O ivory, delicate hands!
O face that hovers
Between ‘To-come’ and ‘Was,’
Ivory thou wast,
A rose thou wilt be.
“It is important to begin when everything is already over… There were worse jokes his blood might have played on him. Its message might have read: All beginnings imply an apocalypse… He awoke the next morning tangled in first lines like wrinkled sheets.”
Robert Coover