Was it worthwhile to lay— with infinite exertion—a roof I can't live under? —All those blueprints, closings of gaps, measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading—not with indifference—about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

Poems: Selected and New