Nevertheless (The Horizon Becomes My Garden)

The thought struck, as I sat in my sunroom watching clouds wipe overtop me, that we are nothing to them.  Hike to the nearest hilltop and try to stop even a single cloud.    

Remember what Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem, The Death of a Soldier:

Death is absolute and without memorial,

As in a season of autumn,

When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,

The clouds go, nevertheless,

In their direction.

Watch the clouds for an hour and they become everything.  This one a cat ready to pounce.  That one a fish nosing against a stone.

And there.

Look there.

As sun descends into the mountains, the horizon becomes my garden, and there bloom the most ephemeral, but also loveliest, of all roses.

—Mitchell Hegman