Having transferred the one to the other

And living on the plain of insistent self-knowledge

Just outside the great city, I see many

Who come and go, and being myself involved in distant places

Ask how they adjust to

The light that rains on the traveller’s back

And pushes out before him. It is always ‘the journey’;

And we are never sure if these are preparations

Or a welcome back to the old circle of stone posts

That was there before the first invention

And now seems a place of vines and muted shimmers

And sighing at noon

As opposed to

The terrain of stars, the robe

Of only that journey. You adjusted to all that

Over a long period of years. When we next set out

I had spent years in your company

And was now turning back, half amused, half afraid,

Having in any case left something important back home

Which I could not continue without,

An invention so simple I could never figure out

How they spent so many ages without discovering it.

I would have found it, altered it

To be my shape, probably in my own lifetime,

In a decade, in just a few years.