The Great Names

This, as it is, stripped and reduced - undone by raging, torrential, opened senses; To its elemental couplings of unbridled pieces. Here is life, in towering, brindled expanse, that swallows whole all of the lightest and darkest; Peaks, valleys, and channels of odds and uncertainty. Winds of feathering, vast plumes encircling and spearing the seams of a freshly illuminated globe, Seen and unseen - written and unwritten - paths into the heart of nature's famous mists. Freedom's mark switches starkly upon the wilding wind's tide, Twain with all outstretched surfaces born from the archaic temporal. There is a champaign of silence - a voiceless giantess - in the middle of the air, Where no thread or whisper of life subsists or waltzes. At end of day, tints and tones - hues and colourings - of shadowed beauty in the envisaged, pale streams. From the trenchant, whetted rim of great stone playing in the welkin court - of the darkling, stygian, caliginous heavens, Escorted to the black marble stretch by keen pinnings of white luminaries. At a glancing, the purling and spouting rivers of space, bearing the arks of souls through the ages, And silent, its moving shapes and great names. Continental creatures of flaming greens and of darkened chains - withholding ripened, blossoming flames in the deep; Mountains, valleys, and oceans, a blanketing of every stretch and shade. Hiding - closed and minute - the cultures, voices, and histories marked in time by empire and ruin; Of maximum and minimum - of greatest perennial, cyclical depths. Split and hewn to fragmentary slippings - the ends of briefest moments of waking and sleeping mind.