Wilderness

When I lay down, for the night, on the desert,

on my back, and dozed, and my eyes opened,

my gaze rushed up, as if falling up

into the sky,

and I saw the open eye of night, all

guileless, all iris of a starshine grey,

scattered with clusters of brilliant pupils.

I gazed, and dozed, and as my eyelids lifted I would

plummet up out of the atmosphere,

plunging and gasping as if I’d missed

a stair. I would sleep, and come to, and sleep,

and every time that I opened my eyes

I fell up deep into the universe.

It looked crowded, hollow, intricate, elastic,

I did not feel I could really see it

because I did not know what it was

that I was seeing. When my lids parted,

there was the real -- absolute,

crisp, impersonal, intimate,

benign without sweetness, I was soaring out, my

speed suddenly increasing to its speed, I was

entering another dimension, and yet

one in which I belong, as if

not only the earth while I am here, but space,

and death, and existence without me, are my home.