stanza my stone

"Openness or emptiness, I’m sick of it:
Horizon everywhere,
Infinity forced down the gullet:
Eat your god, child, and love it!
To be blinded would be a mercy here.

Better to live alluvial,
Better to live layered downward,
To be a man of sand, of hollows, shallows,
To cling to sleeves of water
And to let them go—

An eon’s tune, an instant’s.
I might have rained the rapids back.
I might have learned to hear
In any random rotting log
A tree release its rings year by slow year."

— Osip Mandelstam (tr. Christian Wiman), “Steppes” (via gammasandgerunds)