The indomitable world transcends us, yes.
Yet, moments of pivotal clarity arise:
the exile of Sappho, Siddhartha touches
the Earth, Dante desires Beatrice—each is
the sap’s oozing in the wound of the tree
setting in time to amber. Similar mysteries
ascend these walls with the twice-
blooming wisteria—tendril tanglements
fill the air with a temporal fragrance.
The sureness of each thought is the constant
water sound that slides or breaks on stones.
When a sudden snapping passes, hidden
in the blur of the rock dove’s wings,
it brings thick tears of sudden distances.
The amplitude of mere experience
draws me here, to see the willow
turning, turning with such grace
that I remember what is meant by grace.
Footnote
This poem is more than 20 years old. I was living in Baltimore, in my last semester of MFA work in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. I took a trip to New York with a fellow poet to visit the Guggenheim, where there was an exhibit of Chinese scroll paintings—long cases of ancient ink and paper unrolled in that roll of a building. I looked down at one of them, a mountain scene, a stream, and a single figure seated in the grasses by an arching pine. The description card said, “The Garden of Perfect Contemplation.” I wrote the first version of this poem when I got back to Baltimore. And even though I’d been writing poetry since I was a child, and I’d finished the collection that I’d present as my thesis, I consider it to be the first real poem I’d written. I’ve revised it many, many times since and will probably continue to revise it, even though its ekprhastic inspiration is long gone and I can find no trace of it.
I also learned on that trip that common street pigeons—beauties with infinite variations—are actually named “rock doves.”
The Last Line 
One response to “In the Garden of Perfect Contemplation”
Isn’t it nice to revisit our younger selves, and discover we weren’t complete fools? This is a lovely poem. How wonderful you have it as a continuing touchstone for your life, a way to acknowledge the passage of time- different from a calendar, much more meaningful. Jude
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