The sun keeps following me wherever I go
That, and the yellow grasses, like hair upon a noble head,
Wind combing the hillsides,
Amounts merely to another sort of language
And talk is cheap
I mean boxes within boxes within
Boxes within boxes
This accounts for my immorality or immortality
Not much distinguishes
One from another
Anyone from any other one
These are the ties that bind
Rocks are scattered carelessly hereabouts
And dark green trees, like moles upon a back;
The physical seems more weighty than it is:
Thought, like a baby, never lies
—
Grains of sand or grain, a micro world,
Then you are here, at this scale, deciding on your choices
Next the air’s scattered all about, a suite of it
Not very carefully and if full of water it’s fog
Making everything again indistinct
This easing of the burden’s not presumptive
One or two of them can count on it, wax and wane
I don’t know why my trousers never fit
Organize a bevy of them and you’ve got a class
Or a klatch, a species or a nation, a whole
Cast of trousers covering up your legs
Look then at the shape of this mountain
Or that twelve square mile cloud
And tell me about what you think
Makes me tick
—
The trees exude
Long shadows
As athletes steam
With sweat
Then the hills’ curves stretch out
Like cats
All the tips of trembling tree-limbs
Hunched against the ocean’s edges
Seem to lurch lengthwise
When I shake my head yes or no
Or roll my eyes
From side to side
In astonishment
Indicating nemesis or paralysis,
The normal inability to speak
Anything other than my mind
The guy at the turnstile counting patrons
Has never been more wrong
—
Oh art – like those little pathways through the hills
Meandering here and there,
Going somewhere, never nowhere,
But always circling back,
Always connecting up
“Our time’s the best time” “the worst time”
So they say but it’s different now
Different,
And there are reasons for this
So much art, so much time, so important,
So not, high and low, low and high,
All flat, all endlessly reproduced
I can’t think straight without it yet with it
Can’t ever be
Without it or with it without me
Life and art used to be opposites
Opposites used to be mutually exclusive
Exclusion used to exclude
Those were the days
So are these