In a vast library,
its method of cataloguing
knowledge lost on me, 

believing my work was to carry them 
out from these shelves into the world, 

though their script was to me a silence
like musical notes that some can read 
and hear melody within, 

I am a bundle. Lifting my eyes
from pages, from a dream

within a dream, I am told
that no more than an hour has passed,
life having had its way.

I had loved, fathered, and given up 
on my dreams in this otherness, 

the final word of a dead world, 
a book written and left 
to be found by those who knew 

they were dying, a story about 
a whole world remembered 

by at least one person 
who remains unfinished. 
Because when I woke I was adept 

at an alien instrument,
I played an alien song.