From Dreams and Projects

Between the Lines of Time


     Our words are refuse.  They vanish in the wicked gray that leaves
no trace.  Gray on gray our life evaporates.  It flows away like a gray
wellspring with faded tongues.
     Light runs up and down the universe between the lines of time.  
Anyone who can read between the lines will soon realize why the soul
is squeezed into the disgusting armor of the body.  The soul shrieks
so loudly in its prison that far, far away harps, lyres, and lutes 
start twanging and singing its misery.
     The stars write at an infinitely slow pace and never read what they
have written.  It was in dreams that I learned how to write and it was
only much later that I laboriously learned how to read.  As if such
knowledge were innate to them, the night birds read what is written
by perishable men, a wrinkly scrawl in the opaque night.  The vagabond
flowers offered me a charming surprise when they forged my signature
in living groups on cliffs.

BACK TO 1952

BACK TO ARP MAIN PAGE