Yet the only thing to happen that day had been this:
Old Edgerton Bascom came to the porch, selling buttons.
She bought from him, picked her dahlias for his wife.
He went away, comforted, restored to self-respect by her purchase.
Perhaps when levitation comes it will be a matter of this kind
Rather than of calculation and reckoning.
XII
ENCHANTMENT
In this house I perform all as seriously as may be required.
I accept my desk, my little tools, lamp, paper.
I write in the one language which I have been taught and about the few things with which I am familiar.
I eat the little round of food which it is said will nourish my body.
About my books I am docile and I learn from them.
I look no farther than my window permits.
When I wish to emerge I go obediently to the door as if there were conceivable no other way of exit.
At night I fall into sleep as if that were eternal purpose.
I suffer from absence, I submit to distance,
I am subject to innumerable influences,
I am open to them all with a sober face.
But all the time I have knowledge that I am something other;
That all these things shall ultimately have no more power over me.
That I consent to them because of some delicate exigency in this moment of eternity.
Even now I am often free of them.
There was the day when I moved among the hills and lost every sense of difference from them.
With the crowning cloud and the far filament of the river I found myself in common.
The air was vocal with all that is identical and in that hour it offered to me my identity.
I became everything. I had no question to ask for it was I, too, who was answering.
The hour dissolved. The ultimate star was my neighbour.
... Suddenly I remembered myself down in the valley moving about in a house.
And I perceived that for years I have been enchanted.
I am listening to be set free.