Lake

There is no horizon like a flat horizon! The autumn water's stinging embrace Is like an Ice Queen's embrace: sudden, and welcoming, and deadly... Is like squeezing through a sieve and coming out clean, Your Whole body emerges from brokenness, alive! and Vibrating! Like a renewed man, You see the far colors With clear eyes And there is no such thing as cold, or shivering Only Now, Only the embrace of a sleeping lake And the far calls of an enduring swimmer (He who will take his daily Constitutional in Summer and in Winter) Cheer the heart with a sense of indefatigability, Of not making much of the cold... This Eternity is unlike all other Eternities! To know your every nerve has awakened To be somehow beyond the rim of the sky To dare... to be.... alive! Beyond the rim of the sky Where the rim of the earth Touches the rim of the lake A thin firmament Between two vast expanses (and to think, we live and wake in the thinness, and not in the vastness!) But here, beyond the rim of the world, We are Sane! ...until we get up and out And put on our clothes Over our wet swimming suits And go... And go... (I can't say it!) back into the madness And the close press of thousands Each yearning for three cubic feet of their OWN air Back into the state in which, Everybody brokers A Deal with Time Begging her to end their insanity For a while, And give to them Little, Eternal Spaces Like This...