I sit at my writing-desk like a dreamer who knows if he makes a sound he will wake, and is silent, content in a dreamed room filled with rain and red-beaked birds. Yesterday I tried to read the work of a famous poet aloud, but the meter barbed my mouth, piercing my tongue clean through. The words of the poet were composed at sea. At dusk, a diffuse and sluggish light, as if filtered through a heavy surf, settles over my desk. The willow branches that brush my window, my half-lit neighbor’s house, seem to me foreign, as if I stared out the window of an inn in Malaga, where drowsy rushroses drug the air. The last light hovers like a woman’s lip the clouds run their fingers over continually. I am caught between sleep and waking, as the window-pane is caught between the warm house, where children sleep, dreaming of cruelty and riches, and the rain that streams, dolorous, into tin gutters.