Abbey Pond
February 11, 2008
seven stalks of broomsage sway
on a raised clump of turf
arcing up over a lip of icy pond;
siblings wrapped in a rug of swirled oak leaf.
Their ribboned cossicks,
sensate to the breeze, tremble,
balance in the air, touch
their tawny, filamental bodies in myriad ways.
Finely spiked hair frays from heads
curving downward, a parabola of prayer
and fascination.
Over their pale gold crowns
a lone mosquito jerks by,
drunk with cold, shivering into oblivion.
On the far shore
a wan sun has kept at bay
by a bare margin the full reach of ice.
A solitary goose steps gingerly
in the thin seam of winter water
periodically plunging its beaked head below.
Sated or not, off it flies in unhurried flaps.
They fall on my ears like faint waves
breaking double-time on a distant beach.
This breeze, that mosquito, a goose
feeding or in flight, broomsage
along icy pondshore —
there is a mystery here, an enigma of being
my profane eyes may never see.
But alone and quiet I sometimes receive
intimations of an enfolding of essence so deep,
a conjunction of place and time so dense,
an intersection of life so intricate,
symmetry so terrifying,
that a single note begins to distinguish itsel
fin the background, arising from nowhere, everywhere
one pulse ample and pure,
so astonishing in beauty, I tell you
so heartsplitting that i stagger
for a brief second
under its sway.
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