Along the river, the metal is rushing,
gun-metal
waters are falling and rising, higher and
higher. The sky is a torn scrim, light crashing
through agate
clouds, and the slabs of dark pound the water, stand
down from ether. Everything is pliable,
changing. The sinuous streams of atoms plait
and separate and charge. Matter, involute
and teeming,
renews itself, re-forms from the spoiling heath,
the brackish tidepool, the smelted silicates,
transistors,
poles and flows, energy, information, paths.
Rising and falling, the breaking sky framing
the pounding light, and the metal plummets or
resists, which is the way things live. Even then
I felt gleams
like flashings of a shield‹the earth and common
face of Nature spake rememberable things....
Language
itself a machine of nature. Breath, dipthongs,
vowel clusters, speaking. The blocks of phonemes
sliding into place, bearing the carriage
of thought, making the shapes known and unfearful
as the eye
travels, sweeping the trees bending. Points of dew
like muons in single streams or strings of pearls
refracting.
Each small dome a shifting globe. Or an I who
builds itself by containing consciously
the changing light of rememberable things.