Three Views of Valhalla in June

1. Foreground

She waves at the park ranger,
And the park ranger waves back.
The man in black swim trunks tries
Triangulating the scene
By angles of diffidence.
How eager is the woman
To talk to the park ranger?

How eager is the ranger
To talk to him, he to her?
How much overlap is there
Between their three distinct worlds?
Survey all this correctly,
And the resulting social
Hologram will feel quite real,

As if an actual world
Existed beyond them all.
But he fails. The park ranger
And the woman are a team,
Launching their boat together,
Its blue-roofed aluminum
Hull thocking into the lake.

The engine and radio
Rev and they're off on patrol,
"Valhalla Park Ranger One."
The sweet stink of diesel fuel
Floats to the man on the shore,
And wake waves slap at his toes.
There is no world beside this.

2.  Delta

The profoundest geometry,
The fan trapped inside the circle,
Proliferating triangles
Packed tight as angels in each sphere,

The waves rippling out from nowhere
To pass the outermost orbit,
Their equilateral symbol,
Symmetry for signifying change,

Most fecund plane of existence,
Nonlinear heart of paradox,
Placeholder for infinity,
The joker boxed with equations,

The idealized abstraction
Of experienced difference,
The monster of covariance,
The essence of evolution,

All that, less and more, keeps hidden
In those echo shapes of mountains,
Their conical halos sunk deep
Under the endless wavering.

3.  Distance

Maybe I'd rather just look at it
From the village's civilized shore.
No one goes wild into wilderness.
We carry humanity with us,
Rules, stories, technologies and all,
No matter how lonely we may be.

From the grassy slip by the boathouse,
The houses and highway behind me,
I can look at the heart of the park
Out in that dark, green distance, as if
Wild earth were unmarred heaven, as if
I really wanted to be set free.