Upon Closer Examination

What is it? This piece between fingers pinched is held,
Fingers pressing, squeezing life, holding it fast
What is it? These orbs and lobes extended beyond
A flimsy stem, so held with ease, so clinched with earnest desire
What is it? This green; a phantom, this object, I, the subject, or I the conduit?

It appears before me, green patch now, as someone somewhere sometime said
Is it created, by logos, by fiat, long ago in ancient ancestral planes
Where brick and mortar and iron are hot baked and furnace flamed?
Or cursed by the creator, or by the created,
not now anymore that which once was good?
How do I perceive this thing, this dimmed, flimsy, bright?

With eyes and mind projecting interpretations or
With the thing itself imposing life to me its light?

A part of a scale so grand so vast
Or immanent prose with continual flux
And flow to show the slow to understand
As I perceive this
(I wonder who perceives me)
Am I held in pinchers
Or nothing at all?
Or wings with feathers that cover and call?

I am told you will never cease, but fill the fields and floors—flourish!
What will I be?

Will I flourish like the rainbows in the crescent bay
Swimming the dance of floating eloquence?
Or descend in mud, emanating like a ghost in the firma
One particle at a time, the last memory a final chemical
Distanced into a fjord of massive heaping mound
Buried in slothful swamp of soil…

Yet to stand before the face of
To sing in the presence of
To dance forever with

What is it? This, that or the other?
Simple yet haunting, harrowing though plain
Incomprehensible
Now comprehended in reflection upon this little leaf

These pinched fingers hold
Three clovers in one stead
Reflection, reflection,
Three persons in one head.