A Hint to Plotinus
        It is because things are the way they are that they are good.

She suffers the least gesture of the oldest tree,
Its latest infant. Too, she is breath to me,
And like the saints whom we've refused,
She comprehends the inward of breath:
A world of shining grass and free animals.

You've seen her. The underside of a leaf
Catching the light of your birthday in—
What was it? A gust of wind? A grimace
Of your angel?—featured exactly
As she was: a soft vertex of grey on green.

The wrist of the afterlife curls around
A stem. Immortality comes first
If ever it comes afterwards. Suffer
The rebuke and move on, which is to say
Upwards into the sainted, oldest tree.

At great heights, oblivion
Mimics creation. Disguised as clouds
And flecks of wingspan as once Constable
Hurried them onto the face of clouds,
Pre-existence covers the whole earth,

Pillared by trees. Little bubble of breath,
Little hazelnut of lungs, I nearly fail
To feel the sharp reproach in you, so dearly
Do I love the infant of reproach.
Her delay, her light foot at the edge of life

Is shelter to me, all animals
Climbing into the architecture
Even time must recognize as Time itself.
The saints are in hysterics. Oblivion
Mimics creation, and we are free to begin.

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Copyright © 2019 Donald Revell All rights reserved
from The Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission