“3. AloneThe long march up the fulvous ridgebacks toThe marches, the frontiers of difference --Where flesh marches with bone, day marches withHis wife the night, and country marches withAnother country -- is accomplished best,By paradox, alone. A world of twos,Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, ofSound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayedBy sole infiltrators who have cast offTheir ties to living moorings, and stand outInto the roads of noon approaching nightCasting a single shadow, earnest ofTheir honorable intention to lay downTheir lives for their old country, humankind,In the same selfish spirit that inspiredTheir lifelong journey, largely and at lastAlone, across the passes that divideA life from every other, the sheer cragsOf overweening will, the deepening scarpsLike brain fissures that cunningly cut offEach outcrop from the main and make it oneWhile its luck lasts, while its bravura holdsAgainst all odds, until the final climbAcross the mountains to the farther shoreOf sundown on the watersheds, where self,Propelled by its last rays, sways in the swayOf the last grasses and falls headlong inThe darkness of the dust it is part ofUpon the passes where we are no more:Where the recirculating shaft goes homeInto the breast that armed it for the air,And, as we must expect, the art that thereTurned our lone hand into imperial RomeReverts to earth and its inveterate loveFor the inanimate and its return. FINIS-- from 'Tras Os Montes”