

are sporting today with their children? Oh that I could hear

       from you

nothing at all, and that I could escape from the ghostly lights

of your eyelashes. Surely there is something else on earth.

I cannot disappear or come forward. The red furnace

of night is late

coming, the evening goes on,

prayer is torture, and not yet among the rocks

that are rising have you received

the bottle from the sea. The empty wave

breaks on the point, at Land’s End.