one

A really fantastic bit of writing. Made me cry.

Where, vomit-yellow, the lichen crawls
Up the boulder, where the rusty needle
Falls from the pine to pad the earth's silence
Against what intrusive foot may come, you come---
But come not knowing where or why.
Like substance hangs the silence of
The afternoon. Look---you will see
The tiny glint of the warbler's eye, see
The beak, half open, in still gasp, see
Moss on a cliff, where water oozes.

Where or why,
You wonder, wandering, with sweat and pant,
Up the mountain's heave and clamber,
As though to forget and leave
All things, great and small, you call
The Self, and remember only how once
In the moonlit Pacific you swam west, hypnotized
By stroke on stroke, the rhythm that
Filled all the hollow head and was
The only self you carried with you then.

What brought you back?
You can't remember now,
And do not guess that years from now you may not remember
How once---now---on this high ridge, seeing
The sun blaze down on the next and higher horizon,
You turned, and bumbled for some old logging road
To follow, stumbling, down.

Then it all begins again. And you are you.

-Robert Warren Penn