This see-sawing back & forth between dramatic action & meditation is repeated through Forth of July, with growing intensity; thus, after the fireworks of July appears the visionary brief coda to the entire poem, titled Blackstone's Day-Book (published with the sonnet sequence Island Road; also in the complete sequel to Stubborn Grew, titled The Rose). Here is a sample from that section:

         7


  
         Your law shines from the depths, a stone
 of mutual promises, dropped ex caelis
 to the navel of the earth, at the sea's
 lair.  There it gathered your gravitons,

  
         gradually, from a massive rug of tangled
 superstrings – Love, from the height
 of night (through funnel of Amphitrite).
 The tiny strings thundered, wrangled –

  
         from the far-off realm of Prester John
 across horse-grass dominions (Scythia,
 Sarmatia) to labyrinthine Pythian
 Rhodes – it was inwound cornu,

  
         your love – sheath of dome,
 ark of Shittim wood – a 28
 nestled in 29, sword-blade
 bent straight again (Rome,

  
         roaming, Romany, along a knife-edge
 trimmed with fish-scales – serpentine,
 sly, undoing Knight and Amazon
 with quintessence of Negus-

  
         mystery).  Where stale steel of the Ossete
 meets tempered gaze of his twin-Tartar
 Amazon upon a span of tears – where
 a grain-bin swells, and sweetly

  
         soars (fluted in stone).  I hear, I hear
 ice breaking, underneath a bridge. . .
 in a land of whirring wings,
 beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.

      
                                   4.6.2000