Like dipping oars the egret strikes its wings

on the black water out near Pimlico,

scanning for those widening, dimpled rings

where fish break water, talons skimming low

over the shoals. An itch for landscape brings

me back here to these wetlands in the slow

halflight of afternoon. Loose threads of day

spin themselves out in what I have to say.

To shape coherence from that far company—

harrier hawk circling above the swales,

white tail scrambling across the thorns and scree

of the slick limestone berm. My eyesight fails

to knit it whole. Unlike the owl in its tree

that sees even a least twitch in the cattails,

I patch together buck, scree, briar, and bird

as best I can in the clear light, word by word.

Such distance between what the eye takes in

and what the tongue gives back in its puzzle and sift,

sorting the mayflies from the dazzled spin

of oak leaves flashing silver. In the rift

between idea and flesh a brown marsh wren

flittering from a paper birch, too swift

for vision to hone in, grows still, having lit

here in the space this phrase has made for it.

Suppose the sayer changes what he sees,

or makes a marsh wren up for story's sake

when a tanager, in fact, wings through the breeze

to cross the sawgrass shallows by the lake,

having flown from a stand of fictive trees.

What if this word-stitched landscape is a fake?

For all my honest eff ort, lies are hidden

in the pretense of each sentence I have written.

Think how the visible becomes a dream

when, by some quirk of thought, a beech leaf stirs

and turns into a fawn's ear, or a stream

glints like a fish's scales. The mind conjures

the world to artifice, skews be to seem

in wild pursuit of meaning. What endures

—a paradigm in which the marsh wren flies—

is truer still for being a disguise.