POEM
A Clearing in the Woods
You have come into a clearing in the woods
and want to live your life out, here, alone,
joyous and remote among the catbirds
letting the light fall on you and the shade
in hourly changing angles as a grace
endlessly descending among tree limbs
while growing in you is the will to grow
mindless of the niggling everyday
profusion of detail by which you know
uselessly the names and dates and shape of things.
After a while, you will begin to sing.
Harmless and plentiful you make the sounds.
Bent on nothing that does not bend with ease
you and your song rise in the leafy air
chancy as bass spawn in a mallard’s underwings.
Thomas Lynch, “A Clearing in the Woods” from Skating With Heather Grace. Copyright © 1986 by Thomas Lynch. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Source: Skating with Heather Grace (1986)
