Speak! and I Tell Me

Speak! and I tell me,

go towards and be a whim.

For I have reached the imaginative space of words,

seen the mind of their conception.

I am the mind inside of itself;

I am inward and outward looking.

I have held down long greatness

to marvel when it rises.

And so much renewed ere rest it takes me

like death when it comes, how hard a spreading slow from

without my body into awful silence.

The body mine hath feeling;

I am become the what of feeling is,

myself each a part a history and of them until it grew

that I could see, or my leg to stand, my hand to carry,

for now my mind to know itself.

I am ever changing because I am real.

And know this undoing: myself a dissolution atop

and for the slough, soft settling jots to live upon the water

unmoved,

our truth will always stay lighter than the deep.