I used to imagine him <br />coming from his house, like Merlin <br />strolling with important gestures <br />through the garden <br />where everything grows so thickly, <br />where birds sing, little snakes lie <br />on the boughs, thinking of nothing <br />but their own good lives, <br />where petals float upward, <br />their colors exploding, <br />and trees open their moist <br />pages of thunder - <br />it has happened every summer for years. <br /> <br />But now I know more <br />about the great wheel of growth, <br />and decay, and rebirth, <br />and know my vision for a falsehood. <br />Now I see him coming from the house - <br />I see him on his knees, <br />cutting away the diseased, the superfluous, <br />coaxing the new, <br />know that the hour of fulfillment <br />is buried in years of patience - <br />yet willing to labor like that <br />on the mortal wheel. <br /> <br />Oh, what good it does the heart <br />to know it isn’t magic! <br />Like the human child I am <br />I rush to imitate - <br />I watch him as he bends <br />among the leaves and vines <br />to hook some weed or other; <br />I think of him there <br />raking and trimming, stirring up <br />those sheets of fire <br />between the smothering weights of earth, <br />the wild and shapeless air.<br /><br />Mary Oliver<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/stanley-kunitz/
