These days, people prefer the flavor of awareness provided by the thalamus
Straight, without all that distracting business of mind merely muttering to itself
About the past and the future, what's been done, oh well, might be done.
That's all my meditation was in the car during my long day's driving,
Just a nonexistent interpreter discussing nonexistence with itself
As the curving, cornering, cantering, cambered, changing world swirled
And exchanged infinities of differences and similarities for fresh infinities,
The woman at the pump in Scipio shouting out driving directions
Involving haystacks and tractors and dirt roads not to go down
To another woman laughing, "I'm not redneck but I'm countrified enough
To know what that means!" The mountains scrolled by, right and left,
Familiar but not to be trusted, never the same. The mind
Kept chattering to itself, reviewing prior dates and journeys.
More road, more mountains, a radio station playing
"A brand new recording of Mozart's last piano concerto,"
Which you would think would be identical to its digital self
Every time played, but it wouldn't. Examine any stillness carefully
Enough, and we discover motion. If the quantum physicists are correct,
Even at absolute zero in the vacuum of deep space, subatomic particles wink
In and out of existence. Conversely, slice any moment
However fine, we always find more rapid changes.
Stillness is a ruse. There is no end to changing. Rivers
Passed under me passing over them. Thirty years ago
I looked at an idyll and wrote, "See that gilded angler
In the valley's only river? We'll come back
To this later." I proved a prophet like any other. Today I arrived
Back where the names and appearances would all suggest
I had kept my promise, down to a sunset-gilded angler casting
In the same-named river. But I hadn't, not really, and someday
Someone will write and rewrite the last piano concerto.
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