OBEDIENCE

1 0 4 Y O B E D I E N C E M A U R I C E M A N N I N G It is an everlasting spring up there and the land, through time and rocks, draws down the water to bring like a secret saying, find-me-out, behind the fact of the water – air from underground and air not felt before by the green path; and why the new breath touches the green – the ferns and the moss, the little white flowers with lobes of green and shoots and curls of green and tendrils like a yellow glow in the shade – is to make it greener as if this green is the first, the one beginning of green before a scene like this God started one day, before the voice in his head decided on a name for the scene when all it was was a breath and green and yellow becoming green and not becoming farther than green forever, a scene stopped at its beginning, the symbol now, but first the fact of water drawing up itself, a kind of resistance to other facts. ...