[A Morning Song; Shi Yi]

4.
Simple, the trees placed on the landscape
Like sheaves of wheat that someone might have left there.
The manure of vanished horses, the stones that imitate it,
Everything speaks of the heavens, which created this scene
For our position alone.
Now, in associating oneself too strictly with the trajectories of things
One loses that sublime hope made of the light that sprinkles the trees.
For each progress is negation, of movement and in particular of number.
This number having lost its indescribable fineness,
Everything must be perceived as infinite quantities of things.

--from 'French Poems'; John Ashbery