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 permission of the author.
" ASTRONOMY CRISIS DEEPENS AS THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE SEEKS MISSING MASS "

I'd still put a question, Sirs —
by your leave — and this is it:
What happened to Gravity?
That is, did it just quit,
allowing the universe —
till then " the size of a pea "

and yet with the same mind-
numbing mass it has now —
to spring into such awful
and augmenting immensities? No.
All too often we find
it is still here — as Lawful

as bruised knees or harbor gulls
literally shelling your car
from an eighty-foot elevation
to crack their clams . . . . Quasar
to quahog, nothing annuls,
then, good-old " Conservation

Of Energy " — in this case
a self-strangling Inwardness,
a Fiat Nihil: " Let
Nothing Exist: No galaxies /
light / motion / time / space.
As it was, so be it. Stet ."

But — pardon my pushing this —
if light itself was dull
mass till the " Big Bang " , why
isn't that same mass you miss
just hitting you in the eye?