"after watching David Blaine"
Figure It
The plan
Was to be lifted
By balloons
And vanish
Into the atmosphere,
But the real end
Of endurance, as we know,
Is the thing
Without escape:
Shackled to the gyroscope
Or buried in the tank,
Ice-block encoffined.
The body wastes like
A hermit thronged about
On his desert pillar—
The body
Like a glamorous clock,
Like publicity,
This willful suffering, which
Encourages in the spectator
A delicate propinquity,
Learning in the nearness
Only that
To last is better than the lesson,
Not a prelude
To victory,
Not unemployment but
An agon
—time and self—still
In a small space within
A huge space.
Some would call it
'Doing being ordinary.
The thing is to
Last,
Holding the breath past collapse
Until monotony passes
Into wonder
And no one is thinking of something else.
