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In the heart of the forest, there is simplicity.

In the heart of the forest, there is glory and beauty and many lessons.

And among the chief lessons – is continuity, as we ourselves fold into the undergrowth, among the oily vowels of time… to nourish the shoots and sprigs of tomorrow.

This was the heart of it, for me…

In the cackling frenzy

of Autumn…

I clutch

every moment

with both hands.

Like us,

the forest

never received

the manual for dying,

but it turns out,

it was simple

enough all along.

How beautifully pondered is the faith that the wheels will still go round in what ever fashion, beautifully rendered a painting as magnificent as its frame guided and intricately carved catching the eye to signal what glory lies within and you did not disappoint! The stokes perfectly weighted the dark dancing with the light, the colours harmonising and clashing where they should placing drama unfolding into a renewal of at the very least high hopes drawing you into other dimensions of thought, experience and imagination with keys to emotions clicking open the locks at every line's end and yet still more is fathomed from the whole as much as the universe in each part. Beautifully and masterfully done, the fire to my smoke, water to my vapour, rich earth to my dust. Hugss Ss 

First, I am going to comment on a couple of "nuts and bolts" items regarding how the poem functions, and then I will attempt to read it in the way the critic, Helen Vendler, recommended reading Wallace Stevens' poems.

The way the language and the lines in this poem moves reminds me of a description I once read of Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, which described the music as showing several different groups of themes and of instruments working both independently of each other, and together as well.   And that is the impression I receive from this poem.  This is possible because Patricia has constructed this poem of very short lines, and very ordinary words, to create one of her extraordinary perspectives on the reality in which we live.  Long lines do not suit what she has to reveal to us:  the shorter lines move with an urgency to deliver the message, and an excitement at what the message contains.  This is Poetry of the very highest spiritual value---it is not the lesser kind in which a lesser poet mighty say, "I feel bad today," or, "Aw shucks, I forgot to pay the light bill."  

As I read the poem, it has two centers of gravity, around which its process orbits.  One is the Poet's declaration that the forest, like us, did not receive the manual on dying.  She can say that because our souls are eternal, and are not subject to the process of dying---the way the body is.  Then, further into the poem, she reveals the other center of gravity in which she shows us that death is just another birth; death, in this world, is birth into the eternal existence on the other side of the Cosmos.  Between these two center of gravity, the poem's lines, and the message of those lines, orbit.

Wallace Stevens said that he believed that Poetry was meant to help people live their lives.  I began to study his Poetry in October of 1978, forty-five years ago.  I have never stopped studying his work, and I can attest that he does (after one gets used to him) help his readers to negotiate their way through this existence.  Patricia, being a more accessible Poet than Stevens was, does this same thing, but requires less preparation on the part of her readers.  And, while I have never been a great admirer of Ezra Pound, I find that some lines in his poem, "Commission," describe how Patricia's Poetry actually works.  In Pound's poem, he instructs his poem how it should function:  and I will quote three of its lines.  "Go as a great wave of cool water . . . / Go in a friendly manner. / Go with an open speech."  Having read Pound's poem recently after several years since I lasted looked at it, I realized that these lines I have quoted here are more than just Pound's instructions to his poem; they are also the standard operating procedure within Patricia's Poetry.  And what her Poems bear---as a great wave of cool water; in their friendly manner; and with open speech---is a map, or a diagram, or a chart that shows us the controus of Hope.  She places her hopes in the Cosmos, our existence within it, and our ability to explain that existence (to a certain extent; no one tells the whole tale).  I have said, in earlier comments, that I believe we, as a species, are the only sentience in the entire created Cosmos; and our function---which is carried out at the very highest level by our Poets---is to explain the Cosmos to itself.  We are its awareness of itself; it only becomes self-aware when we put our poems to the service of that purpose.  And in explaining the Cosmos to itself, we explain ourselves to ourselves . . . which is what Patricia does, at a degree of quality which convinces her readers that she invented the concept.  We were not created to live in fear, but in joy; we were not created to dread the end of our sojourn on this planet, but to anticipate its blossoming into the eternal part of life on the other side of the Cosmos.  This, ultimately, is the supreme explanation that we can render to the Cosmos for its function and purpose:  it is the venue we inhabit until we cross to its other side into Eternity.  This is the core content of Patricia's Poetry, and of all great Poetry:  you can find it in Vergil just as validly as in Dante, or Wallace Stevens, or Patriciajj.  And I will here borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens' late, and very great, tribute poem, "To An Old Philosopher In Rome" (which was written to his former philosophy teacher at Harvard, George Santayana):  "total grandeur of a total edifice."  I truly believe that I was told (by a Poet who visited our campus in October, 1978) to read Wallace Stevens, and to never stop reading him, in order to prepare to read the Poetry of Patriciajj.  Her poems explicate that total grandeur of the total edifice which is the Cosmos.  But her explications are brought to us as the great waves of cool water, and in the friendly manner and open speech that Pound advised his poem to convey.  I think I have realized, after all these decades of reading, that the Poetic expectations established by the Poets I studied---Vergil, Stevens, and to a much lesser degree, Pound as well (although I intensely disliked him and still do)---are answered by Patricia's Poetry.  This is not a coincidence, not wishful thinking, and not a grasping at straws.  The Cosmos, which has arranged this relationship between its Poets, does not operate by coincidence, wishful thinking, and grasping at straws.  The stars are set in their courses across the fabric of the Cosmos by the Creator; we have been privileged to live in the Cosmos, and to realize the grandeur of that edifice; and we do that best by listening to the Poets who explicate it the best; and, on PostPoems, that Poet is Patriciajj. 

It is a daunting everyday existence with traps all about while yet hanging on to the promise of beauty, good, and good returns. In many ways, as the poem aptly states: 'we may have to wait a bit until we begin again at the end of each turn.' Thanks so much for sharing.