In My Blood, A Harder Mysticism

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum

And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting

The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual

Appalling presence, the power of the waters.

He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood

Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.

Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only

The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;

The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind

Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty

Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

Robinson Jeffers