Stanley Kunitz

I used to imagine him

coming from the house, like Merlin

strolling with important gestures

through the garden

where everything grows so thickly,

where birds sing, little snakes lie

on the boughs, thinking of nothing

but their own good lives,

where petals float upward,

their colors exploding

and trees open their moist

pages of thunder—

it has happened every summer for years.

But now I know more

about the great wheel of growth

and decay and rebirth,

and know my vision for a falsehood.

Now I see him coming from the house—

I see him on his knees,

cutting away the diseased, the superfluous

coaxing the new,

knowing that the hour of fulfillment

is buried in years of patience—

yet willing to labor like that

on the mortal wheel.

Oh what good it does the heart

to know it isn’t magic!

Like the human child I am

I rush to imitate—

I watch him as he bends

among the leaves and vines

to hook some weed or other;

even when I do not see him,

I think of him there

raking and trimming, stirring up

those sheets of fire

between the smothering weights of earth,

the wild and shapeless air.

Mary Oliver

from Dreamwork (1986)