“Steppes” (1937)
Openness or emptiness, I’m sick of it
Horizon everywhere,
Infinity forced down the gullet:
Eat your god, child, and love it!
To be blinded would be a mercy here.
Better to live alluvial,
Better to live layered downward,
To me a man of sand, of hollows, shallows,
To cling to the sleeves of water
And to let them go–
An eon’s tune, an instant’s.
I might have rained the rapids back.
I might have learned to hear
In any random rotting log
A tree release its rings year by slow year.
[note: a steppe is a prairie with wide open, flat, terrain that is too dry to any trees to grow. By contrast an alluvial plain is rain soaked and full of sedimentary rock]
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