A Voyager Arrives

"A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory..."  – Czeslaw Milosz, from "This Only"









I had wondered how to write a poem of the prairie.
My goodness, all that has been done.
Reading Laforgue, old French Master, I see the strands to Whitman
and know how he would have excited.
I admire the catalogues.
I am completely jealous, to the tell the truth, of the robotic scientist,
who I presume shreds away the delusion of romance
down to the very fiber of the tracking roots.
You see there are so many problems with imitation.
It is a theme that very few come to understand.
In my own mind, it had become glass.
The prairie is viewed. Because it is beautiful
beyond what we normally see we find ways to witness.
I so desperately want to be it.
In underneath the big bluestem is sense the field mouse
scurry along the rigid stems of twenty species.
What is like under there? That, the scientist must contend.
I must say though it is not enough.
Emerson understood; Whitman threw it upon the wind.
I shouldn't be bothered with the love of the Transcendental,
as I, just another, walk along the hot paths
of this simple trail that meanders through a staged prairie
who considers already his lesson plan
for such and such a landscape.
I won't be bothered!
There are some things that I know, things I love,
and yet rarely tell others.
I love the radiant sense of pure sunheat on my body.
You want love to be a sly kiss or a tingle near the belly button.
I get my love from a fire bomb in the sky.
The dragonfly is a sphinx to me.
The dragonfly is the prism for the light of the sun.
The dragonfly is not thinking about me.
The dragonfly is scepter upon the phalanx of the ruins,
eyes of your god, not wings but tied
to the soft draping molecules of heat that love nothing.