The tall grass sleeps against the wall;
we speak and listen in turns.
I have to wonder how I sound to the tattered ground leaves
and the buzzing nets in the shadows--
I am sure,
  as I speak of many things that my textbooks would rather not say,
that the grass doesn't understand why I pace on, fretting about
  islands,
     or the oceans between them.

I pause for breath in the sleepy shade,
a humming place where I enter the ground
and the grass hollows after me,
speaking as a tunnel:

Why would anything wish
  to prove that it is nothing?
We have known for eons
  that each blade stands apart from the rest--
But we are all counted as carpet.

Shall I tell the grass that it does not exist?
That its roots are only in language,
   and without my voice, it would simply be a sliding thing--
slipping into everything else.
No, dear grass,
you are only a carpet that I made, when
I decided you were for walking.

I know the grass laughs.
It laughs as the air laughs back at me,
throwing pale echoes in my face.

Dear soul,
you are not the worm,
you are not the sun.