A boat carried forward by waves resembling the bright backs of rowers,

Gripping their oars, as if they were sure of the way to their destination,

Bending over and pulling themselves erect on the wooden handles,

Wet with water and sparkling in the one-ness of their motion.

The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and being no longer heavy

Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin,

So that he that stood up in the boat leaning and looking before him

Did not pass like someone voyaging out of and beyond the familiar.

He belonged to the far-foreign departure of his vessel and was part of it,

Part of the speculum of fire on its prow, its symbol, whatever it was,

Part of the glass-like sides on which it glided over the salt-stained water,

As he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable without any meaning,

A syllable of which he felt, with an appointed sureness,

That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to enter,

A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat and leave the oarsmen quiet

As at a point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or little,

Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and needing none.

II

The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared

Was beyond his recognizing. By this he knew that likeness of him extended

Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between himself

And things beyond resemblance there was this and that intended to be recognized,

The this and that in the enclosures of hypotheses

On which men speculated in summer when they were half asleep.

What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been loosed,

Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread,

As if all his hereditary lights were suddenly increased

By an access of color, a new and unobserved, slight dithering,

The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick, to which he gave

A name and privilege over the ordinary of his commonplace—

A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary,

The way some first thing coming into Northern trees

Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South,

The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring,

Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,

The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly

Among the more irritating minor ideas

Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home

To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,

Not to transform them into other things,

Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be

A pensive nature, a mechanical

And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like,

Without his literature and without his gods …