Quiet

I'm having trouble sitting still. There are -- let me count them -- seven windows open in my browser right now, one unfinished email waiting (five if you count the ones I'm intending to write, but havent started), and (if we might go outside my computer screen for a moment) two open books and a magazine perched on the armrest next to me. I can't concentrate on any of them, but I can't put any of them away, either. I'm just too restless, too unsettled, and I can't let them go.

So, here's a poem to quiet me down:



In the Garden, by Anne Pierson Wiese


On the edge of the pond a great white
egret catches catches five-inch fish, it's trick neck
now a bone-china handle just thick
enough to curve without cracking -- sleight

of spine and cup -- now a javelin in flight
traveling with frugal grace: quickness
made slow by the instinct that missing
what's aimed for's what comes of haste, or eyes

too big for your stomach. Among the weeds' dead
shoots giant carp feed--a tea party of stiff-
tongued brutes sipping algaed shadows, exempt
by size from a predator whose slight kisses
yield up what's small enough to swallow instead
of choking alone on a single wish.