Poem ---- Jerry Austin

Within And Beyond

Ten acres to explore--my grandfather's land.

Ten more--my Uncle Ernie's adjacent land.

How can one's mind narrow while roaming

twenty acres of forest and fields, like

watching the night sky fill with its lights?

How when watching an Alligator Lizard

spiral audibly down a cedar stump the summer

has dried? I celebrated the tanager colors

of June, and wanted to retain

their fervid dance, their motions near the trunks.

Always I have longed for their river of flight

and the light-filled leaves stranding down

from the alders, the big alders, and the rare birch.

Now other lessons abound. It is as if, as one looks back

on one's life, that river of high mountains

in its descent, and revisits mistakes

one would give years of life to alter,

so it is that we look at our life from outside

our life, and find lessons as if for another's

life--a continuation of our own, or

a psyche wholly other, that differs as birch

from stone, or mountain from dream, or

time from time in another place. But the lesson

learned remains, a permanence of information.

Always I have sought the glacier beauty

because I have seen the glacier; and the rural

cicada because I'd heard its song, and the horse

snorting as he steps to the fence to take

the apple from my hand. There is a reaching

out, a desperate need to reach out from within--

one's own mind seeks it and has always sought it

though it lay hidden like the shadows of a barn

or the long shadow of a mountain.

Jerry Austin / 5 May 2015