A Vision 

	 	       'Twas midnight, 
And a solitary man by the light
Sat rigid, stone-faced, turning the pages
  Of a worn-out notebook.
What immortal thoughts haunt him? What wages
  Has he with gods partook?

			No anguish
Saw I in his face but melancholy
Born of hopes thwarted and memories false;
His last infirmities.
Outside the chimes against each other knells,
But inside is silence.

			Has he then,
Being unwise, promised love to a woman?
Perhaps he was a poet who thought to sing
The delights of the rills
That run between moss-woven rocks, and bring
Gift of life to the hills.

			Or was it
The lone morning star that burns without heat
That that solitary man as a youth
Once aspired to become?
(Ah, what is a youth of a man in sooth
But a two-facèd poem?)

			I did know
He had rage and desire, delight and woe,
For I saw the pages filled with scribbling.
They all a story told
Of life filled with stories that bear telling--
Stories of a life willed.

			I lacked will
To read the book's stained pages, for its fill
I feared lest they contained the words that said:
  I had wanted the world,
  But now when all facets of life are met,
  It merely rests in words.



  
 Do not despair--One of the thieves was saved...