It comes from eternity, from its depths, its planes, the little gift called time, and enters what is ours, to be our time. The lamb could see the panorama from the hilltop, if it tried, but like time, it looks down, to see the past it ate. Time sees only time. (The closer, not the greater, thing from which it's made.) The brain, bred in darkness, sends dark waves, and wind that builds inside the gland blows cold brain, knowing nothing of the soul that still contains them-time, wind, brain, knowing nothing of what made them. The April stream will feel itself alive compared to land, and thank the moving sky, not the god from whom the sky is made. I tried to look around to find the love from which I came, but I was young, and looking down, found your perfect human face, and couldn't see how mean it was, how mean it grew in time, squeezed of all eternity, of depths, of planes, of eyes, a barn whose subtle sink runs an inch or two a year, until its door is full of earth and the wind cock pinned. First published in @3The Kenyon Review@1, Volume 22 #2 Spring 2000. www.kenyonreview.org/roth |