I’m Reading Your Mind

here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has

been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet

here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole hill-sweeping grove down, its

mile-long headfuls of leaves upswept so the whole valley shivers its windy silvers,

watery ... A strange heat is upon us. Again. That was you thinking that. I suggested it.

Maybe the wind did. We both put in the horizon line now, the great loneliness, its

grip, chaos recessed but still there. After finitude you shall keep coming toward me

it whines, whitish with non-disappearance. We feel the same about this. The same

what? We feel is there more. That’s the default. We want to live with the unknown in

front of us. Receding, always receding. A vanishing moving over it all. A sleepy

vacancy. It’s the sky, yes, but also this thinking. As from the start, again, here I am,

a mind alone in the fields. The sheep riding and falling the slants of earth. The

sleepiness a no-good god come to assume we are halfwits, tending, sleepy, the

animals gurgling and trampling, thistle-choked, stinging. A dove on a stone. No sky

to speak of, the god lingers, it wants to retire, it thinks this is endgame, what

could we be — mist about to dry off, light about to wipe a wall for no reason, that

random. This must have been way BC. Or is it 1944. Surely in 2044 we shall be

standing in the field again, tending, waiting to surprise the god who thinks he knows

what he’s made. Well no. He does not know. We might be a small cavity but it

guards a vast hungry — how bad does that hurt you, fancy maker — you have no idea

what we turned our back on to come be in this field of earth and tend — yes tend —

these flocks of minutes, whispering till the timelessness in us is wrung dry and we

are heavied with endgame. Have I mentioned the soul. How we know you hustled

that in, staining all this flesh with it, rubbing and swirling it all over inside with

your god-cloth. Rinse. Repeat. Get this — here with this staff which soon I shall turn

into a pen again — brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless — I

hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I’ve made, I see the dry field blonde-up and

green, day smacks its lips, they are back, the inventors, they are going to do it

again, sprinkle-seed, joker rain coming to loosen it all. How many lives will we be

given, how many will we trade in for this — it comes in bushels, grams, inches, notes,

crows watch over it all as they always have, come back from the end of time to caw

it into its redo again. Cherish us. Will not stop. Nothing to show for it but doing. The

flock runs across as the dog chases and I walk slowly. I admire what I own what I am

and I think the night is nothing, the stars click their ascent, I feel it rise in me, the

word, I feel the skull beneath this skin, I feel the skin slick and shine and hide the

skull and it is from there that it rises now, I taste it before I say it, this song.