Narcissus Walking

for Donald Petersen at Yaddo and
in memory of Phyllis Reid

The room is open. The shape of the room spreads
The space outward, wide. The walls carry the space,
Not close it, and the space shifts as he moves, gradually
Taking change and shape in the room where he is
Always alone. The windows open outward
Into the air outside and the encompassing green.
Standing, he watches the slanting rain. He hears
The rain splash over stones. When the rain stops
Later in the morning, he walks around the estate.
Rain still hangs in a sky as gray as stone.
Silent in wet sneakers, he walks down the edge
Of the grassy lawn, and takes the public way
To the rose garden, where the petals waft
The softest odors to him, the softest colors.
On the stone path he walks among the statues
And the stone benches, among stone columns, alone.
Then he walks through higher grass to the stones piled
Unshaped by men, moss covered, in a pool,
And receives into himself the stillness of stone
And water, in the midst of grass and moss.
Later, as he moves along the road
Into the open woodland, he is encompassed
By evergreen, by cedar, oak, and locust,
By arbor vitae, elm, white birch, and pine,
Their shapes and their substantial shadows. He walks.
Mushrooms grow in the moss, and on wet stumps
Fungus. Ferns brush across his legs
As he leaves the road. Mud sticks to his sneakers.
His eyes are open to the brown light of the slopes,
And he turns it inward. He sees the horsetail shoots
By the quiet lake, and he remembers beginnings.
He listens to the deep stillness of water.
He hears the distant stream rabbling over the rocks.
In the cold air his breath is moist. Is he
Alone here, at the center, held by the hard need
To know his own substantial form in stone?
He listens: No one calls or follows him.
He leans down and sloshes his hands in the lake
To move somehow into these outward shapes
Before he passes over the bridge and back,
Gradually, up the stone steps overhung with hemlock
To his own room, and to the open, the encompassing green.

Yet he seems, even to himself, to dissolve without words
In the shapes he moves among, the open spaces.

He is not here for long, but for long enough.

　

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