The Double.(Poem)

 
THE DOUBLE 
 
   The witness Jones attests by affidavit 
   That you were present at the seminar 
   All of the day in question. 
   He asked you for your number and you gave it. 
   He's quoted from your repartee 
   At lunch and, when you broke at three, 
   He came to collect a pamphlet from your car-And 
   this at your suggestion. 
 
   Impossible: by one I was miles away, 
   Counting the wind-pale grasses by a beach, 
   And watched in a lagoon, 
   Whose surface told the fortune of the day, 
   Clouds build their drowning Samarkand. 
   My hair is stiff with salt, the sand 
   Is in my clothes. I walked almost the reach 
   Of that vast afternoon. 
 
   Your colleagues Smith and Brown have sworn on oath 
   That the next morning your were in by eight 
   And seated at your desk. 
   Both spoke to you and you replied to both. 
   Your supervisor called you for 
   An interview and at his door 
   You turned to them to imitate his gait 
   With an ad hoc burlesque. 
 
   Not that door. For the one I opened led 
   To no such chamber, but to a museum 
   Of lost antiquities. 
   And there among the gold flakes of the ...