I wasn’t there. How could I be? I was a virgin in wolf’s clothing, a bird above the sensual fray, with a thorn twig in my saw-beak and a song in my heart, but in my throat, only an ominous catarrh and a wicked clotch of animadversions. No Nymph would console or tease me. Until one night.

On the other hand, I see no nymphs here. The cave is empty. These translucent spheres and twirling, intersecting lights are the traceries of absences, one half, anyway, of the nymphs’ true  spiritual character—even in being around, they were half away—(but oh, that pale flame of a being you were, and even now, are, my Kore, my fleeting possibility, my lure to so many elsewheres—

A nymph is a fragile lure, one to each elsewhere, surely. And the only elsewhere worth calling to is the one that is the shock of what is, in spite of it all, right here right now ever and for always at hand. Or not at hand, but beneath the veil of the transitory, if only what is at hand be grasped in its intricately passing translucency, its twirling lights and the rigor of its evanescences; for only what evanesces (and vibrantly so) conceals/reveals Possibility Herself—that which no anidmadversion can ward off or hide away.

Until that night. We had retired to a vacuole in the social cytoplasm,  a report of a haunt where rain was filaments of light, where I myself were evanescent, “and all thought of existence itself / drift toward the luminous.”