“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.