the day turns, the trees move.

II.

I go from the woods into the cleared field:

A place no human made, a place unmade

By human greed, and to be made again.

Where centuries of leaves once built by dying

A deathless potency of light and stone

And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless

Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain,

The growth of fifty thousand years undone

In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock

And clay – a ‘new land’, truly, that no race

Was ever native to, but hungry mice

And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns

And thistles sent by generosity

Of new beginning. No Eden, this was

A garden once, a good and perfect gift;

Its possible abundance stood in it

As it then stood. But now what it might be

Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives –

Thousands of years to make it what it was,

Beginning now, in our few troubled days.

III.

In a crease of the hill

under the light,

out of the wind,

as warmth, bloom and song

return, lady, I think of you,

and of myself with you.

What are we but forms

of the self-acknowledging

light that brings us

warmth and song from time

to time? Lip and flower,

hand and leaf, tongue

and song, what are we but welcomers

of that ancient joy, always

coming, always passing?

Mayapples rising

out of old time, leaves

folded down around

the stems, as if for flight,

flower bud folded in

unfolding leaves, what

are we but hosts

of times, of all

the Sabbath morning shows,

the light that finds it good.

IV.

The year relents, and free

Of work, I climb again

To where the old trees wait,

Time out of mind. I hear

Traffic down on the road,

Engines high overhead.

And then a quiet comes,

A cleft in time, silence

Of metal moved by fire;

The air holds little voices

Titmice and chickadees,

Feeding through the treetops

Among the new small leaves,

Calling again to mind

The grace of circumstance,

Sabbath economy

In which all thought is song,

All labor is a dance.

The world is made at rest,

In ease of gravity.

I hear the ancient theme

In low world-shaping song

Sung by the falling stream.

Here where a rotting log

Has slowed the flow: a shelf

Of dark soil, level laid

Above the tumbled stone.

Roots fasten it in place.

It will be here a while;

What holds it here decays.

A richness from above,

Brought down, is held, and holds

A little while in flow.

Stem and leaf grow from it.

At cost of death, it has

A life. Thus falling founds,

Unmaking makes the world.

V.

Over the river in loud flood

in the wind deep and broad

under the unending sky, pair

by pair, the swallows again,

with tender exactitude,

play out their line

in arcs laid on the air,

as soon as made, not there.

VI.