We rowed to the middle of Caspian Lake today, myself sprawled over the keel of the small wooden boat, the little child kneeling beside me. The older daughter welding the oars demanded, What are we doing?
I said, We’re hanging between the water and the sky today.
In the lake’s center, waves lapped against the boat, the oars clunked in their metal locks, a gull flapped by without a feather-whoosh of sound. I dove in, the water so clear I saw my kicking feet brushing all that water below, then raised my arms into the sky, an infinity of luminous blue broken with troubled storm clouds. Cool and sweet, the lake was fragrant as fields of growing hay.
Glory be to God for dappled things…
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
Greensboro, Vermont
Stony Soil Vermont 