Adoration
The afternoon is beautiful and silent.
The white garage lifts like the cloudy pillar
Into the sunlight. The tree rears taller,
Its foliage rufled like a green swan's plumage,
A sudden bird goes skimming through the sky
As noiseless as a fish swims in the sea.
When everything is far and near at once,
Remote as memory and luminous as now,
Till mind is cut adrift and like a web
Shimmering rides the heat waves up and down.
Nothing is half so tenuous as flesh,
Which, on the lightest pretext, steals away
To sleep in the cocoon of summer heat and haze,
When a jay's scream might tumble the brick wall
Next door to slide into the forests of the grass,
The afternoon so beautiful and silent.
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Onions and Roses
Wesleyan University Press, 1968
