Couplet

What is the power in things?
Who are the elements' kings?

Arche

I would say, “I want to think.”, and you would begin to tell me about grammar. Because I can say one word and then say another. “And this is called thinking?” “You have to listen very carefully for the space between the sounds.” What, then, am I listening to? But I can’t deny that I hear it.

This dizzying freedom in which one has no commitments:

To think is to form a thought:
Molding dough or shaping clay. But a shape --
I’m looking for a shape that responds
And corresponds

To

The reality? The idea? The expression? The question?

You have to think in pieces
And put them together,

You have to collect them

Gradually, the gradual formation, by degrees,
The steps going forward and backward,
The stumbling, half-waltz

And arrange and re-arrange

As if they half would leap together…

Color

“I think you’re like the sun…”
It would mean illumination,
First, and under it all is the darkness,
Except for my eyes, which exist
Between this absence and its light:
The original of time is black.

“This light which illuminates everything
Is itself invisible.” So I cannot see you.
Wouldn’t it have been better to call you
A reflection of that form in which
All vision of the beautiful partakes?
Its image or its prophecy
To which I am delivered?

But if light emerges from the undistinguished shroud
Then why not say you are the revel of this gloom,
The point that points all things,
Shining species of all spectacle,
The glow which is the world’s gleam?

True

There will be something,
And that’s what’s best -- I would say
This (and point to nothing -- though
There will be something).

Think past the words. Think past
The thought to that in which
The thought inheres. “There will be
Something…” Unsaturate
And all-profound,

The most beautiful thing of all
Is the sound.

He could have had an idea, but it was running away from itself. He would have looked at the sun: in that illumination shines the truth. Properly it would have been the end. But was he looking too high? Did he see with a squint? "These are the dark shapes that offend the eyes, with neither beginning nor end – but neither infinite. Not: the glittering array transcends itself. The light of the eye is lost in swamps."