Then Scale By Scale, We Strip Off

If We Were Not So Single-minded About Keeping Our Lives Moving And For Once Could Do Nothing, Perhaps A Huge Silence Might Interrupt This Sadness Of Never Understanding Ourselves And Of Threatening Ourselves With Death Perhaps The World Can Teach Us As When Everything Seems Dead But Later Proves To Be Alive.

Maybe Someone Will Know I Didn't Weave Crowns To Draw Blood; That I Faught Against Mockery; That I Did Fill The High Tide Of My Soul With Truth. I Repaid Vileness With Doves.

And What Has Become Of It, Where Is That Onetime Love? Now It Is The Grave Of A Bird, A Drop Of Black Quartz, A Chunk Of Wood Eroded By The Rain.

I Had No More Alphabet Than The Journeying Of The Swallows, The Pure And Tiny Water Of The Small, Fiery Bird That Dances Rising From The Pollen.

I Don't Want To Go On Being A Root In The Dark, Vacillating, Stretched Out, Shivering With Sleep, Downward, In The Soaked Guts Of The Earth, Absorbing And Thinking, Eating Each Day.