The morning stars are a torment,
if you thought long enough, and yet
how much more unsettling is the reason
you have gone to the window in the first place.
Look what they do to the landscape.
You can see them standing in that certain detail,
like a sun-lit field full of children
learning to dance. Each one shining just so.
Or like a set of distinctions
impossible to take in. So that the sky
expands outward, and each time
you almost lose yourself, thinking of water,
in all directions.
Up to a point you can only imagine them,
because the eye plays past
its own hysteria, which is the same thing
as saying to yourself: but think of the risk.
And we expect to live out these moments
to their end, to the point
of greatest intensity, except the fields are.
And the trees still arrive there before
us constructing, out of fragments, the way
it would feel: what tipped the weeds
that way beside the pond-edge;
why is that shadow shaped like a glove;
who stunned the cattle into motion …
Only this time it’s impossible,
so completely have I given up the idea
of the mountains’ isolation,
and my own, which is like applause beneath
those stars. And there is a woman
who resembles this landscape
though it never occurred to me until now,
her deepening meadow, the burdens of space,
or how I might say we finally met, stranded
in the grass, the last green thing in Iowa.
Still, what bothers me more
is the sudden concussion of the snow-line
where the semblance is unnatural, and asking
please—which makes me love it more
and where, you’ll say, no wonder the birds
flew away, and so on, assuming it’s that
other condition, the one I can never conceal,
the one you call wilderness, though it might be
anything. We’re in no danger. That much is like
a plane of sunlight shimmering on the horizon.
It’s just the possibility we’re giving in
-I don’t know how-to some exquisite emotion.
As if none of this really happened at all,
down to the last negligible star, or the low
sun shifting the fields, or the woman
receding into the trees—and why wasn’t she
more fully realized so close to the window?
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