Mythologizing the Garden

For all we have taken into our keeping
and polished with our hands belongs to a truth
greater than ours...
-William Stafford


So, the world happens twice--
once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is.
-William Stafford,
from "Bifocal"











Seeing and Perceiving

You learn to like the scene that everything
in passing loans to you--a crooked tree
syncopated upward branch by pre-
established branch, its pattern suddening
as you study it; or a piece of string
forwarding itself, that straight knot so free
you puzzle slowly at its form (you see
intricate but fail at simple); or a wing,
the lost birds trailing home.
These random pieces begin to dance at night
or when you look away. You cling to them
for form, the only way that it will come
to the fallible: little bits of light
reflected by the sympathy of sight.

-William Stafford

See, it's so lightly and rightly a sonnet.