If done steadily, and with the kind of patience that belies all fear, 
it is indeed possible to walk the plank backward from the doom 
of vanishing

                to that softer, wildflowered field across which mere 
diminishment winds like a path maybe worth sticking to, finally, for look 
where the alternatives have led—not that, even now, you regret them,
or would, if you believed in regret,

                if you could understand regret 
in all of its steepness, the slim shadow it has a way of casting—like 
a finger at the lips, for silence—across that chaos whose names, 
so it seems, change endlessly: unreason, consciousness, the sea with its 
shifting patterns, now fluorescence and glitter, now glitter and shine,