He had come a long way,
raised [himself] up out of nothing,
right out of the gutter,
to this blue lawn,
a fine appearing gentlemanly young man.
The old island here
flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes
[with] vanished trees
[that] once pandered in whispers
the last and greatest of human dreams.

[His] single dream,
[his] green light,
[sat] at the end of Daisy’s dock,
just across the bay.
He paid a high price
for living too long
with [this] single dream;
he lost the old warm world.

The green light,
the orgastic future
recedes before [him], [eludes] him.
No matter, he says,
tomorrow [I] will run faster,
stretch out [my] arms farther.
And one fine morning...

But Daisy tumbled short of his dreams
[because] of the vitality of his illusion.
With every word, she was drawing
further
and further
into herself.
So he gave up;
He no longer cared.

Yet the dead dream fought on,
trying to touch what was no longer tangible.
Unhappily, undespairingly struggling
toward the lost voice across the room.
He was clutching at some last hope
and [one] couldn’t bear to shake him free.

The colossal significance of the light,
compared to [his] great discovery
that [she] did love [Tom] once
but [she] loved [him] too,
had vanished forever.
Now again [just] a green light
on a dock
across the bay.

In [his] new world,
material without being real,
poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air,
drifted fortuitously about
like an ashen fantastic figure
gliding toward him
through the amorphous trees.

The green light [had] seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
But it was already behind him,
back in the vast obscurity,
beyond the city,
where the dark hills of the republic [roll].

And the holocaust was complete.