All the birds of the region in one room,
Condor to humming-bird! Only a glance takes in
Pelican, golden eagle, blue-jay, wren…
Two hundred maybe, stuffed, posed, poised for flight.
What need (you say) has nature for so many
Exquisite variations? She selects
Each kind, are we to think, by fine distinction –
In the whole country, say, some forty species
Of warbler, each a different intersection
Of colour, music, mass, texture and form?
Or was it some such randomness as jars
Through the San Andreas Fault, which will in time
Shatter this state of high prosperity
To nameless this and that: did some such flaw
Cause these named rifts, that branch in plenitude?
The boy geologist who clove the rocks
Here on display grew up to be the great
Philosopher of colour into form
And, in the products of just workmanship,
Discerned the paradigm of the just state.
It was the Lord’s design he made apparent –
These bands and blocks of azure, umber, gilt,
Set in their flexing contours, solid flow
That had composed itself in its own frame:
Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white;
In manhood, similarly, his eye judged how
Good stone splits fairly at the mason’s touch;
How painters stay their colour, shape the run
And blotch of it to images of truth.
He taught that these, and others like them, might
– Workers with hand or mind – be driven less
By harsh need or harsh fate than by the call
Imagination hears to make new worlds:
Which honour in epitome this world,
Ruled by its fluid and elusive forms.
If chance be providential, the taught eyes
Of those who paint or carve so should instruct us
In justice and original design.
I have no names for them, foreign to me,
Although my father named and numbered each.
Nor, now they are gone, can I recall
One individual insect – neither shape
Nor colour nor composition. So I brood
On formless memories of moths so big
They looked like two splayed hands linked at the thumbs,
And butterflies arranged by deviation
From an unstated norm of their design:
You could imagine them – they were so vibrant –
Cut from some miniature of Shah Jahan’s.
I was three when my father died; my mother
Outlived him forty years. When she died too,
My sister and I brought down the insect boxes –
Perhaps in expectation that that vision
Of plenitude, long stowed, awaited us.
I could not breathe to think of them. We opened
To nothing but a hint of dust, and pins
Staked upright, row on row, like monuments
To that which he had left us, though it felt
As if what he had left us had not been.