“...as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.”

“I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.”

“But it is the same thing we are all seeing,Our world. Go after it,Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,Into the chamber behind the thought”

“Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned, That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint None of us ever graduates from college, For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.”

“until only infinity remained of beauty”

“A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.”

“Some departure from the normWill occur as time grows more open about it.The consensus gradually changed; nobodyLies about it any more. Rust dark pouringOver the body, changing it without decay—People with too many things on their minds, but we liveIn the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousnessAnd the other livers of it get off at the same stop.How careless. Yet in the end each of usIs seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s timeThat counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it wereThe same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,Yet would like an exacter share, something about timeThat only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means.It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.If it isn’t enough, take the ideaInherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowersLying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means moreIn pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the endAs though you cared. The event combined withBeams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the wiserUsages of age, but it’s both thereAnd not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,At the back of the mind, where we live now.”