from the meadow - peter everwine

It isn't that you were ignorant:
star thistle, bloodroot, cruciform...
beautiful words, then as now,
unlike pain with its wooden alphabet,
its many illustrations, which are redundant.

You had imagined vistas, an open meadow:
on the far side, water trembles its lights;
cattle come down to their shadow lives
beneath the trees;
the language of childhood is invented anew.

But now you know, right? what lies ahead
is nothing to the view behind?
How breathtaking these nostalgias rising
like hazy constellations overhead!--

little to go by, surely,
though from the meadow where you stand looking
over your shoulder, that tiny figure you see
seems to be calling someone,
you perhaps.

Everwine, Peter. "From the Meadow" The Pushcart Book of Poetry. Murray, Joan, ed. New York: Pushcart Press, 2006. 355.