In the meantime / There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, / Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem / From insignificance.

But, for the time being, here we all are, / Back in the moderate Aristotelian city / Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry / And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience, / And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.

Once again / As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed / To do more than entertain it as an agreeable / Possibility