Mountains,
a moment’s earth-waves
rising and hollowing; the earth
too’s an ephemerid; the stars— short-lived
as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry
in their summer, they spiral blind up space, scattered
black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf
before birth, and the gulf after death is like dated: to labor eighty
years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome, enormous repose
after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity. Surely you never
have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue
merely to the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is
called life? I fancy that silence is the thing, this noise a found
word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding
treasure says ‘Ah!’ but the treasure’s the essence;
before the man spoke it was there, and
after he has spoken he gathers it,
inexhaustible treasure.