This Little Glade, Remember
When lying beneath a ponderosa
pine, looking up through layers
of branches, mazes of leaf-spikes
and cones—contemplation grows
receptive to complexity,
the pleasant temptation of pine-
scented tangle. Sky as proposition
is willingly divided and spliced
into a thesis of weaves and hallows.
Name them something else
if you wish, but needled shadow
and substance are, in this hour,
an architecture of philosophy.
And a rising wind, called ”a rough
and bawdy wind“ by a rough and bawdy
voice, is that wind and that voice
transformed. The structure of words s
ways and bends in the blow.
Looking away into the clear sky,
expectation shifts. Vision becomes
a welcome to guests of crows in new
dimensions who themselves become
not only depth and horizon in a circus
of wings but old vision’s startling visitors.
Not soul alone, but soul consumed
by a single bee descending into the center
of a purple mountain lily is soul
to a soul suckled in sleep.
Earth and human together
form a unique being. A brief era
of immortality is lent to each
by the other. Move momentarily
now—with hovering granite cliff,
with sun-stripe flick of perhaps
vagrant shrew, with raised tack
of mightly larkspur—into this company.
Copyright Credit: Pattiann Rogers, “This Little Glade, Remember” from Generations. Copyright © 2004 by Pattiann Rogers. Reprinted with the permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. For online information about other Penguin Group (USA) books and authors, see www.penguin.com.
Source: Generations (Penguin Books, 2004)