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For a couple of years now, I: For a couple of years now, I have applauded each of Patricia's newly posted poems as events of high, even supreme, significance on PostPoems.  This new poem is also such an event; and the timing of it, immediately following Easter, makes it especially meaningful.     In my previous comments on my poems, I have emphasized the cosmic emphasis in her poems---the sense of the universe, represented by stars and planets and other extraterrestrial objects.  (The first two poems that introduced me to the brilliance of her poetic accomplishment were aptly entitled "Gates Of Orion" and "Council of Stars"---which I first read thirty-seven months ago.)  This particular poem begins bucolically---joining itself to a great, ancient tradition first presented by Theocritus, and brought to its epitome by Vergil's ten Eclogues.  Bucolic, or the so-called "pastoral" poetry (it was so designated when I took a course on it, during the Spring of 1977 . . . yes, I am ancient, too).  Bucolic or pastoral poetry provides a vision of the earth, not normally the stars.  But here, Patricia swerves the tradition (in the way that Vergil swerved it from Theocritus; and, yes, I am equating her action with Vergil's) and brings in the cosmic, in the first stanza, giving us a spectrum (always associated with light, and light is created by atomic fusion in stars' cores), a lattice of white, green and purple.  She uses purple to designate the soul of lilacs (which implies a huge metaphysical meaning which, strategically, she does not explicate, leaving it to the reader to deduce the significance), and the purple soul of the lilacs shouts to her that she can be filled with memories and power.  Here is another cosmic aspect that her poetic subtlety places before us for the taking (she reminds me of a phrase Jesus used---which I paraphrase here---whoever has ears to hear, let them here) if we but have the ears to hear it, or the eyes to read, really read, it, rather than just skimming it in a cursory way.  Memories and power:  these are component aspects of starlight.  All starlight, including our sun's, is an arrival from the past.  Even the sun's light is on a seven minute delay, and some stars' light, which we can gather in our telescopes' barrels, have taken centuries or millenia to arrive.  Thus, all starlight is, essentially, memory; and all starlight is generated by the enormous power released by atomic fusion.  So, in that single coy phrase, she has given us the essence of cosmic starlight, proclaimed by purple lilacs in their bucolic setting.    Then she gives us a process of becoming---false starts, wounds, and compressions of fears giving way to an essential state of being to which she assigns one of her most triumphant phrases:  ultimate beingness.  Let me state it again because its importance is paramount:  ULTIMATE BEINGNESS.  As I write this, I realize that this is not just the explication of a metaphysical principle . . . it is also both the explication of, and the supreme title of, her entire oeuvre.  When her poems are collected in a single volume, its title should be, Ultimate Beingness.  And I can already see the graduate students using that phrase in the titles of their dissertations on her work . . . and yes, there will be dissertations on her work.  I will likely not live to see them ,and I do not need to, because I have a privilege those future scholars will not have:  I am watching the whole oeuvre assembling itself before my very eyes.  And this, again, is another aspect of the memories and power, like starlight, that she mentioned earlier in the poem.  For future readers, her poems will be from the past---as starlight, even sunlight, is from some part of the past.  But those poems will also be manifestations of tremendous verbal power, as starlight is the manifestation of the tremendous power released through atomic fusion.        I admire Patricia's ability to convey profound metaphysical concepts in short lines that move with a light and sparkling buoyancy.  She choreographs the leap and soar of these lines to the rhythm of the profundities that her poems reveal.        The final eight lines are the poem's center of gravity.  She uses the metaphor of green leaves (a bucolic symbol) gathering stars (a cosmic symbol).  These are placed, in swarms, among tree branches.  At night, one can, with a little effort, see stars among the leaves on tree branches---it is an effect of a particular perspective.  It is also, within this poem, another example of the way she swerves the bucolic into the cosmic.  This may not seem, at the present moment, as important as it will, later, be proven to be; in the same way that Vergil's reconstruction of the Theocritan pastoral tradition was not immediately given significance by the initial readers of the Eclogues.  Having given us this resonant image, after reminding us that the center of our circle of existence, of that ultimate beingness (I cannot praise that phrase enough!), is, paradoxically, everywhere (paradoxes in Patricia's usage are not so much anomalizes as they are revelators of significances).  Then she concludes with two lines that are, gramatically, phrased in the present tense but are, poetically, bearers of the infinite and the timeless:  "We reach that far / and we're always home."  These two lines convey a confidence, an assurance, and a comfort that bypasses the ordinary act of reading and, instead, speaks directly and intimately to one's soul.  This is how her entire collection of poetry works; this is what that collection provides to her readers.  This process is present in all of the poems, but it most obviously demonstrated, and displayed, by the collection's centerpieces---of which this particular poem is proven to be one.