The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature

Hold fast what seem ephemera—

plain details that rise clear

beyond the fog of half-thoughts,

that rustling static, empty of metaphor.

Thy moss gardens, the deep

constellations of green, the striate

rock furred with emerald,

inscribed with gold lichen,

with scarlet!

The gleam of thy drenched

floors of leaf-layers! Fragrance

of death and change!

a mountain,

forbearing—so far—from volcanic rage,

blesses the city it is poised above, angelic guardian

at rest on sustaining air; and that its vanishings

are needful, as silence is to music?

How clearly it speaks! Respect, perspective,

privacy, it teaches. Indulgence

of curiosity increases

ignorance of the essential.

Witness
Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

This mountain’s power

lies in the open secret of its remote

apparition

Mirage
Ethereal mountain,

snowwhite foam hovering

far above blue, cloudy ridges—

can one believe you are not a mirage?

the mountain

retreats from so much pomp,

such flagrant and superficial pride,

and drifts above the horizon,

ghostly, irresolute, more akin

to a frail white moth

than to the massive tension

of rock, its own bones, beneath

its flesh of snow.

But God

is imaged

as well or better

in the white stillness

resting everywhere