Another Marriage

What is there in the landscape’s whorl,
The fingerprint of dirt, that
Strikes the eye, a distant girl
Who, no matter what

Ways and means the mind
Might take, blown along
Whole avenues of wind,
No other face, no meadow wrung

From vision’s atavistic trance
Displaces this one lay of land
And lake, or jams the homing dance
Of face and curl, so that a bird can

Find, hidden in a rural
Oyster bed, one specific pearl?

November 22nd, 1986