Poems in need of reduction, 1:
The man I met on the mountain (but on its very lowest slopes, and only because he was descending) smiled at me with the smile of the mad, in the maddening sunlight, whose brightness made me look first here, then there, explained that only because he fasted would he be saved. This, in any case, is what I understood of what he said. Which meant I didn't understand at all, and only now (three decades later) do I realize that the reason he and his whole people would be saved was because fasting, for him and for his people, didn't belong to the realm of decisions.