In the Grove

Where are you, in the harmony of leaves

and light-splashed silence as all else stops?  Why retreat

through gradations of greens to where light cascades down

staircases of leaves to the sprouting ground, while leaf-tips spear high

toward sheer summer sky?  Where are you

in the music of the leaves

glimmering in the greens

staring at your hands

holding something unseen

with fingers tipped in light? 

Why do you sigh

in the glitter of green leaves

away from all others

in your shade-sweet silence?

Do you know how I brood in my study—

and though you’ll never know—think of you and sigh?

Do you know how often I ramble in the forest, but never find

the forest you cherish inside?  Can you escape the music 

of the leaves, in the grove of hugged silence

where you count the veins of a ripe fallen leaf

beneath a private sky?  For I, Theodore

Robinson, a painter living on teaching and sales,

cannot quit the spell of summer work indoors

where I draft and plan still, to stand apart and capture

in an image (as with a sunbeam, visible and invisible alike)

this firefly music of the heart.

G.H. Mosson is the author of two books of poetry, Questions of Fire (Plain View, 2009) and Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River, 2007). His poetry and literary commentary have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Unsplendid, Measure, The Potomac Review, and has been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has an MA from The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where he was a teaching fellow and lecturer, 2003-2005. He lives in Maryland with his family.