A Grain of Mustard Seed Read Online Free Page B

maintained
    Against those terrible antagonists—
    How many from this quiet room have drowned?
    How many left to go, drunk on the wind,
    And take their ships into heartbreaking seas;
    How many whom no woman’s peace could bind?
    Bent to her sewing, she looks drenched in calm.
    Raw grief is disciplined to the fine thread.
    But in her heart this woman is the storm;
    Alive, deep in herself, holds wind and rain,
    Remaking chaos into an intimate order
    Where sometimes light flows through a windowpane.

A Vision of Holland
    The marriage of this horizontal land
    Lying so low, so open and exposed,
    Flat as an open palm, and never closed
    To restless storm and the relentless wind,
    This marriage of low land and towering air—
    It took my breath away. I am still crazed
    Here a month later, in my uplands, dazed
    By so much light, so close to despair.
    Infinite vertical! Who climbs to Heaven?
    Who can assault the cloud’s shimmering peak?
    Here the intangible is the mystique,
    No rock to conquer and no magic mountain,
    Only the horizontal infinite
    Stretched there below to polarize
    The rush of height itself, where this land lies
    Immense and still, covered by changing light.
    Those troubling clouds pour through the mind.
    An earthquake of pure atmosphere
    Cracks open every elemental fear.
    The light is passionate, but not defined.
    So we are racked as by a psychic fault,
    Stormed and illuminated. “Oh sky, sky,
    Earth, earth, and nothing else,” we cry,
    Knowing once more how absolutes exalt.
    Slowly the eye comes back again to rest
    There on a house, canal, cows in a field.
    The visionary moment has to yield,
    But the defining eye is newly blest.
    Come back from that cracked-open psychic place,
    It is alive to wonders freshly seen:
    After the earthquake, gentle pastures green,
    And that great miracle, a human face.

Bears and Waterfalls
    Kind kinderpark
    For bear buffoons
    And fluid graces—
    Who dreamed this lark
    Of spouts, lagoons,
    And huge fur faces?
    For bears designed
    Small nooks, great crags,
    And Gothic mountains?
    For bears refined
    Delightful snags,
    Waterfalls, fountains?
    Who had the wit to root
    A forked tree where a sack
    Of honey plumps on end,
    A rich-bottomed fruit
    To rouse a hearty whack
    From passing friend?
    Who ever did imagine
    A waterspout as stool,
    Or was black bear the wiser
    Who sat down on this engine
    To keep a vast rump cool,
    Then, cooled, set free a geyser?
    Who dreamed a great brown queen
    Sleeked down in her rough silk
    Flirting with her huge lord,
    Breast-high in her tureen?—
    “Splash me, delightful hulk!”
    So happy and absurd.
    Bear upside-down, white splendor,
    All creamy, foaming fur,
    And childhood’s rug come true,
    All nonchalance and candor,
    Black pads your signature—
    Who, above all, dreamed you?
    When natural and formal
    Are seen to mate so well,
    Where bears and fountains play,
    Who would return to normal?
    Go back to human Hell?
    Not I. I mean to stay,
    To hold this happy chance
    Forever in the mind,
    To be where waters fall
    And archetypes still dance,
    As they were once designed
    In Eden for us all.

A Parrot
    My parrot is emerald green,
    His tail feathers, marine.
    He bears an orange half-moon
    Over his ivory beak.
    He must be believed to be seen,
    This bird from a Rousseau wood.
    When the urge is on him to speak,
    He becomes too true to be good.
    He uses his beak like a hook
    To lift himself up with or break
    Open a sunflower seed,
    And his eye, in a bold white ring,
    Has a lapidary look.
    What a most astonishing bird,
    Whose voice when he chooses to sing
    Must be believed to be heard.
    That stuttered staccato scream
    Must be believed not to seem
    The shriek of a witch in the room.
    But he murmurs some muffled words
    (Like someone who talks through a dream)
    When he sits in the window and sees
    The to-and-fro wings of wild birds
    In the leafless improbable trees.

Frogs and Photographers
    The temperamental frog,
    A loving expert says,
    Exhibits stimulation
    By rolling