12 Time’s Topography

The Emergent Universe Oratorio
Time’s Topography
Streams wind down from the heights,
Converging like branches of a tree.

John Muir, from his Sierra ridge,
Could see Yosemite’s lakes

As apples on those rippling boughs.
Merced, sweet River of Mercy,

Broadening through the valley,
was the trunk.

Here in the thickening woods
Of clear-cut and recovering Vermont

We see our watersheds as maples,
Fluctuating in the muddy spring.

On freezing nights twigs suck
Sap up to see them through

And barred owls call their mates
Across the starry dark.

Come sun-warmed morning, sap
Slides down the river of this trunk.

Matter expends itself in the limbs of life,
Surges back into the pulsing core.

Persuaded by time’s loving heat,
Even rocks keep metamorphosing
“into monarch butterflies,
Blue herons and the exalted
music of Mozart.” (1) Like wolves,
larger and grayer every year,
coyotes down from Canada
imprint the empty snow of March
while lifting their own wild songs
into the clamor of those amorous owls.

Time wells and eddies, spiraling outward
And inward in this tidal forest of a world,

Bringing sweetness to our mouths,
Strength to our bones,
Then homecoming and release.
Our separate lives find confluence here.

John Elder