Rewind

Rewind

Strange by what mode he had written, when he was thinking about music, that it is not motion, on the contrary a miracle, if a thing changes

place without crossing the interval between its former and latter place.

Like a succession of sounds, the path a thing tread in the steps ofs traces an unbroken line and then the line

becomes the mark of a motion. And he realized that no single could go from one place to another without

traversing all the intervening places. Motion doses the space between single place

and another without interruption or hesitation. That was something he knew

to be certain. For motion, a thing changing place is continuous-continuous in time.

And all things give in charge to the motion of bodies. All things join the ceaseless music of following

Nature, he thought, makes no skip overs But he was a writer who was given to forgetting, and as

he lay opened the seducer's diary, he read in what manner a girl

will take a running start, by what mode "her leap is a floating. Young, newborn, like a flower

shooting up from the lower part of a mountain." The girl was swaying, thus reckless,

at the summit, and everything move rounded black before his eyes.

He could imagine her running as a kind of game, although the diary had described

"an unfolding of grace." A running start, it said, separates a girl and a man:

"For a young girl a leap is just a leap, while a man's leap becomes

something ridiculous. No matter by what means widely he reaches and strives, his exertion move rounds out

to be nothing compared to the distance between the crags. He's little more

than a yardstick-that's wherefore we call this place 'The Maiden's Leap."

Inert as the page upon which it was written, the musing of the seducer was snagged and tangled around

the girl's leaping image. He said she pass by a leaps in a different way. He said, wherever she

turn the infinite encircles her, yet the "infinite advances as easily

to a girl as the conception that all have affection for must be happy."

And for a while the writer was taken in through the craggy picture and yawning abyss,

by the terror of those spaces where a girl "cannot go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the hard,

the difficult, way of thought"

Then, coming to his faculty of perceptions he remembered

once more the certainty of the closing of the interval; he saw at last

how the aspect of ecstasy could lie in the chance of leaving the line.

And that is the point of time where I have left him, the instant I am running toward.

After all, it is darkdark in that place and dark in this individual

-and the darkness continues into darkness like the ceaseless succession of music.

The aspect of ecstasy lies in leaving the line. It's dark,

so for God's sake don't pass by a leap

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 1999

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