G. W. George
Aroostook
On First Looking Into Grennan’s Physics
Aesthetics
The Church
Aroostook
Winter covers the huge fields
with glistening white snow.
Summer covers the huge fields
with new plants’ white flowers.
Such beauty it takes to grow
Potatoes!
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On First Looking Into Grennan’s Physics
. . . miming the way matter itself
might be: restless specks
of luminous wounded music
in this enchanted void.
—Eamon Grennan, “Shepherd to the Wind”
Even ten seminars
of starving graduate students
or a hothouse of literature professors
in the full flush of tenure fever
could not deconstruct
the discourse of that,
while over in the physics department
they would simply say,
“Nope—we stuck this ‘matter’
into the cyclotron, bombarded it
with gamma-bamma waves,
dunked it into serial emulsions,
and left it a Bunsen-burned crisp,
from which we can tell you
that ‘restless’ might apply,
but there’s nothing ‘luminous,’
‘wounded,’ or ‘musical’ about
anything in the subatomic lot,
and the void in which invisible
smidgens of grit called ‘matter’
chase themselves is totally
unenchanted.”
Nonetheless, when those lines of the poet
on first reading instantly broke
unimpeded and unscathed right through
all the enfiladed fire of my stickling mind’s
star forts, something
in the castle keep of me said—
“Yes! That description’s just right!”
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Aesthetics
Which moves us most in winter?
The serenity of falling snow?
The whiteness of surrounding hills?
The glistening of frozen water?
Perhaps one should admire most
the endurance of the evergreens
bearing tiny flake upon flake.
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The Church
In New England style,
it beatifies the hill,
drawing to a point
the little scattered town.
The weary graves behind
—memory’s pottery—
reveal upon their stones
weathered names and dates
of consecrated bones.
The living love the steeple
and the gothic window panes,
unstained, the glass left clear
to let the sun burst in
like armed and flaming angels,
moving us not because
we may find heaven from here,
but because such gloriousness
makes “here” ethereal.
The lower half of the church
has been repainted white;
the clock has been repaired,
but the steeple, unrestored,
will someday tumble down;
to what, then, one must wonder,
as each day we go from street
to street and hope to hope,
will our dark eyes look up?
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