The Weirdness of Now

How many goddam haystacks
Did Monet have to paint
Before he got past his obsession
With getting them just right,

So that whatever was needling 
His brain skipped to lilies and sooty 
London bridges and other 
Distortions of the light?

Now is my haystack, 
My field of moments taunting me,
Always with another variation
On the same weirdness I write

Out over and over, and out
On the umpteenth brilliant blue
Morning or navy-blue moonlit night,
I look up and around and know

This, as momentary as moments get,
But the same forever as itself,
Same as other moments were
Themselves themselves, almost

The same as not being themselves
At all, almost nothing 
In and of itself, but all the moment
I can get, who am the same

As now, and as I am now, almost
The same as not being now,
Being now and nothing and not
Myself, not being a self at all.