Journey round the garden 4

"If you could keep going deeper and deeper, you'd finally not be a person ... you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone could speak, poetry would be its words." (Galway Kinnell)

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (Galway Kinnell)

4
When one has lived a long time alone,
one falls to poring upon a creature,
contrasting its eternity's-face to one's own
full of hours, taking note of the differences,
exaggerating them, making them everything,
until the other is utterly other, and then,
with hard effort, probably with tongue sticking out,
going over each difference again and this time
canceling it, until nothing is left but likeness
and suddenly oneness, and ... minutes later
one starts awake, taken aback at how unresistingly
one drops off into the bliss of kinship,
when one has lived a long time alone.