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 . . . 
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. 


 = Doug Ross