The name for what, alone, is fully untroubled is to be.

Parmenides, Fragment XX

    
     Having Listened

                                               

     Trees were seldom, sunlight plentiful.

     I roamed there among fenceposts that cut the light.

     Each thin shadow spoke the day west to east,

     trusted night, then reached again.

     Any creature rising up offered its tongue of dark––

     the hawk’s quick fragment,

     prairie dog’s short poem,

     buffalo an epic.