Published online at poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/24549: The Origin of Order BY 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, milkweed.org.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 06:07:38 +0000
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