- Faced with a wood—not an imposing wood or a grand wood, mostly oak, pine and maple,
- Simple trees, gray in the twilight beneath. A second growth on old farm land,
- Now reduced to the mere limits of a backyard, and the margin of sight from a patio,
- I am confronted with a realization just as prosaic—the commonness of my own life.
- There is beauty there if I bother to see, says the man wiser than me—that blow-fly
- Of thought, that mosquito of guilt—but you know that is not the point of my disillusion.
- Self-pity is not well served by reality. You know there is always something better,
- Or even worse to see. Indeed, they say, there is beauty almost everywhere you look,
- But that appreciation is not revelation. When I was young, I simply imagined more.
- What if I were blind? How would that change my equation? Or, if I were deaf,
- I couldn’t hear the owl or the crow. And if I were dead, there’d be nothing else to know.
- So, what’s to see? The matter is, I am yet again made aware of my own mediocrity.
- When I was young, I imagined more, believing my sight to be unique, not better
- So much as not the same, as if I could see what was not seen by others. But,
- Here I sit on a patio, unsatisfied with the limits of my perception, looking for doors
- Where trees now stand, unhappy with the depths of my insight, and the perceiving,
- But more, by my lack of understanding. A patio, by God! And the woods look back at me!
- As if I might be ready to grill perhaps, or poised to read a fat novel, or simply doze.
- With summer still present, but dulled by several million seconds, autumn hovers
- In leaves that have turned brown rather than to wait for a blaze of reds and yellows,
- Accent to the brown study of my self-regard. What use am I? What’s become of me?
- —Not that it matters, of course. But it should have! Once upon a time, it was going
- To matter! At least as much as my fathers mattered—and their fathers before. Instead,
- I am only second growth, here weeding old pastures once cleared for better purpose.