By Joshua Lickteig | Contributing Writer
All that is lush and nourishing in nature
Sacred recitatives in the evening’s chorales,
Attention in a journey of life.
The ordinary speech of some memory offers in its
Patterns different choices, careful where order itself
Is an entanglement. May we really guess
How its rhythm is being expected?
The red breasted finch quizzes an aphid:
On a plinth this tenor sings each day mythic glory,
Arrives as if opening the twelve minute tune to Sunny
Rollins’ “What’s New?” – And mid
Any passion’s ghost reconstructing yesterday
With spirit plumb, also this day examines in glimpses
The neighborhood newspaper’s flaps in breezy gusts
From the open doors south and west in the garage,
On a found trapezium that will become a table, or desk.
Our narrator whose responsibility may also be as audient,
Before planning an additional central chorus for later in the day
Recalls last night in another part of town a harpsichord’s string,
Just before the concert, snapped with an edgeless twang.
Of sudden blur many purple lupines beside the road, mullein reaching skyward
And transport to a rumination weeks earlier on Mount Rainier
Adjacent the trail to Panorama Point over a glacial stream. By its waterfall
Quite windy. Marmots scurrying, collecting, and grazing.
There are painted paper cylinder lampshades inside the old park lodge below
Of 64 alpine flowers. A steeply pitched roof with exposed Alaska cedar
Log framing red huckleberry and salal above the fifty foot fireplace of
The building’s west. From avalanche lily to marsh marigold,
Shrubby cinquefoil, trillium, mountain ash . . .
Resuming the aria, flute and oboes seem to join the finch
Just as Bach might have borrowed
In gospel settings from other composers. Nearby
Mending of clothespins mid-wire in the gleam
Of August, a handkerchief flies away, finds respite
Draped over jade. Our attention selects what kind of light
In the undulations of the mind?
At times it commends pathways with
Fullness to harmony and balance
As if all at once seen
On a slow morning, opening timeworn books.
Some slide like a juniper wood barn door
And bow to the heat.