Spirit that hears each one of us,
hears all that is --
Listens, listens, hears us out --
inspire us now!
Our own pulse beats in every
stranger's throat.
And also within the flowered ground
beneath our feet.
We can hear it in water, in wood, and
even in stone.
We are earth of this earth, and
we are bone of this bone.
This is a prayer I sing, for we
have forgotten this and so
the earth is perishing.
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers...
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent....
Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.