Lines Written Outside Front Royal
On the blue side of twilight, an immediate
lucidity reveals the full continua of hillscape
rolling from somewhere northeast
to the other end of creation: on early
nights, gazing out across its expanse,
accompanied by the subtlety of honeysuckle,
I think of Plumly some decades ago,
a county over and parked off one of the meanders
of back highway outside Staunton, tempted
to enter an endlessness of golden delicious
and rafts of high-pasture grass, brief
eases of emptiness, his mind venturing
further to the upper ridges and into the umber
of chestnut and dry oak forest, although
choosing to remain on the roadside in Romantic
admiration of the coming rainfall, auric gray swelling
over the upper ridges—see, in the physics of poetry
the rain simultaneously exists so near
you could gaze at the reflection of a cornflower
on each drop and so distant it’d take a lifetime
of walking to reach them, only to wind up somewhere
between the Virginia state line and eternity.