I

Happiness—that light
light, that full breath, that
essence in essence

is beyond me

Within—possible—it is me,
is always,
what I could be forever
and so

is beyond me

Only to be lived
when I am past, when life
has truly gone

beyond me

II

Is what is full, is whole—
all of all
conceivabilities, which absorb
all and take in all
like a first breath, breathing
everything—the wild message in
feeling and being and vitality
of animals and plants and millions
of multiplying, tremulous cells,
as in husks and surfaces and
shimmeringly naked landscapes
efflorescing,

coming all
to culminating breathlessness,

and skin of new life,
sublimely sheathed in
lighted glass, in the mist of
a beatific cry shedding
in pure air, in pure light,
firm like the rock
of distant morning mountains,

to the glistening above
of a night pond touched only under,
to the rush and song of a river echoing
blood and centuries and the stillness
of change

to the taste of fruit upon a starved
tongue, to the despair

of solitude—
and the wrenching bliss of solitude—

to the hot red of a wound
and the womb,

of shame, and longing, and lips and again,
the despair—

of again—of despairing—of again
despairing at the misery of
the truly doomed, at the existence
of despair and misery and truthless doom
within existence, at the possibility of
unbearableness, and losing breath
finally again

III

I cannot, will not, and never will
bear this wondrous inconceivability—
True if true happiness
is not mine to be borne

It is

beyond me so in me

that somewhere I am

beyond