MUSINGS #60 - Two Poems in SNOWY EGRET

THE ARCHITECTURE OF PLACE

at Delphi 2010

We are part of it –

at break of day, we dwell in certain ruin.

Sunlight shafts between stone.

Spired cypress, goddess-sacred,

stand as shadow to columns

cut from the mottled granite mountain.

From these heights, we look down

upon a river, lined with olive groves,

snaking its way to the Gulf of Corinth.

One bird is singing its heart out

from the top of Apollo’s temple.

In the otherwise silence,

we ask the Oracle why all this

– the sun’s rising, lost glory, the beauty of relic –

matters so to us.

In a pungent trance, she does not answer.

Yet the riddled thought comes to us –

all the small green hopes

seeded in feathered droppings

take root and reach,

fracture the face of things.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

What was trail disappears among rock and slide.

Unable to see what lies ahead,

I search for sure footing – no blue diamond

mark on bark, no cairn or arrow. Venture

into the unknown, full of trepidation –

all I know is to keep going. Reaching

the summit, then descending,

I can see a far way down. The trail

now obvious as yellow bricks,

dropped bread crumbs, a puma’s spoor.

Not because I’d passed this way

before – no, nothing,

no stone turned or branch broken,

looks familiar. Of course,

the trail is more visible, peering

down from a higher vantage.

But in this sudden seeing, it’s as if

the chronology of unfolding matters –

the random twists and turns

take on the look of cause and effect,

form a pattern – like a child’s

connect-the-dots drawing,

the moral of a fable – laid out

behind and before me all along.