[A. E. Stallings]

Wilbur, I know, has been discussed on this board before, but as he's a favorite of many here, no reason not to have an encore. The Dickinson thread was taking a turn in his direction.

This is a poem I've referred many people to who were trying to use haikus as a stanza form on the Met. boards. The rimes pull the syllabics together beautifully. The feel is at once formal and organic. And the poem, like many of Wilbur's, moves effortlessly (or so it seems--that's the trick), between the closely-observed particulars of real objects and the metaphysical.


Thyme Flowering among Rocks

This, if Japanese,
Would represent grey boulders
Walloped by rough seas

So that, here or there,
The balked water tossed its froth
Straight into the air.

Here, where things are what
They are, it is thyme blooming,
Rocks, and nothing but--

Having, nonetheless,
Many small leaves implicit,
A green countlessness.

Crouching down, peering
Into perplexed recesses,
You find a clearing

Occupied by sun
Where, along prone, rachitic
Branches, one by one,

Pale stems arise, squared
In the manner of Mentha,
The oblong leaves paired.

One branch, in ending,
Lifts a little and begets
A straight-ascending

Spike, whorled with fine blue
Or purple trumpets, banked in
The leaf-axils. You

Are lost now in dense
Fact, fact which one might have thought
Hidden from the sense,

Blinking at detail
Peppery as this fragrance,
Lost to proper scale

As, in the motion
Of striped fins, a bathysphere
Forgets the ocean.

It makes the craned head
Spin. Unfathomed thyme! The world's
A dream, Basho said,

Not because that dream's
A falsehood, but because it's
Truer than it seems.

[Tim Murphy]

So far as I know, Wilbur invented this ABA haiku stanza form, and he has used it to good effect many times in poems like this, Zea, Alatus, etc., all of which show off his prodigious knowledge of botany. My favorite of the botanicals though is Fern-Beds in Hampshire County, which he had reservations about publishing because of its heterometricity:

Although from them
Steep stands of beech and sugar-maple stem,
Varied with birch, or ash, or basswood trees
Which spring will throng with bees,
While intervening thickets grow complex
With flower, seed, and variance of sex,
And the whole wood conspires, by change of kind,
To break the purchase of the gathering mind,
The ferns are as they were.
Let but a trifling stir
Of air traverse their pools or touchy beds
And some will dip their heads,
Some switch a moment like a scribbling quill
And then be still,
Sporadic as in guarded bays
The rockweed slaps a bit, or sways,
Then let the wind grow bluff, and though
The sea lies far to eastward, far below,
These fluent spines, with whipped pale underside,
Will climb through timber as a smoking tide
Through pier-stakes, beat their sprays about the base
Of every boulder, scale its creviced face
And, wave on wave, like some green infantry,
Storm all the slope as high as eye can see.
Whatever at the heart
Of creatures makes them branch and burst apart,
Or at the core of star or tree may burn
At last to turn
And make an end of time,
These airy plants, tenacious of their prime,
Dwell in the swept recurrence of
An ancient conquest, shaken by first love
As when they answered to the boomed command
That the sea's green rise up and take the land.

Far from a demerit, I think these couplets, consisting as they do of every length from dimeter to pentameter, are absolutely masterful. Finally, I find the reconciliation of evolution and Genesis to be pretty majestic.