when I heard the learned astonisher, I said
to myself, well, I bedanged, I felt so
unpuzzled and, like a text or bottle of
goodie, 80 or 90% proofed, so I went out and
looked up at the stars and said to them, do
you realize how much we mites have found out
about you from this little dot in space: they
did not respond, you might know, because they
are just stars: (if I killed myself, then I
would only be dead: the achievement, unlike
the gesture, would not be great): I would like,
in spite of this alarm and that enfeeblement,
to hold on: the unfolding is not finished:
the big thing remains to do: but what is it:
is it a cluster of small things, terribly
honest, even if filthy and low-drawing, or is
it, as I always thought it was, the inclines
of the peaks, the coming together, so high
that only the unspeakable shares anything with
it: oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, god, I love the
dibble of the beginning rain, the blue storm
off in a rumbling locus and coming here, the
wind holding, the humidity high, before the
falling out of the playing through: when
the wind strikes, everything will bend over:
the brunt will break, ease will rise again:
the Lord of the rain is where the swirls make
up and where the synthesis crests along great
sweeping lines of fronts and water appears,
but also there is the primate lord, the big
guy at the top of the order, in whose favor is
ease and place and out of whose favor are the
anxieties of hell, the peripheral body without
a body: order at all costs, because only in
that tent may the infant nurse, the seed set,
the loom waft, for when orders collide (the
cost of order) the wounded and the dead precede
supper’s menu:
DON’T ASK ME