'HALF ASLEEP ON THE COLD GRASS'

“Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful/ thing in the world,” writes George Oppen in his serial poem “Route.” In the eleven lines below, Gary Snyder achieves as clear and beautiful a verbal image as Oppen would want. Writing from my hot Manhattan apartment during a pandemic, I want to drowze on the cold grass beneath the perfect darkness of the damp maples. The opening lines of “Stone Girl at Sanchi,” they are all that’s needed, since the poem merely meanders from there. They are enough.

half asleep on the cold grass
night rain flicking the maples
under a black bowl upside-down
on a flat land
on a wobbling speck
smaller than stars,
space,
the size of a seed,
hollow as bird skulls.
light flies across it
–never is seen.

—Gary Snyder

from "Stone Girl at Sanchi," published in The Back Country