Having read them all or not,
we soon conclude everything’s a front
covering up centuries of inexperience:
the leaves outside don’t care
about last year’s foliage,
and the rocks in rain find it easy
to forget the sun’s glower.
Year after year our voyages
deliver us to the same predicament:
around us lies the land of the already
explored, and yet our errors, veering off
with the eye, outside, beyond the safe interior,
remain unmapped and unremarked:
that streak of quartz, those patient, weeping trees!