So it's going much quicker than I thought.
So I'll try one more new one.
It's a little gnarlier.
It's called "Hypostasis and New Year."
[SIGHS]
"For why am I afraid to sing the fundamental shape of awe.
Should I now begin to sing the silvered back
of the winter willow spear, the sparkling agate blue?
Would this blade and this sky free me
to speak intransitive lack--
the vowels themselves free?
Of what am I afraid?
Of what lies in back of me of day?
These stars scattered as far as an I. What world and wherefore
will it shake free?
Why now in the mind of an afternoon
is a daisy for a while, flagrant, and alive?
But what of night, of hours' unpredicated bad luck
and the rot inside it clings to, fathomless
on the far side in winter dark?
Oh shadow world when a thing comes back,
comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself, what then?
What silver world mirrors tarnished lenses?
What fortune?
What fate?
And the forms not themselves, but only itself the sky
by water in wind shaken.
I am born in silver dark.
Of what am I to see these things between myself
and nothing, between the curtain and the stain,
between the hypostatic scenes of breathing and becoming
the thing I see?
Are they not the same?
Things don't look so good on the street
today beside the tower rusting in a broken lot.
One is a condition.
The other-- mystery.
Even this afternoon, light so kind and nourishing,
a towering absence, vibrating air, shake.
And I see pots from old shake.
And I see cities anew shake.
And I see robes shake.
I see desert shake.
I see the farthing in us all.
The ghost of day, the day inside night,
and sight decaying as tones decay and border air.
The old songs and the present wind I sing and say,
I love the unknown sound in a word.
Mother, where from did you leave me
on the sleeve of a dying word, of impish laughter
in the midst my joy?
I compel and confess open for my cracked tinge picture doubled.
I can't remember now if I made a pact with the devil
when I was young, when I was high.
On a sidewalk I hear, "buy a sweatshirt,"
and think, buy a shirt from the sweat of children.
Hell, I'm just taking a walk in the sun in a poem.
And this sound, that one, caught in the most recent coup.
Told you it was gnarly.
[LAUGHING]
It's hard to read.
All right.