“It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York.  I was him again—for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own.  And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it was so quiet that you hear a dog barking in the next county.  But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.”—Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success” (1937)

Within

the tenderest latent merger

of youth

to bloom,

the golden hours

of dreaming

lose favor to time–

this, a narrowing passage

and gist,

dimming,

yet

in its call to longing,

wholly sublime.