Having Taken lsd Out Near Krum, Texas, June 1978

Flat field, and northward that shrubby windbreak (oaks?) tangled with fallen-away posts and gouached unspoolings of rusted spiked wire

But dirt dirt blown and dirt dusted up as we walked, the wind

in little gusts visible as smudged archings and swallow-dipped bisters tarrying above the gray crumbled furrows

the slurry of daylong walking the amoebic vacancies and tiny cataracts of tripping out there in the dry fields where Soren had come for the light his painting

and Helena had followed, to write and to love Soren

to the grayed farmhouse that stood in the wind out there while we climbed up onto the roof (sticky, I remember, and hot) at dusk to sit and watch the stars, and the broad black sky, the activities of light

we climbed, it seemed, into the sky itself light growing into light, great subtleties

and once there, in the dark, surrounded by these vast     (vast!) outspillings of whited distant light, so generous it seemed to us then that heroism of outflung distance

We were twenty, twenty-one then, sick of history tribal, very kind I think, yodeling occasionally back to the coyotes

And I saw how the stars above us burned how the map arced above me identically whether I closed or opened

my eyes / the stars inside the stars outside hung there sparkling and could be seen in their beauty though I looked out or in