THERE IS NO AVAILABLE SYNCHROTRON2

 

Perhaps, this year, the days will be longer.

I shall not get tired.

Thought will pour forth from me

like an endless flow from the river,

like excess water from the reservoir.

 

I sit, my eyesight deteriorating,

recollecting the example of the poet

who continued after that forewarning

Dictating to his assistant, and I,

so much less productive, now wondering,

 

Who are we to compete with sunlight?

When can words with a past history as strait-laced

as a dictionary, their composition

limited to these twenty six letters,

like old joints which creak when they try to move,

 

subserve the necessities of illumination;

poor substitutes for reality,

dreams for experience,

dim wattage bulbs,

hardly more effectual than candles?

 

O, time still holds us in bondage. We try.

We try to be wonders, imagine we have harvested the photon,

have shot it as though from a cannon,

to be dissected, analyzed, completely comprehended.

Mere delusions. There is no synchrotron

 

available for such a study; Only that bag

of arbitrary contents

for us to shake, to explore like beggars

on abandoned cornfields, and we remain, ensconced

in imaginary structures that are paleolithic.

 

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