Whether it more was like
the ocean,
or more
those pastures in the earth that
shift abruptly according to
laws that, even if I
give to them here
no name, apply
nevertheless outside, in
spite of–
I forget,
as so many somewhere always have
just said. Exaggeration,
to say I never thought
I’d lie among them; more exactly: I
had not hoped to. How
brief, comparatively
at least, that
feathered phase–
less Roman,
more Greek, more
birch than
ash, none of shame’s
nobility attached, but–
worse–the embarrassing
thud of blunder, to
ever have laid
the blue-to-black,
black,
then blue
familiar of self full-length
and down, ringside, as if there’d been
a ring, or as if by
long traveling at last done
in, as who would
not be? I
had not guessed it.
As when to find a stone
is to find revealed
no truth unless the truth
of stones, which
is to say the fact of
themselves only. Or
as when the song
of wanting is understood as
not at all the song of
being wanted,
not like thirst,
not like hunger,
not the disappointment
of only the one leaf gone
vermilion inside of
the tree’s saffron majority,
not a godlessness in
the wake of a habit of prayer, neither
that sort of wind, nor a tunnel, or through one, it
was not like that.