A measured gaze or grace that falls on roads, trees, and mountains.
Those things and you are not separate; neither your eyes
nor the surfaces of the objects scratched by them are distinct.
You and the objects have been welded together seamlessly
by the sun’s flames of affection and allusion.
This is not a materialist philosophy in which a gold-toothed tiger
devours the deer in a jungle composed of atrocious branches
which grow randomly like the moss with no particular objective
like your mind’s growth or the growth of the tangle on your head,
the unkempt bush that others name incivility, Asia, Africa, backwaters,
the colony but which is immensity and peace for the panther and the jackal.
The clunking of the cement-grinder in which particles are rolled
and crushed resembles the stone eroded by the action of the river
or better still clothes which are us that are kept going in a centrifugal
motion in the washing machine of the universe. The search, in the meantime,
continues not as much for dark matter but for the mythical god or the pied piper
who accidentally switched on the button of the proverbial machine
as you once did while rummaging like an ape for bananas in your apartment.
The ultimate goal in the search of laws of the universe is not a lofty aim
or is as much a debased game as the anticipation of the moment to lay claim
to the fact that you or I or they have discovered the ungraspable
or revolved dark matter in their hands.
All this narcissism is irrelevant in the scheme of space and slightly relevant
in the scheme of time, and the way in which the long stretch
of it could be spent. So, thanks to the mirror of the water that prompted
Narcissus to fall in love with himself. Thanks to the sliding doors, the glasses, and the lab beakers in which we may minutely observe ourselves and marvel
at out-bounded rationalities.