quare id faciam?

Looking north

 
Burden
 
I called you because I could not stand alone
looking north to that skyline-
tree globed with its yellow apples
balancing like a fountain of planets
in the bright light and the blue air.
 
And because on the way there
I looked at a smooth cirque
the brook had worn in a stone;
and nothing as soft as water
could, by taking care,
have so pestled and polished
that granite mortar; only
by a thousand years of indifference,
of aiming elsewhere.
 
I wish we might do – or no,
look back and find we had done –
some un-advertized thing,
overwhelming and un-self-aware
as water streamlining a stone, or a tree's
kindling in an empty meadow
its casual Hesperides.
 
 
by Peter Kane Dufault, 1978

 
With Julia in mind – who herself knows from experience, it might be said, about being a thing exposed balancing like a fountain of planets/ in the bright light and the blue air – and in that, perhaps, knows more than she knows she knows about Grace.

posted by paul bowman @ 6:15 PM