Earth Day

The gap widens and more slide into the divide
between this and that, between now and then,
blinded by the smallest of imperfections
as we go spinning off counting and hoarding
small grains and fractures of useless reflections.

We step slowly at first then begin running,
taking time only for the disregard of our memory,
and leave the chances to leap beyond the ground
for a later date in which there is time
and materials to build on that spot, once seen,
where the rainbow ends, where retirement begins,

before it is too late but before it is time
and then it is gone and on and on and on
to the next and better or worse and then forward
still to the horizon for a wider cut and deeper
rest and richer air and on and on
until the sun falls and we are all lost.



Poem: "Nostos," by Louise Glück, from Meadowlands (Harper Collins)

Nostos

There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.