As a mineral exploration geologist I spent a career thinking about discovery: what it is, how it happens, and how it feels. Now I try to find the same rewards in poetry, because each new combination of words which works is a discovery. Something new is discovered in words which were there all the time. Of course, it only works on rare occasions.

Proust said: “I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature — to discover it.” And Proust speaks of analogy as pointing to the essences of things; and of “the miracle of analogy”. These are concepts at the heart of scientific discovery. Reading Keats’ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” I know that it is describing the feeling I had when I first made a discovery of a hidden likeness in mineral exploration, and this makes me think that the moment of discovery in the arts and in science is the same.   

On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer

Blue-shaded Mountains

Dark canyons around me, and wild-running streams,
Around me blue mountains like mountains in dreams,
Around me a valley like Eden in spring.
Around, all is beauty — how can I not sing?

“Come circle! Come circle! Come fly wing on wing!
We’ll call to the valley below us to sing
Of mesas and canyons and wild-running streams
And blue-shaded mountains like mountains in dreams!”

Home

Here are the lakes ringed round by spruce and fir,
And here the meadows where the mountain flowers grow,
And through the aspen trees, the snowy peaks,
The apple orchards and the village down below.
What place could be more beautiful than this, our mountain home?

Yet sometimes, even so, I will remember
How in my other woods the trillium bloomed,
How dogwood turned the springtime into splendor,
And every hollow was a watery glade
Where peepers called and violets filled the shade.

Let Me Not Be Inured

Let me not be inured to wondrous things,
To rocks in shady glens where lichen grow,
To aspen when October breezes blow,
To meadowlarks and yellow siskin wings.
Let common usage not betray my eyes
And hide the beauty of my time and place,
But open up my eyes and give me grace
To see the wonder that around me lies.
Give me the grace to look and see and care,
And not to pass unmoved by wondrous things
As if it made no difference they were there.

Three miracles occurred as one:
A robin’s song,
Your hand in mine,
And then the morning sun.

But looking back, there was a pause
— not miracles at all —
The bird and sun were just effects,
Your hand in mine, the cause.

What miracle of alchemy
Transformed a starry residue
By rules of chance and symmetry
To such a thing as you?

What forces in the atom’s heart
Conspired time out of mind
To draw together two apart
And form the ties that bind?

They bind together you and me,
And will not be undone
Although the moon forsake the sea
And earth break from the sun.

The Turquoise Sea

I dreamed a treasure’s hiding place
Was like the snow-white strand
Between a jeweled turquoise sea
And some exotic land,

And in my dream the sea had gone
A billion years ago,
But still I’d find the treasure’s lair,
For, looking, I would know

That some things tell of vanished seas
And some of vanished land,
And finding both, I’d look between
And find the hidden strand,

And in the strand a treasure-trove
— the vision promised me —
But morning’s finger touched the dream
That held the vanished sea,

And suddenly Space changed to Time
And In-between to Now,
And there I found the treasured strand,
The likeness showed me how.

What butterfly disturbed the air
And changed the world and swept me where
I chanced to see you passing by?
Dear butterfly. Dear butterfly

Eastern Tailed Blue by Jay Cossey. Used by Permission.

The Last Barricade

A ridge of boulders runs across our place
And separates the field from a shade
Where wildness still reserves a little space
Against all odds — a sort of barricade.

There marmots live, and other wild things,
And lichens coat the rocks, and there the air
Is still, and underneath the rocks are springs
Which murmur. At times, deer nestle there.

In springtime mallow tints the nearby field,
Made desolate by someone with a blade,
Who, with some thought of monetary yield,
Instead, left us a priceless barricade.

Instead of gold, a marmot’s clarion call,
Instead of silver, rose-hips in the fall.