Hat

The gods intended you for me: I had searched
store after store, nothing fit, in a whole world
of hats and hatmakers, nothing had been made for me,
Lilliputian or giant, it scarcely matters which.
 
Then I was directed – it cannot have been chance –
to a store of hats, hats crowding the walls,
where the diminutive genius of the place
used a long hat-crook to lower you, boxed, before me.
 
After which I was sent out among the machines
in a city of luck, in a ritual of undertaking,
winning your price from the gods of equivalence.
Now you are freed, I am permitted to own you.
 
Great Hat, you are some size I have not
hitherto lived up into, some consequence
I have been expecting in my secret room. 
You are the personality of an idea
 
of which night is a part, a running of hooves
of many horses, the running of mountain water,
of which space is a part, the figures of stars intent
on their hunt for a god through the repeating year.
 
Hat, you have come to be with me at the
hot gates; at the determination of stature
I walk with you into the glad voices of my own myth
which had never recognized me until I knew you.