The stove is small, the winter room is shut.
Outside, the Bavarian snow lies on the road
And does not ask for passage. Here, the heat
Presses its silent thumb against the glass,
Leaving no record but a fading mist.
I sit and strip the world of what it seems:
The crowd, the street, the cold, the very bone
Of this hand holding ink—they are but dreams,
Phantoms the devil plays on sleeping eyes.
But in the darkness, where I doubt the dark,
Something resists the stripping. There is this:
The thought that has no shape, yet holds its ground.
I think, I doubt, and therefore I remain.

And who is “I”? The room is silent, yes;
The stove is warm, the door is tightly bolted.
But who gave you the word for “door,” or “heat,”
Or “hand”? You sitting by the iron grate,
Scribbling in secret of your phantom bone—
Did you invent the grammar of your doubt
In isolation? If you had no neighbor,
No voice to correct the child’s clumsy sign,
Could you have named the phantoms in your head?
You use the public currency of speech
To buy your ticket to the wilderness,
Then claim you made the road you traveled on.

I was not taught the silent fire that burns
Beneath the name. The name is but a coin
Passed hand to hand, worn smooth by common use,
But in the soul’s deep parlor, by the stove,
I feel what cannot be debated, sold,
Or shared in market-places. Here, my pain
Is simply mine. It needs no parliament
To vote it into being. When I wince,
The wincing is the thing itself, whole,
Untouchable by any neighbor’s eye.
You call it public; I will call it known
Because I cannot doubt the knot of it
That holds me to the bench. I am the judge.

“The soul’s deep parlor”—how the metaphors
Multiply to protect the phantom guest!
You say you have a sensation you call pain,
And write an “S” in some secret book,
Each time the inner twitch returns. But look:
How do you know it is the same “S” now?
Because it seems the same? In your small room,
Where no one else can test your rule, your gauge,
To seem right is the same as being right.
And that means right cannot be said at all.
Your private “S” is but an empty box
You carry through the house, and call a beast,
Though no one—not even you—can see its shape.
If it has no part in the language game,
It cancels out. It does not play, or speak.

The box is not empty if it holds the spark.
You would make the mind a crowded street,
All noise and transaction, where the soul
Is but a ledger of the things we say.
Must I wait for the crowd to count my pulse?
If I were cast alone upon a reef,
With no companion but the salt and stone,
My thought would still be thought, my pain still pain,
Unprinted, unrecorded, yet entire.
You cannot strip the inner room of weight
By pointing to the crowded market-place.
The ghost is there, because the doubt is real.

The man upon the reef who cries “Ah!” in pain
Does not make a statement; he expresses his state,
As any beast might cry against the dark.
But if he tells himself, “This is the thing
I’ve named ‘regret’ or ‘S’ or ‘doubt’,” he plays
A game that has no rules, a circular chase
Where he is both the runner and the mark.
You think you find a foundation by the stove,
A rock that needs no hand to hold it up.
But what you find is just your own voice,
Reflected by the glass, and called a ghost.
We are not sealed-off cells; we are the play
Of rules we share, the game we run together.
There is no “S” that does not go by law,
And law requires a neighbor, or the crowd.