The Great Circle of Nothing
When I AM THAT I AM made nothing
and rested, which rest it certainly deserved,
night now accompanied day, and man
had his friend in the absence of the woman.
Let there be shadow! Human thinking broke out.
And the universal egg rose, empty,
pale, chill and not yet heavy with matter,
full of un weighable mist, in his hand.
Take the numerical zero, the sphere with nothing in it:
it has to be seen, if you have to see it, standing.
Since the wild animal’s back is now your shoulder,
and since the miracle of not-being is finished,
start then, poet, a song at the edge of it all
to death, to silence, and to what does not return.
by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Wesleyan University Press, 1983
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