The Figure on the Hill
The Figure on the Hill
by Jeffrey Harrison
When I saw the figure on the crown of the hill,
high above the city, standing perfectly still
against a sky so saturated with the late-
afternoon, late-summer Pacific light
that granules of it seemed to have come out of
solution, like a fine precipitate
of crystals hanging in the brightened air,
I thought whoever it was standing up there
must be experiencing some heightened state
of being, or thinking—or its opposite,
thoughtlessly enraptured by the view.
Or maybe, looking again, it was a statue
of Jesus or a saint, placed there to bestow
a ceaseless blessing on the city below.
Only after a good five minutes did I see
that the figure was actually a tree—
some kind of cypress, probably, or cedar.
I was both amused and let down by my error.
Not only had I made the tree a person,
but I’d also given it a vision,
which seemed to linger in the light-charged air
around the tree’s green flame, then disappear.
Ironic. The convention of rhyme adds to the disappointment of poetry’s fine discrimination and romantic exaltation coming to nothing but an error in perception. So much for daffodils or grecian urns.