The Evening is Tranquil, and Dawn is a Thousand Miles Away

This evening poem came to me via a friend's post on Facebook who saw it on The Writer's Almanac.  It's by Charles Wright,from his 2009 book Sestet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Evening is Tranquil, and Dawn is a Thousand Miles Away

by Charles Wright

The mares go down for their evening feed

                                                              into the meadow grass.

Two pine trees sway the invisible wind—

                                                          some sway, some don't sway.

The heart of the world lies open, leached and ticking with sunlight

For just a minute or so.

The mares have their heads on the ground,

                                 the trees have their heads on the blue sky.

Two ravens circle and twist.

              On the borders of heaven, the river flows clear a bit longer.

Wright's poem "Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night" is another one from that site that I thought of too. It reminds me of when I am using the Star Walk app on my iPad that allows me to look up at the sky and actually know what stars, planets and constellations I am seeing. A planetarium in my hands.

Later, I like to sit and look up
At the mythic history of Western civilization,
Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac.
I'd like to be able to name them, say what's what and how who got
where,
Curry the physics of metamorphosis and its endgame,
But I've spent my life knowing nothing.

I'm feeling like I know less and less every day. I suppose it's the old "the more you know, the more you realize that you don't know."