Some certified nut Will try to tell you it's poetry, (It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense) But watch out or he'll start with some New notion or other and switch to both Leaving you wiser and not emptier though Standing on the edge of a hill. We have to worry About systems and devices there is no Energy here no spleen either We have to take over the sewer plans-- Otherwise the coursing clear water, planes Upon planes of it, will have its day And disappear. Same goes for business: Holed up in some office skyscraper it's Often busy to predict the future for business plans But try doing it from down In the street and see how far it gets you! You Really have to sequester yourself to see How far you have come but I'm Not going to talk about that. I'm fairly well pleased With the way you and I have come around the hill Ignoring and then anointing its edge even if We felt it keenly in the backwind. You were a secretary at first until it Came time to believe you and then the black man Replaced your headlights with fuel You seemed to grow from no place. And now, Calmed down, like a Corinthian column You grow and grow, scaling the high plinths Of the sky. Others, the tenor, the doctor, Want us to walk about on it to see how we feel About it before they attempt anything, yet In whose house are we? Must we not sit Quietly, for we would not do this at home? A splattering of trumpets against the very high Pockmarked wall and a forgetting of spiny Palm trees and it is over for us all, Not just us, and yet on the inside it was Doomed to happen again, over and over, like a Wave on a beach, that thinks it's had this Tremendous idea, coming to crash on the beach Like that, and it's true, it has, yet Others have gone before, and still other will Follow, and far from undermining the spiciness Of this individual act, this knowledge plants A seed of eternal endeavor for fear of Happening just once, and goes on this way, And yet the originality should not deter Our vision from the drain That absorbs, night and day, all our equations, Makes us brittle, emancipated, not men in a word. Dying of fright In the violet night you come to understand how it Looked to the ancestors and what there was about it That moved them and are come no closer To the divine riddle which is aging, So beautiful in the eternal honey of the sun And spurs us on to a higher pitch Of elocution that the company Will not buy, and so back to our grandstand Seat with the feeling of having mended The contrary principles with the catgut Of abstract sleek ideas that come only once in The night to be born and are gone forever after Leaving their trace after the stitches have Been removed but who is to say they are Traces of what really went on and not Today's palimpsest? For what Is remarkable about our chronic reverie (a watch That is always too slow or too fast) Is the lively sense of accomplishment that haloes it Form afar. There is no need To approach closely, it will be done from here And work out better, you'll see. So the giant slabs of material Came to be, and precious little else, and No information about them but that was all right For the present century. Later on We'd see how it might be in some other Epoch, but for the time being it was neither Your nor the population's concern, and may Have glittered as it declined but for now It would have to do, as any magic Is the right kind at the right time. There is no soothsaying Yet it happens in rows, windrows You call them in your far country. But you are leaving: Some months ago I got an offer From Columbia Tape Club, Terre Haute, Ind., where I could buy one Tape and get another free. I accept- Ed the deal, paid for one tape and Chose a free one. But since I've been Repeatedly billed for my free tape. I've written them several times but Can't straighten it out---would you Try?