We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn’t reach out our hands or we get them gashed.

This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed.

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life’s end is death.

O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o’er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak Above the blinding clouds of prejudice, Would we could see all truly as it is; The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine. The fleet limbs of the antelope?

I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

The world’s in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean.

Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers’s, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry.