stanza my stone

"The tiny intelligence that is another way of knowing,
Or the third eye of the lizard that hazards day;
Cathedraled helix, cloistered cochlea,
All the small-talking antennae, touching, going—

How near it is, the nothing you can sense
Is everything, as if existence
Pressed a note into your grasping fingers,
Which you unfold and find blank, and now must answer."

— Osip Mandelstam (tr. Christian Wiman), “Octets: Sixth Sense” (via gammasandgerunds)