PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I sat beside your beautiful lake, letting my mind wander to those visited in my memory, 

and in my smile, I found the beauty in your words inviting me once again to my youth,

where " the unblinking water" held its mysteries in my own imagination. 

I thank you for such a wonderful gift, and for the peace I once found on that shore, alive again,

through your words, and talent. 

We share in our love of lakes and willows – and what lay above and below. Something magical therein dwells – to the woken eye. Be it night or day.

In this poem, the Poet follows the strategy of her great peer, Wallace Stevens, by locating two major concepts deep in the body of the text:  one in the middle, and one iat the conclusion.  This is exponentially Stevensian.  And these concepts dovetail into each other, so I am not sure where to begin.  She speaks of sky-love, which, when her poems are collected someday into a single, and hopefully annotated volume, might be either the title or the subtitle of the entire collection.  The sky is so many things:  it is our perspective of our space; our two closest astronomical objects, the sun and the moon, share it as a venue; the planets dance their wandering paths across the grandeur of the fixed stars that turn through it like a great adagio.  Sky-love is, in her usage of it, a Unified Field Theory which, as applied to her Poems, brings them all into a single array.  A UFT attempts to account for the function of all forces and elements within existence---and that, definitely, is what her Poetry does.  She also establishes what I might call a conservation of personality within the function of her UFT:  no one gets lost in it.  It is a shelter, a haven, and a venue---just like the sky is for the sun, moon, planets and stars.  See how these Poems of her works?  I want to paraphrase another interpretation of Stevens and, because I have been reading about Stevens since October 1978, I cannot, in my state of health and age, remember where all these ideas about his stuff come from.  So I will state this with the caveat that this is not my own understanding, I was taught this by one of Stevens' commentators:  and the gist of it was the enormous amount of control between Stevens' poems.  You can find contradictions in the poems of Eliot, Pound, even the great and magnificent Vergil.  But Stevens seems to avoid this; and Patricia does as well, and this is the literary aspect of how a UFT functions.  And in this poem she metaphorizes it as the sky.  And the sky is to be loved---as those of us who like to watch the stars love the sky for revealing them to us.

   She states that "the celestial is Earth / as it should be."  Here, her UFT shatters certain false distinctions that human beings, with their often limited perceptions, make for themselves and then very often impose upon their brethren.  We like dichotomies:  earth is "down here," and the sky is "up there."  There is a terrestrial and a celestial.  Yet we know that all things, including ourselves except our souls (which is God's breath within us) are made of hydrogen, which is as old as the earliest Cosmos, or elements fused from hydrogen in the cores of the stars.  Here, too, is a unified field that encompasses all sorts of existences.

  Her UFT also offers us the possibility of what the poem calls "dimensionless joy."  If something has dimensions, it also has limits; and she is speaking of a joy without limits, an infinity of joy, which is certainly the joy that God meant for us to experience.

    There is a lot going on in this poem, just as there is in the subsets and subroutines of a UFT.  You will need to read this poem at least twice, and likely more than twice, to hear all of the nuances and pick up all the phrases as the Poet meant them to be.  As I was reading, I thought of a metaphor . . . of the wildflower meadow that formed the westward half of my grandparents' property, just above the village of Germantown.  A small creeklet bisected the property north to south; and when you crossed the plank bridge over the creeklet, you enter the wildflower meadow.  At the height of summer, you would see or hear all sorts of activities going on, far more than you could take in during one visit.  This poem is like my grandparents' wildflower meadow.  It cannot be taken in on one visit; and it generously rewards subsequent visits.