Any faithful attendant must be able
to travel as fast as winds in a black
blizzard, as winds in the gales
of a north sea storm, must move parallel
with the cheetah, the coyote, the hare
and fleeing gazelle, must fall swiftly,
side-by-side with everything that falls —
rains, and meteors, and forests afire,
wounded men, crumpling cities,
melting mountainsides of snow.
Whatever monitors stone and fire
must circle the sun with the disintegrating
comets, the cold planets and their lackey
moons, orbit the galaxy with each and every
one of its stellar systems and bursting stars.
Whatever is steadfast must be
as quick as an electron moving by no
means across the emptiness between
one phantom ring and another, like a firefly
that loses its vanishing place and finds it
again across a vacancy of night.
To be in union with the seasonal,
that which adheres must go and return
year after year among winters and springs
with all of their motions multiple, speed
one-by-one with the spores of royal
ferns and mescalbeans flung outward
and each red, wind-spinning key
of the swamp maples, hover among
the migratory gray whales and humpback
whales and the rapidly sailing spray
porpoises, matching eye-to-eye exactly
their true directions, their determined paces.
Whatever it is that keeps careful watch
with the fleet, the rapid, the brisk,
the headlong rising or descending,
must become itself the virtue
of velocity, the intimate of light.
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