This recording was originally much longer than what I've got for you here. I took a fork in a trail which led me to an overlook that was so magnificent, so overwhelming, that I just stood there, mostly mute. It's vastness, it's quiet emptiness: it made me feel small and like a thing touching divinity.
Later, on that same hike, I discovered tiny tiny flowers that I hadn't noticed before. They were just as shocking to me as the canyon. Big and small: this hike was really killing me aesthetically.
It took a bunch of research to figure out that the flowers I looked at were [Gilia inconspicua], or "shy gilia."
### TEXT OF POEM
"Interlude III" by Karl Shapiro
Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail
And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing
Caught my eye then, A gossamer so frail
And exquisite, I saw in it a thing
That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote
It hung upon my finger like a sting.
A leg I noticed next, fine a mote,
“And on this frail eyelash he walked,” I said,
“And climbed and walked like any mountain-goat”
And in the mood I sought the little head,
But it was lost; then in my heart a fear
Cried out, “A life- why beautiful, why dead!”
It was a mite that held itself most dear,
So small I could have drowned it with a tear.
[Gilia inconspicua]: http://www.swcoloradowildflowers.com/White%20Enlarged%20Photo%20Pages/gilia.htm
Episode 4.17 Kay Ryan’s “This Life”
Episode 4.16 Three Poems by Stephen Crane
Episode 4.15 Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring"
Episode 4.14 Walter Scott’s “Innominatus”
Episode 4.13 Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain"
Episode 4.12 W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Episode 4.11 Jim Harrison’s “I Believe”
Episode 4.10 E. E. Cummings “sweet spring is your,” “old mr ly,” and “pity this busy monster,manunkind”
Episode 4.09 An Easter reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “A Nativity”
Episode 4.08 Mark Gibbons’s “My Life as a Capitalist”
Episode 4.07 John Donne’s “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward”
Episode 4.06 Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Episode 4.05 Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Episode 4.04 The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Brunanburh”
Episode 4.03 John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Episode 4.02 Czeslaw Milosz’s “And Yet The Books”
Episode 4.01 John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around”
Episode 3.11: Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon"
Episode 310: Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"
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