No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,

So well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,

A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,

A transparency through which the swallow weaves,

Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what

We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,

In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,

A moving part of a motion, a discovery

Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.

The afternoon is visibly a source,

Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,

Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,

A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.

We think, then, as the sun shines or does not.

We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because

The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound

Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects

A moment on this fantasia. He seeks

For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,

Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world

Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass

And there become a spirit’s mannerism,

A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

The World as Meditation

J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur—la méditation—rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour.

—GEORGES ENESCO

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,

The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.

That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.

A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,

Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,

Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,

Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise

In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.

No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.

She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace

And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun

On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.

The two kept beating together. It was only day.