A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea,

A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly;

Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play

Follows its curve,– a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.

Here or otherwhere,– poised on the unreachable abrupt snow-solitary ascent

Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent,

Or in¹ the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert’s hungry soul,–

A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity’s face, in a fragment the mystic Whole.

Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,

Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in sense,

In the greatness of a man, in music’s outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound,

Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a Nothing that was all and is found.