wdn't it be silly to be serious, now;
Document Actions
Glare - Strip - I
wdn't it be silly to be serious, now; I mean, the hardheads and the eggheads are agreed that we are an absurd irrelevance on this slice of curvature and that a boulder from the blue could confirm it: imagine, mathematics wiped out by a wandering stone, or grecian urns not forever fair when the sun expands: can you imagine cracking the story off we've built up so long--the simian ancestries, the lapses and leaps, the discovery of life in the burial of grains: the scratch of pictorial and syllabic script, millennia of evenings around the fires: nothing: meaninglessness our only meaning: our deepest concerns such as death or love or child-pain arousing a belly laugh or a witty dismissal: a bunch of baloney: it's already starting to feel funny: I think I may laugh: few of the dead lie recalled, and they have not cautioned us: we are rippers and tearers and proceeders: restraint stalls us still--we stand hands empty, lip hung, dumb eyes struck open: if we can't shove at the trough, we don't understand: but is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone: at least, that's what I heard: also, that there are billions of such systems spread about, some older, some younger than ours: if the elements are the elements thruout, I daresay much remains to be learned: however much we learn, tho, we may grow daunted by our dismissibility in so sizable a place: do our gods penetrate those reaches, or do all those other places have their godly nativities: or if the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included: perhaps a dribble of what-is is what what-is is: it is nice to be included, especially from so minor a pew: please turn, in yr hymnals, to page "Archie carrying on again": he will have it his way though he has no clue what his way is: after such participations as that with the shrill owl in the spruce at four in the morning with the snow ended and the moon come out how am I sagely to depart from all being (universe and all--by that I mean material and immaterial stuff) without calling out--just a minute, am I not to know at last what lies over the hill: over the ridge there, over the laps of the ocean and out beyond the plasmas of the sun's winds, and way out where the bang still bubbles in the longest risings: no, no: I must get peanut butter and soda crackers and the right shoe soles (for ice) and leave something for my son and leave these lines, poor things, to you, if you will have them, can they do you any good, my trade for my harm in the world: come, let's celebrate: it will all be over
