Home > Poetry Magazine > The Origin of Order

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

The Origin of Order

By Pattiann Rogers b. 1940 Pattiann Rogers

Stellar dust has settled.

It is green underwater now in the leaves

Of the yellow crowfoot. Its vacancies are gathered together

Under pine litter as emerging flower of the pink arbutus.

It has gained the power to make itself again

In the bone-filled egg of osprey and teal.

One could say this toothpick grasshopper

Is a cloud of decayed nebula congealed and perching

On his female mating. The tortoise beetle,

Leaving the stripped veins of morning glory vines

Like licked bones, is a straw-colored swirl

Of clever gases.

At this moment there are dead stars seeing

Themselves as marsh and forest in the eyes

Of muskrat and shrew, disintegrated suns

Making songs all night long in the throats

Of crawfish frogs, in the rubbings and gratings

Of the red-legged locust. There are spirits of orbiting

Rock in the shells of pointed winkles

And apple snails, ghosts of extinct comets caught

In the leap of darting hare and bobcat, revolutions

Of rushing stone contained in the sound of these words.

The paths of the Pleiades and Coma clusters

Have been compelled to mathematics by the mind

Contemplating the nature of itself

In the motions of stars. The patterns

Of any starry summer night might be identical

To the summer heavens circling inside the skull.

I can feel time speeding now in all directions

Deeper and deeper into the black oblivion

Of the electrons directly behind my eyes.

Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind

Has been obligated from the beginning

To create an ordered universe

As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.

Pattiann Rogers, “The Origin of Order” from Firekeeper: Selected Poems. Copyright © 2003 by Pattiann Rogers. Reprinted with the permission of Milkweed Editions, www.milkweed.org.

Source: Poetry (December 1982).

Biography

Pattiann Rogers was born in Joplin, Missouri. She attended the University of Missouri, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and went to the University of Houston where she earned an M.A. in creative writing. Her awards and honors also include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, Poetry’s Tietjens and Bess Hokin Prizes, the Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the Strousse Award . . .

Continue reading this biography