The forest's gloom has deepened now,
Its burnished bronze fast run to gray
Beneath the mighty cedar bough
Where veery song has passed away.
And soon Orion will once more
Kneel down at Eridanus' shore
And Phaeton's plight with tear endow
The passage into night from day.
Adrift in Mare Cognitum
I scarcely seem to feel the tide
Of all I found so wearisome
When I made pause to subdivide
And analyze the warp and woof
Of simple gifts beyond reproof
As harvest time's chrysanthemum
Amask in dew at morningtide.
If I ascend Olympus Mons
To meditate on twofold moons
Will tempest brewing in my pons
Be heightened by their perilunes,
Or are these twins the Gordian knot
That know but language polyglot,
The quintessential sine qua nons
Forever two, as they were hewn.
But forest gloom is home tonight
And there is mystery in the air
To beckon to the acolyte
In thrush's warbling solitaire.
If Euclid's postulates must bend
Then let me know the love unpenned
In language of the recondite
That is Orion's quiet prayer.
Cassie, this poem is a philosophical reflection that followed from reading Whitman's "The Learn'd Astronomer"; that poem raises the question of whether we wring the mystery and enchntment of the world from it by overanalysis, so I asked myself it it is even possible to think analytically about anything and, at the exact same moment, still have a pure 'experience' of it. I doubt that this is even possible, though that may simply be a reflection of my own mental limitations. Read the whitman poem, consider that premise, and then reread my little bit of verse. I recognize that this is a challenging poem, but it is also a deep question that it is asking. I don't wish to exclude anyone with a poem like this, only to encourage all who read it to think about things they might not otherwise have considered. My favorite writers do that for me... Cheers!
