Together, we sit quietly in the tall bowed hollow
Of a building that has translated sunlight
Into wood and warmth and protection,
And because the sun is still here, ambered
By the mellow devotion of human labor,
Our meditation swells up into the rafters —
So much aspiration and pain and piteous
Supplication now transfigured into something
Beyond ourselves, transfigured into unseen
Streamers of etheric light that swirl into orbs,
Which, like dew drops molding opals
On morning’s glass, grow larger, each one,
Until, one by one, they snap together,
Forming a lustrous pool. When we open
Our eyes, and look up, we can see that pool,
Our faces and bodies all suspended there,
As diaphanous imprints of hope and hurt and prayer.
Yet, after all, it is only an amber glow
Saturating the bent timbers of the rafters,
And to say that these meditations are enough
To transfigure their meditators is to speak too heavily,
Too obscurely about what is more potently expressed
By the soft luster of light on arching wood.

When the thrush quickly lights on and departs from
The plum branch, snow-pink plum blossoms
Detach themselves and breezily flutter down, down and down.
Like some beautiful, fluttering young woman’s lithesome laughter.
They write on the lime-green lichen of the tree trunk,
And upon the English ivy, and upon the cushions
Of moss that compose the territory, the mind,
Of the tree. They write certain phrases of joy and yearning
In the special language of blossoms. Please do try
To understand. The thrush, a singer,
But in this instance, no poet, is not the author
Of these phrases, nor is the tree, nor is the breeze, the sun is.
His polyglot pronouncements are as fluent
In Blossom as they are in Thrushsong or in Beehum,
Or as in the showery flutter of a young woman’s laughter,
And it is to his august sonorities that we
A-tune ourselves, even in so small and light
A thing as a plum petal. He is not loud, but he
Is mighty, and we, standing in the subtle blare
Of his golden presence, beneath the blossoming tree,
Hear that message from the motions of the stars,
In words as tiny as the tip of a finger and as large
As the blue pavilion of sweet heaven.