Flat light and the white aisles of cotton,
sky like an idea of blue.
There’s no space like this,
wide, fraught with God.

The past is not a place
but story upon story gone so far
inside of things it takes a touch
of almost inhuman love to tell them.

To be the wire through which that current burns,
conducting the stone’s slow accretion
like a cry, deciphering sunlight,
to pluck sound from the rings of a tree . . .

More than this I want the silence that ensues,
to believe in nothing else but the fact of absence,
striking out again in a hard horizonless country
whose one road releases me like heat as I walk on.