Snow Spinney

It’s not only the pathos
Of lost wonders festooning

Fragments, ruins, translations,
And wreckage—the eroded

Has a beauty of its own
Beyond the original

Which was never, after all,
Completely original.

You could say a child can see
That glass and driftwood sculptures

Were created by those waves
That tumbled so much away.

The child’s delight in the find
Is for the weirdness of it,

And isn’t melancholy
For what was taken from it.

The barrenness of fragments,
Translations stripped of rhythms,

Ruins sunk without contexts,
Are plain lovely because strange,

Reduced, with no clear function.
Trash would be, will be, the same,

Except that, when waste is young,
We recognize the purpose

It recently served—we see
How out of place it appears,

Like this crushed plastic bottle
With its half-attached label

Emerging from the straw damp
In mud and last winter’s snow

At the base of this spinney
Of dwarf willow by a tarn

With hidden thrushes singing.
Yes, it’s a hideous corpse

For now, like all cultured waste.
So much work went into it.

So much time will whittle it,
Carve some beauty into it.

No, you won’t live to see it.
But souls who were horrified

Enough by erotic poems
And images to burn them,

And later poets who ached
For the loss of those verses

Were equally capable
Of gliding their palms along

Smooth white stones from these mountains,
Bones exposed by translation.