PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

'mortally in love and writhing in dreams',   beautiful

'this same absurd elegance spilling all

around the shaggy forest,'  a unique and lovely thought

'the days outnumber us.'  what a sweet description of our evanescent stay

   on the planet

'the taste of rivers'

'I don't speak fluent free spirit' 

 you've extended my sight and expanded my world

In youth, we are like a sapling

Our greatest attribute is

our unending

flexibility

But as our core matures

to grow in width,

we learn

to fight the wind

Rather than bend

to its desire

~/~

you`re welcome

Wallace Stevens said that part of them purpose of Poetry was to help people live their lives.  Patricia's poems, with all the grandeur of the highest poetic art, fulfills Stevens' dictum more perfectly than any ciontemporary poet that I have encountered.  Today, I had something of a bad shock that really shook me up---but, for the first time today (other than when I was considering my faith), I had moments of peace during the reading of this poem. 

  This is a very bucolic and nature-friendly poem, worthy of Vergil himself; but far more personal than Vergil ever gave us.  The poem's center of gravity, or the core where it fuses its elements together (with the subsequent creation of light and warmth, is the fifth stanza. 

   There is a lot of activity in the poem, which the Poet's language captures but does not disturb or interrupt. In my elementay school days (yes, when dinosaurs roamed the earth), we lived at the edge of a small town, and our "backyard" extended to a pine-tree forest which had existed well before the township had been platted and statehood achieved.  And in that woods there was always sound, of some sort, even in winter; and from that woods there was a sense of thriving life, not always visible to the eye, but very definitely there.  I often experienced the same effect at my grandparents' rural residence, whose small acreage abutted against the edge of a very think Walnut foest.  That same effect, enhanced by a wildflower meadow between their main cottage and the walnuts, as well as a narrow, shallow creek flowing northeast to southwest and bisecting their acreage, was very much present.  Patricia's poem helps me to know---and reminds me that---these effects are universal, making my parents' sibirban residence and my grandparents' more rural residence parts of a universal symbolism.

  At the poem's conclusion, the activity in the poem does not cease; it continues on, even after the reader has stopped reading.  Just as those two properties I have described above still resonate within me, although decades have passed since I was present at either, the poem's activity continues on even after my eyes have left the screen (or the page).  That is comforting.  Nature, and the bucolic poems it inspires, are not like sitcoms that we just switch off before an evening's slumber; nor are they like the card party, which ends when Aunt Gin and Uncle Tonic drive off to their home on the other side of the county.  Nor do bucolic poems shut their effects down just because an old man, with a spinal injury, confined to and unable to leave an easy chair, can no longer walk about in God's sunshine.  Patricia's poetry assures us that these vital processes continue on around us and in us.  Eden is still a functional, although cosmic, place; we just can't go there right now.  While reading Patricia's poem, I turned to a bit of Orthodox theology to help me be more appreicative of her poem, and was reminded that Eden was not left behind in Genesis; it is mentioned by Jesus, on the cross (of all places; because conversation there is difficult), promised to the repentent thief as a functional place, close enough that the thief would arrive there in just a little while that day,  This, too, is an aspect of Patricia's magnificent poem.  Withoiut naming Eden as the archetype of the world she describes, she shows us, through her poetic vision, that Eden is still right there; and Poets like Patricia, Poets whose artistic quality functions at such an extreme level, are highly qualified to demonstrate its unseen presence to us.  Thank you, Patricia, for allowing to put my "shaking up" aside to experience, once more, through your words, the beauty of this part of Eden that you have observed.