Even staring out the window is changed,
the private peak above it all brought down
with the erosion of the poise between
the viewable and the mused unseen.
Dissolution so nearly changeless as not
to appear is shifting the sands inside
from what we watched, no more the steady stage
the self-dramatic days play out on outside.
The silent portent now allowed alert
to things changing the light
a darkness
not the normal individual
mortality, but as if the epochal
heartbeat of larger elements, the seas,
the air, had mutated, become chimera,
grown wing, and routed ancestral time.
Even staring out the window, the timeless
is gone. We see coming
in the daily migration of the local geese
to the lake at evening the cities pull up
and move in unlike consternation towards and
away from the water
that had been so calming to gaze out on,
to live by, easy to not live according to.
And now that seas are adding themselves
into the land, horizons look ominously larger,
the arrivant out of them, faster and clearer.
Now, you see the view is turned on us to frame
human agency become transparent,
light as air, before the picture blackens
as a consequence of our seeing too much
of it as only for us to use and then
use up.
The eye is not filled with seeing, with only
seeing, but with understanding the sight.
Ed Roberson, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a contemporary poet interested in the environment, visuality, and spirituality. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including MPH + Other Road Poems (2021), the chapbook Closest Pronunciation (2013), To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2010), which was a runner up for the Los Angeles Times Poetry Award, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (2009), City Eclogue (2006), and Atmosphere Conditions (1999), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series, and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and Northwestern University.
