He noticed on the high hill of the orchard
the changing space beyond the changing light,
He saw that space had changed to light and light
was all there was of place when place gave way
to the swift complacencies of thought
and to the grim noise words made in the mind
like the whirring of cicadas in the midday heat
on the high hill of an orchard at noon,
of the sibilance, the fricatives, the aspirations
of a man in thought in the high white light of noon,
just a man thinking, but not at all a thinking man,
who stands at no real height at all, in fact, but high enough
to catch a glimpse of distances beyond the treetops,
beyond the weedy sublimations of the ground,
across the kind of distance thought must travel
like sunspot noises to bedevil all our careful messaging
across the brassy breath of noon upon a hill,
on this hill in particular – a hum from nowhere special.
