Design in Living Colors

Embroidered in a tapestry of green
Among the textures of a threaded garden,
The gesturing lady and her paladin
Walk in a path where shade and sunlight harden
Upon the formal attitudes of trees
By no wind bent, and birds without a tune,
Against the background of a figured frieze
In an eternal summer afternoon.

So you and I in our accepted frame
Believe a casual world of bricks and flowers
And scarcely guess what symbols wander tame
Among the panels of familiar hours.
Yet should the parting boughs of green reveal
A slender unicorn with jeweled feet,
Could I persuade him at my touch to kneel
And from my fingers take what unicorns eat?

If you should pick me at my whim a rose,
Setting the birds upon the bush in flight,
How should I know what crimson meaning grows
Deep in this garden, where such birds alight?
And how should I believe, the meaning clear,
That we are children of disordered days?
That fragmentary world is mended here,
And in this air a clearer sunlight plays.

The fleeing hare, the wings that brush the tree,
All images once separate and alone,
Become the creatures of a tapestry
Miraculously stirred and made our own.
We are the denizens of a living wood
Where insight blooms anew on every bough,
And every flower emerges understood
Out of a pattern unperceived till now.