The Gazing-Globe Garden

is the element ether, a stuff
insubstantial as any that transits:

Carrara of columns, rememberance's
granite, acute

angles of mountains, the blunt
edge of a world.

Nonsense.
It's glass. It's merely

a mirror, a round-up
of columbine, dogwood, dwarf

crested irises, first slow sprigs
of bellflowers. It glistens,

accepts, sinks
as the plants rise

up toward their doubles. It is what
surrounds it. Or it is

self-containing.
Or it is both, like the bloom

of a face on its skin.

Copyright © 2005 Jeanne Larsen All rights reserved
from The Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission