That would be the answer to the things there are
to push against: to go into that private place,
where the wind rests between the connecting rods
and the willows. The attempt to lie down
and simply breathe fraught with the very
recentness of the plain, whose elements are:
bare sun, the howling gusts, dust scouring the eyeballs,
the shrieking of birds somewhere not at all distant,
many tensions to push against, many coiled-up things. That
would be the answer: to give it all away, to empty
the mind until there's nothing there. Strange how
it would take a Swedish girl, half-mad, half-drunk,
to tell you this, incoherent though language is,
at a loud party, on a night that drips like honey, where music
makes all but the music impossible. Then to succumb
to the flailing of the dance is to assume that suddenly
we would wear our eloquence like a cloak.
And did we ever.
                                   Now she is gone and the city
will not yield her. And still it is endlessly right
to trust in fate, or if that's too rich, in the way
things will unfold. Into what solution plunge your eyes?
when the ocean rails against the headland and the boulders crack
until even the seagulls shine with fear, that private place
remains; in the lake's balm the mind rests; the sun
splits neither sky nor stones; the clammy frailty
of autumn brings relief, sinks deep into the shoulder blades.
What loss, what risk, right then, to give it all away,
to dream deeply in the time of dreams, to let it go
out beyond the fingertips. Lie down and simply breathe.
The speed of light is constant. It is time distorts.
Dusk weeps into consciousness in the green hinterland.
Live then through all these imagined velocities. Clearly
love is a great expanse, apple blossoms as far
as the wind-scoured eyes can see, and the sudden silence
of a freshly-gone storm. Here bend and build your cairn.