On Method -- Mary Margaret Sloan

Within a series of blue valleys
lay a dark speck upon a filmy sheet, a space indefinitely
extended in our thoughts, as of the sky or earth,
light, heat and a thousand more. Indelible and homely,

resisting the long chains of lucid reasoning,
its parallel exiles call to one another.
Repeated migrations of constituents
through picturesque chasms tender the will.
It is not customary to pull down all the houses

of a town with the single design of rebuilding
as far as a frontier, as far as its setting,
small or distant, as a pile of stones; plan an expedition
to be the first to enter that pile of stones