The Scrivener

"He lies snoring, like the moon,
Clownish white all afternoon"

Information is constant.
Difference is constant.
Information is difference.

Swimming through the hotel
Where every room, every day
Erases every other, hand cups
Clear water in the sunken world.

The total system conserves
Information: even as pattern
Is lost, complexity emerges
Somewhere else in the absence.

Sleep is the great hotel,
The haunted one, the lake
Of sunken villages, the memory
Discoverer and dissolver,

The beds remade as if no guests
Had ever stayed, somewhere
New guests and new intimacies
Waiting, new thoughts, new desires,

Fresh turning in the night, species
Disappearing, species appearing.
Everything gets lost in here,
But nothing never more, nevertheless.

On waking, the tiny mind,
In one high garret room, forgotten,
Copies as many letters
As he can and never sends them.