float across mild clear water. A red sun
stains the lake like colored glass. Day is stopping.
Everything I am feels distant or blank
as the opulent rays pass through me,
distant as action is from thought,
or language is from all things desirable
in the world, when it does not deliver
what it promises and pathos comes instead--
the same pathos I feel when I tell myself,
within or without valid structures of love:
I have been deceived, he is not what he seemed--
though the failure is not in the other,
but in me because I am tired, hurt, or bitter.
[Henri Cole, 'Kayaks', in Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007]
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