Spring

A Palimpsest of the Tasks

14 A Palimpsest of the Tasks I look up into a volume of air—it could be a rectangular prism of air, or require more, like deĀnition under a behaving surface of curve— Up through the height of air into space [space: begins at the boundary where the black and blacker molecules outnumber the clear—or where? and on the cusp of it, how wide is the cusp? Enough to stand on?]— And within the volume of air, rising from the visible up, one bird population and another and a third, stacked at different altitudes from the earth, fly over one another, or beneath, each imperceptible to the other, serene in lines, serene at the hinge, each in its own broad amphitheater, looking ahead to the great tract of air in its continual arrival like a broad cloth feeding through, a canvas becoming so near that the brushstrokes of paint appear as themselves, material in rilles and ridges, Āssures, gulfs, striations—in their own, alien substantiality, weird in dried clots or sputtering out— And the panel of the same earth below, a new terrain from every stratum, kaleidoscope of patches. 15 And so to lower through the scrawled layers: a palimpsest of the tasks of living creatures: the free, luxuriant foliage, the canopy of green in crazed array, and beneath, all the small animals going about their gatherings and errands. The animals sunning themselves on leaves or clinging to the undersides of mothers. And beneath, the multiplicity of crawling things, each in its own crevice, below layers of bark, gnawing, and the xylem delivering its nutrients to the vascular outgrowths, and below, through the silicate mantle, the core wrapped in molten plasma, and inside the core— what is it, scrawled on the inside of iron? ...