Intellectuals dream of an escaped space
in which abstract perfection flowers up
through the faces of the seeming-simple:
thoughts too pure for style or system.
 
They would become a poem written
in the taciturn parchments of bus-riders' faces -
thus the scholar would like to believe
that his books beget a real sense of life, not just an ache.
 
Can you make a world of subway-trains
in which the act of riding-reading
becomes infinite, gentle existence
in se, in which the marvelous
 
parallels of cognition simply gaze,
smiling in the pacific sunrise?