1.

When did it cease to amaze me that

I’ve shrunk so much in my own sight?

I was sitting by the window, a book on my lap,

Coffee was steaming from the table,

The traffic’s statics rose up from the street below

And rattled the picture frames,

And I was listening in it,

Mindlessly, as if I was not sitting in

The prim and desiccated canyons

Of our second nature,

But in the towering grass,

As wasps and bees buzzed contemptuously by,

Hellbent for mudbanks and calices,

And above them in the immeasurable sky

Indifferent birds’ wings chimed

Like a jet’s dense chords.

Where would I find my own features here –

Me, matchstick Gulliver, on the True Giant’s body?

Where is a face or hand,

A cool intention in all that animal nervousness –

Except, perhaps, those pine-wigged Titans in the hills,

Setting out to steal the sun.

Okay, let’s not disperse right from the start

Into simple-minded stories.

We can go deeper,

Into still another nature.

I put the book on the table,

And stepped to the oak by the hedge,

And stripped the branches bare,

Husking their chattering leaves,

And only whatever remains without

Landscapes remained.

Cool, and misprized, and until this moment,

Unsuspected,

Harmonics of the water seeping in the grass,

The treble that had been a motor down the street,

Airwaves, and breaths,

Like the infant leaves of experienced trees,

Whose branches mesh with the gears of stars,

Whose perpetual foliage is their fire,

Whose shafts are the channels of the floods of light.

Only the cold in the thawing snow swims

Like understanding in that pillar of light,

Whose cataract flow wears down the peering mind,

But gives the soul safe passage,

Like a calm and lucent well,

Guiding it to a violet sea,

Where voiceless sparks float free,

Beginning their turn to the amber house,

Where minuscule souls congregate,

Like bees to the figure eight.

There must be something straightforward in all this,

Surviving just infinitesimally charged

Through the riot of transformations.

The tangle, lest it break us down,

Breaks itself down,

Under the weight of permutations –

Lustrous simplicities leap into view,

Simple colors, in a thousand variations,

Like the snow,

Simple axes, with a thousand branches,

Like the trees.

Clear as it is, self-evident as it seems sometimes,

It is not enough –  shining fishes gliding through

The treasures of a sunken ship,

Swallows roosting in abandoned eaves.

It’s clear, but it lacks relation,

The scaffold we learned perspective from,

The roof we’re standing on.

2.

Stanch the last remorseless stream of information,

Rip off the shreds,

Use them for tickets to the weeds –

In the forests of your night

The eye makes its own light.

Sound in the deep: the sea resting.

Sound in the deep: the fire rising.

Sound in the height: the birds gliding.

Sound in the height: the clouds cruising.

Sound in deep: the night coughing.

Sound in the height: the light hovering.

Sound in the diamond.

Sound in the molehill.

Sound in the pillar.

Sound in the earth’s

Eternally echoing voices.