For now the kingdom feels sufficient and complete,
And summer seems to flow through everything:
A girl slides by on roller blades,
The flags flap on the flagpoles, and across the street
The afternoon holds court at Gil's Cafe.
There is this sense of plenitude and peace
And of the presence of the world
Wasps on the driveway, and purple flowers on the trees,
And a bicycle goes rolling down the hill;
And at length it starts to deepen and increase.

And even as it deepens something turns away,
As though the day were the reflection of a purer day
In which the summer's measures never ended.
The eye that seeks it fills the universe with shapes,
A fabulist, an inquisitor of space
Removed from life by dreams of something other than this life,
Distracted by the bare idea of heaven,
Suspended in the earthly heaven of this afternoon
As off the lake a light breeze blows
And all there is to see lies dormant in the sun.

The sun shines on the houses and the churches and the schools,
On restaurants and parks, on marriages and love affairs,
The playground with its monkey bars and slides,
The bench where someone sits and thinks about the future,
The accident in which a person's life abruptly ends.
The world is like the fiction of a face,
Which tries to hide the emptiness behind a smile
Yet seems so beautiful-insignificant,
And like everything on which the sunlight falls
Impermanent, but enough for a while.