Learning on the Job

I have seen so much of noon and midnight, seen so many silhouettes on walls.
What is the end account? To balance the books: a noble endeavour, but, alas, not a skill I have ever acquired.
I am what I have destroyed, the nothing I tried to annihilate. In the joyous beginning I already perceive the grievous end.
But we must let the music go its own way.
The days are coming for you, coming again, you can count them, if you like…unpredictable obventions bait your mind for the kill…
To live by accrementition, to inspissate routine and procedure, to become the idle fabulist of one’s own times…me too!
Remember those ice-cream summers of not so long ago, when the sun king crowned you prince of park and shore, and you galloped round the oak tree fifty times, playing kiss chase with the sky? You believed the Bible stories, you wanted to be Jacob with his ladder. Dragons alighted and fed from your hand.
This is the clearing-house of dreams, the warehouse of spices from distant isles fought over and since forgotten.
What do I trust in now? Not Fate, but a good hand of cards. And if a rainbow should happen in the air again, I will dash out to see it.