Morning

[rejectomorph]

As the sky begins to pale, the gauze of cloud which has dimmed or obscured most of the stars all night is revealed. Something is causing several distant dogs to bark. I hear one, then another, then a third, as though they were having a conversation. I've been hearing other sounds. Odd flutterings, as of wings, but too close to the ground. Twigs cracking. A soft whooping sound, perhaps from some bird perched somewhere in the forest. Mostly, I have heard the sprinklers in the orchard, sending their artificial rain over the ripening apples. The click of their turning mechanisms reminds me of woodpeckers drilling into bark. Even the thing I know, and know the reason of, becomes mystery in the dark. All I have not seen will vanish or appear once night is lifted. The familiar will be restored, un-changed.

Still reading Levertov--

A Figure of Time

by Denise Levertov


Old Day the gardener seemed
Death himself, or Time, scythe in hand

by the sundial and freshly-dug
grave in my book of parables.

The mignonette, the dusty miller and silvery
rocks in the garden next door

thrived in his care (the rocks
not hidden by weeds but clear-

cut between tufts
of fern and saxifrage). Now

by our peartree with pruning-hook,
now digging the Burnes's neat, weedless

rosebeds, or as he peered
at a bird in Mrs Peach's laburnum,

his tall stooped person appeared, and gray
curls. He worked

slow and in silence, and knew perhaps
every garden around the block, gardens

we never saw, each one,
bounded by walls of old brick,

a square plot that was
world to itself.

When I was grown
and gone from home he remembered me

in the time of my growing, and sent,
year by year, salutations,

until there was no one there, in
changed times, to send them by. Old Day,

old Death, dusty
gardener, are you

alive yet, do I live on
yet, in your gray

considering eye?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~