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The Authority of Dream said take
one final look, and so, awake,
I run with the fury of grace
down to the wind and water
where the meek green-headed ducks
sail off onto the far fog-shrouded lakes,
where the great blues stilt
in the ink-shadows of calligraphy.
And blown in the tempest of the dream,
I make final pilgrimage to the vast heronries
of heaven, their great nests clotted high
in the dead, swamp-drowned cypresses
of the estuaries, the waste-wets,
riverine salt-fields where the tears
of God fall into his old creation crumbling
like glacial till at the horizon
of the up-rolling world. I run west
away from the chaos of the world's
reworking into the wind-blown switchgrass,
into the milfoil fields, low sun in my eyes,
late day colors mixing with indigo
of the failing final night.
I pray for another ark to come
for this failed trial world, to salvage
all its intricate work of innocence--
the robed heron, the firegreen duck,
the waving grass, the proud dead tree,
all made to flee the rolling up
of day and night.
For no other world has taken us
like a mother into its meadows
where the sweet strong yeast of love
once dusted down on it until
the heavenly contagion took and spread,
and all things came awake and grew.
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