Watched the happy-go-lucky PBS show on cosmology last night (Elegant Universe). I could identify with the neglected string theorists & their rejection slips from science journals hither & yon.

Over the weekend the true impulse returned & I went back to my template quatrains & I think it will work. Some excerpts below from the new version Dove Street.

  It begins like this, on a dark autumn day.
  The wind is blowing, you don't know
  where it leads.  Pussy-willow, dogwood
  wave their last leaves.   The lead-gray sky

   
                  shrouds the universe in its camouflage
  of sleep and melancholy.  Ravens
  mark your place in the book of dying
  and being born.  Goldfinch paces his cage.

      
                                        * 

   
                  In Bruegel's The Dark Day, the herdsmen
  follow a ridge in the foreground, drawing on
  their oxen, charcoal outlines seemingly stolen
  from the Lascaux caves.  In the distance

   
                  storms lash a somber, mountainous coast
  helmeted with desolate castle;
  shipwrecks ornament the entrance
  to the harbor.  A wintry violence

   
                  looms in murk above muted ruddiness,
  ramshackle roofs of valley and village;
  Bruegel grins in the teeth of all this rage,
  shepherding home his cataclysmic canvas.

      
                                         *

   
                  Every leaf bears an image of the tree
  (as when the underside of an autumn olive
  stands upright, tall - a tiny silver cypress).
  Every book bears an image of the Book To Be

   
                  and every child bears an image of the singer
  (almond-eyed) who left a humming shadow
  in the neighborhood - that summer cicada
  shrunk to autumn cricket (fading, lingering).

      
                                      *

   
                  Cosmologists are gathering in conference rooms
  with maps and diagrams and arguments;
  Anthropic Principle, String Theory, Branes,
  Dark Energy vents, dents - various dawns, dooms.

   
                  I walk down Dove Street almost every day
  to watch the silver-gray autumnal sky
  mirror the shifting moire of the bay
  (soothing my heart this way).

   
                  Orpheus fingered the space between the strings
  of his imaginary lyre (he'd thrown the real one
  in the river, after Eurydice had gone).

   
                  Only a pearl-gray shadow (lightening).

      
                                    *

   
                  What mutters and broods in an undertone,
  the doves and pigeons underfoot, gray
  wing upon gray stone.  What flits off
  at your lumbering step, O ponderous one -

   
                  through a gap in the trees in your heart,
  under your eyelids, beyond memory,
  beneath, behind.  Dazed now, you see
  but can't explain:  home again - Dove Street.

      
                                    *

   
                  As if childhood were Bruegel
  panorama - tiny almond eye
  planted (hidden) at the center. 
  And the passionate quest - trial's

   
                  puzzle of yearning loneliness
  only subplot, type, analogy
  (ink-path echo - shady
  image - singular ingress).

       
                               *