"child of earth"
—William Wordsworth

It's enough to know what's coming, and then not to live within the gauge with a thin, coppery smile. A new jacket, for example, transforms "alot" into mechanical movements, salmony equations of expectation and independence, independence derived from expectations, not as you might want to christen them causes, not even results with bits of straw stuck in their hair, but a taste for some things which serves as a reminder that you are not just pulled along in the tide, so that this thought breaks through one of the Seven Seas in a lonely way sometimes, or maybe you feel like someone hacked into your memory and downloaded secret tapes of conversations that sound marvelously prophetic, life-like dreams remastered with you spending a night with the lighthouse family, salvers gleaming with fruits of sea-wrack and ruin, woe, and later singing and drinking and looking for shooting stars. Is it not possible, asks the engineering genius, that someday the path may be established more directly? But the world as meditation ravels and unravels its sailors in black watch-caps and bell bottoms, moves rubies around from jeweler to skin condition in a very prodigal manner. Who are you to think like a beacon piercing the ocean of night like that? And what do you get out of it? It must've been something I lost, is the mocking reply you may use, just something I lost, OK? And no one will mention it again. And it will be transmitted to generations of evenings, some buff-colored as a baseball, streaked with green light and grass stains, a piece of film with sprockets along the edge where the teeth bite in, dusted light from the projector room widening out like a boat's wake in the air above the movie theater where we drown and laugh.