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A poem posted by this Poet is always an Event worth noting; in fact, it is a double event---both the posting of the individual poem, and the expansion of her collection of greatess. 

   In a book of essays (on Wallace Stevens' poetry) entitled Words Written Out Of Desire, the superb critic and explicator, Helen Vendler, has suggested that Wallace Stevens always situated the point, or crux, or main subject a poem in its center.  I believe that this also applies to the poem Patricia has just posted (and I think that most of the centers of gravity, as I have called them, are similarly placed).  This poem's center of gravity is the stanza that beings with "Listen. you've glimpsed it too."  This stanza is discloses not only the poem's process, but the fact that are overhearing a conversation---she is directly addressing the reader, in a conversationl tone, and admitting the reader to the internal processes of her poem and, by implication (I think), the internal processes of her entire collection. 

    I believe Vendler also pointed out that, in Stevens' poems, a set of internal connections and references brought the poems into relationships with each other---and this, also, is a feature of Patriciajj's poems.  Stars create light and warmth by the fusion of atomic particles:  a controlled collision of elements within their cores.  A star is a body of plasma which retains its shape and integral form through the perfect balance of two forces:  the downward pressure of gravity, and the upward pressure of the energy released by the fusion.  Patricia's poems also operate in this way, if I may extend the metaphor:  there is a pressure of what the Poet's need to express an emotion, or an insight, or an opinion; and there is the opposite pressure of the energy released by the fusion of each poem's internal elements, and from this fusion the poem's vivifying light and warmth proceed.  I am not saying this to simply praise the Poet, because, frankly, her greatness is so far above my praise and does not need it.  I am saying this, and all the other comments I have made or will make on her poems, to two sets of readers:  those members and guests of postpoems who read this, and those graduate students (in a future I may not live to see) who will be diligently studying her poetry (and some with an eye to writing graduate dissertations).  Reader, do not smirk:  this is going to happen; and, since I will not be an active part of it, I want to leave my mark, like Robert Peary's steel spike in the North Pole Ice; so here, just to be whimsical, it is:  [*/+/].  There will be more precise observations and greater insights than I can provide; but I will have been here "afore 'em," to paraphrase an old Scottish song.

  Is it an event, the posting of this poem, or of any of her poems?  Of course it is.  In closing, I shall describe it in a metaphor from the month of July, a month that has been of supreme significance to me, personally, since the early seventies.  Many poets are like people setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July:  sparklers, noise-makers, flashes of light in the local heights just above us.  But Patricia's poems are not like those.  Patricia's poems are like the stars that rise into the sky on the night of the Fourth of July, or any other night; beside which so many other poets'efforts are  flashes in the pan, on the surface, like the glows and glimmers of fireflies, signalling the presence of high summer before they die in the chill of autumn.  Patricia's poems are above, beyond, this.  Like the stars, her poems mark the seasons of our lives and our emotions, but are not affected or limited by those seasons.  It is a privilege to watch this happen, in each of the events of her poems' postings.  It is also a privilege to be able to comment on such greatness as it procedes and constellates itself before our eyes.

sounds like a spiritual place in time