The Greatest Grandeur, Pattiann Rogers

The Greatest Grandeur

 

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance 

of the purple-tongued sand goanna, 

for there the magnificent translation 

of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

 

And some declare it to be an expansive 

desert—solid rust-orange rock 

like dusk captured on earth in stone— 

simply for the perfect contrast it provides 

to the blue-grey ridge of rain 

in the distant hills.

 

Some claim the harmonics of shifting 

electron rings to be most rare and some 

the complex motion of seven sandpipers 

bisecting the arcs and pitches 

of come and retreat over the mounting 

hayfield.

 

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror 

of lightning peals on prairies or the tall 

collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas, 

because there they feel dwarfed 

and appropriately helpless; others select 

the serenity of that ceiling/cellar 

of stars they see at night on placid lakes, 

because there they feel assured 

and universally magnanimous.

 

But it is the dark emptiness contained 

in every next moment that seems to me 

the most singularly glorious gift, 

that void which one is free to fill 

with processions of men bearing burning 

cedar knots or with parades of blue horses, 

belled and ribboned and stepping sideways, 

with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies 

of black-robed choristers; to fill simply 

with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried 

crockery, tangerine and almond custards, 

polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing 

walls; that space large enough to hold all 

invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000 

definitions of god and more, never fully 

filled, never.

 

~ Pattiann Rogers ~

 

 

(Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems)