Terrestrial Cows

Man, thy walk, is but a little flight and
Change of scene
You find yourself in the same water again and again.

From surf to surf
Escaping the dusty confines of earth.
None flies so free as the wheeling gull.
Search the flattened horizon,
None can quit its spinning.

Therefore content yourself in pasttimes befitting
little children
And still derive great satisfaction in this play.
Were you to escape this terrestrial pull
Where would you alight?
Nothing on the moon is meat for your imagination.

Sleep, a brief forgetting
Of dusk and dawn
Yet the same day rolls on
While you pretend that all is new.

Blue sky
this thin envelope
gravity cannot defy
in all its width and height---
gives distant dreams
to your waking sight.

To drink the day from a crystal vial;
to forge the way through a forest wild;
to sing with the voice of a little child!

To admire the black cow in the searing sun
When Winterland is white;
Save for the tawny, dry grasses
Which he must cheerfully chew upon---
To reckon the world in his eyes,
To see beauty at the source.

Standing awake you are yet a dreamer
Though your purse is full,
Hammered in delicate coin,
None of your riches can buy back one word
of this terrestrial testament.