An Everlasting Once
	
	Suppose your whole life
	you went your way, belonging
	to no place, no school, using
	your wits to gainsay every trace
	of influence or imitation, wiping
	out anything that reminded you
	of anything.
	               You knew how
	browbeating memory, the rule
	of the past, can be, how easily
	it thrives in wiping out the new
	since seen for the first time
	only.
	        So you kept yourself
	to yourself, doing only chores
	you had to to survive.
	Unknown to anyone--almost,
	for its engrossment, to yourself--
	you gave yourself to your work.
	
	With you gone they found it
	something unspeakably, if not
	unbearably, your own. No matter
	how they tried they could not
	digest it into a name, a scheme,
	an explanation.
	           Except for this
	they might not have been sure
	you'd lived at all. But this,
	unblinking, brutal in its
	authority, made it impossible
	for them to deny it or to call
	you a minor this, a crazy that,
	eccentric at best for his battle,
	rejecting the main stream.
	                 They
	might turn away; they could not
	altogether still the whispering
	fear that, after all, that stream,
	notwithstanding its deflections,
	its passages long underground,
	had gone this way. Daily now
	the stream grows louder.
	                  --Theodore Weiss