Page 194

This page reduces wilderness to a lesson in passage, where people and things move on and all life eventually changes hands.

It reads like a stripped companion to page 193, less armed and more resigned. Concentration and severity appear, but neither is able to hold what is already passing through. The final line gives the poem its weight, because transfer, not ownership, is the law underneath the whole scene.

Working your way out of the wilderness, into it, things and people pass, severity has no way of knowing what each let go by. All life does change hands to and from the stars.