This poem, known by memory in a former life, has been flitting into my mind from some recess recently. The rhythm comes first–the trochaic insistence of the title/opening lie. The declaration, which expresses something tentative, has an incantatory power that opens the way to that most special place, the meadow where making happens. That space is the creative mind that gives access, that is by definition openness–even as it folds on itself with that repetition-with-a-difference of phrases. The meadow is what D.W. Winnicott refers to as a transitional phenomenon–a space of experience that is in between internal and external realities, the space of play, art, and fantasy.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,   

that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,   

an eternal pasture folded in all thought   

so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light   

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am

I say are likenesses of the First Beloved   

whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill

whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words   

that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing   

east against the source of the sun

in an hour before the sun’s going down

whose secret we see in a children’s game   

of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow   

as if it were a given property of the mind   

that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,   

everlasting omen of what is.

by Robert Duncan