You are the future, the immense morning sky
turning red over the prairies of eternity.
You are the rooster-crow after the night of time,
the dew, the early devotions, and the Daughter,
the Guest, the Ancient Mother, and Death.

You are the shape that changes its own shape,
that climbs out of fate, towering,
that which is never shouted for, and never mourned for,
and no more explored than a savage wood.

You are the meaning deepest inside things,
that never reveals the secret of its owner.
And how you look depends on where we are:
from a boat you are shore, from the shore a boat.

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends.

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kindgdom of transformation.
When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are
   rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
   curve.

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely—and why?

We’re still reminded—: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment.

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.