I awake so easily today as if awakening were breathing out the night’s long breathing in … and she—sleeps, still taking breath, as easily as morning’s light grows in its ancient, patient way.

In this broken cabin, equally of land and sea, on sand between the collapsing and collapsed, we live our lifelong doorway, waiting out the tide when it takes hold, worrying the pilings, not eager to take hold, just there, the random fact of eventual capture.

But no tide now, just wind rustling the brown palmetto fronds casting their moving maze on us, a maze of shadows she accepts, as calm as milk-glass under them.

On our first morning, how I worried: would she be able to be with me, at once forgetting and remembering her other first mornings with others? She undressed to the sadness of nakedness, in the old confusion of twilight, in the old understanding, clothes falling softly as her breathing, and then came, forgetting and remembering.

If we had waited, been deliberate, entering a maze of yes and no to find some certain yes or no, to find some law besides the Second Law … O that wish! to enter it, turn face up, and then O to rise! above the timebound maze in the noon’s discovering blaze and see the pattern, the whole pattern! O to rise if we could but rise, leave these doors and corridors—

But she stirs—“Good morning.” Good morrow to you now as now you come, good morrow as we now say yes again for yes we will go down, caught in the center, we will go down to join the beginning and the end, to obey the timebound order of the land, to become the strict disorder of the sea.