In wildness, ears untuned, I took my love today,
And Nature watching quietly where we lay
Exploded colored self across the sky.
I turned, looked up, said, ‘Why?’

And when I turned again to see her lying there,
I saw some vibrant screen upon the air
Which, quick, protected us.
Sky red, sea blue, the wildness vanished thus.

She neither approved nor disapproved, which saddened him until he realized that she could say nothing, for it would be speaking of her own self, her own being. What he spoke and wrote was as much her as it was him. When he knew this, one night, he asked, "What is your name?"

He was stunned by her look. A soft voice replied, "Ruth." Then she was not he. Or was she, for, strange that he had never thought of it before, he had no name.

He was perplexed. He looked fleetingly at her and, without thinking, said, "What is my name?"

She looked at the sea and the sky. He was frightened. She turned to him with the same expression as before, now softer, almost resigned. "Your name… your name is…" and she cried.

He moved toward her but was unable to touch her.

Her crying ceased and she said, "I can not tell you. You could learn my name only by asking. That is not the way to yours." He looked at her unbelieving. Since the first day, her words had soothed and calmed. He felt tears coming and fled to the jungle. During the night, he wrote:

In eight years
the child's fears
became reality.
The last time I slept fears were pure:
Dreams of angels trying to lure
Me to the bright white light;
Not once, beyond the earth, of flight
Of heart beyond its bounds I dreamed
When all was what it seemed.

In time’s grip
This lonely trip
was triviality.

I turned from light to dark and tried,
Self-aware, all fear to hide
In man, whose face was false;
All colors confused behind my thoughts,
Tempestuous tonings came
Across the sea, once more the same.

Color-blind
I tried to find
reality.

That cool night and that bright light
Are gone forever—and flight?
I laugh at children with their wings
From realms where light is played on strings
And seek no more the truth,
For I have found it in my Ruth.

She accepted him the following morning and he showed her the poem. "It is not bad," she said, 'but you can do better. The words do not slide smoothly from the vestiges of thought." He tried to speak, "How, when form demands rigidity and thought demands freedom…" but she had turned away.

Other works followed in a profusion which revealed his searching. He sought to define poetry for her. "It is," he said, "the most economical linguistic expression of true thought." She said nothing. "Poetry is feeling realized." Again she was silent. "Poetry is the threshold between man and nature." She smiled.

Nights, they were together. Days, he was at the spring, watching the water and the mill. He despaired and rejoiced by turns as he found yet another new world there.

Ten months of existing thus found expression. He read to her:

Patience.
Certitude.
The first was not a problem in childhood.
Freedom, clouded rarely and then not for long,
Admits of no time and no anxiety.
The tenets of youth may;
Physical maturity, dragging the mind
Up with it, does,
Has to.
Certitude lurks, in the confusion.
Man fucks, in the profusion
Of earth and seed
Of sun and need,
heedless, heedless, heedless.

She nodded.

Released from years of confinement, the words flowed forth in ever-increasing volume, words and thoughts viewpoints experienced and viewpoints imagined, exhausting form and depleting material, till at last one day he saw it all as a chaos.

The night before the child was born, he talked in his sleep. She recorded what he skid.

The child matured rapidly, a foreign being, foreign to him, for he was distant. The father's eyes could not read what they had written in the son’s.

A week after birth, the man and the ,woman were standing on the prominence. The child lay in the grass at their feet. The father was lost in thought about the germ of a new poem.

She spoke and handed him a piece of papyrus, stepping closer as she did. In one moment so large as to seem tangible, the earth gave way underfoot and she plunged noiselessly into the sea. Her falling, the helpless motion over the entire distance was stopped in his mind as one action, one movement.

She was gone before he could answer. He looked at the papyrus and sank to the ground beside the child as he mouthed the words:

Dein Wort ist mir hold, dein Zittern brav,
Dein' Schläfe mir süss, Umarmung jäh.
"Komm jetzt," sagst du mir, "Zeit, Raum vergeh!"
"Komm wieder," sagst du, sagst du, "und schlaf."
Umsehend im Zimmer bin ich allein.
Wo bist du, mein Herz? Diese Zeiten scharf,
Die Wände durchbrechend, das Licht entwarf.
Heim, heim! In der Zukunft, bei Zufall dein
Unendliches Warten, geduldig hehr,
Soll mich und die Andern erheben geschwind
Unerwartet ins Leben, wo Schöpfung. blind
Blendend hell und klar herrscht in ewige Kehr.
So warte ich gern, gespannt nicht mehr:
Deines Herzens Ruh ist der Menschheit Säer.

For several years, the child occupied much of his time and displaced many memories. When the boy reached an age of self-sufficiency, he began to spend his days in the jungle, wondering only infrequently at the actions of the old man, his father, who was now given to long days beside the spring. The boy often said to him, 'The purest of waters will not lessen the greatest of pains.

The boy returned one evening to find him sketching there. He discerned vague outlines of a human figure. Without looking up, the father said, "It is to be an image of your mother, carved from stone and placed beside the mill."

"It is futile."

"You are wiser in many things but not here. The wisdom of time brooks no hindrance, heeds no advice but its own."

'You shall see that it is futile." With that, the boy left and found his home in the jungle.

Thus the statue took shape amidst the loneliness of man and the silence of nature. The former he could bear, but the latter, being impartially acquiescent in its effect, was often intolerable. An image thrice removed from the original—his concept, the drawings, the final object—such an image he despaired of creating satisfactorily but patience brought ability, ability response, and the stone was animated under his touch. When finished, it had a reality of its own, no less valid to him than that of its predecessors.