Peripheral Vision by Carol Oberg

Peripheral Vision

She walks down the road
Passing trees, wildflowers, shrubs
She couldn’t name in a million years.
Strolls the seasons
Without seeing the first buds,
Some oak leaves refusing to ever fall
The slow melt of ice and snow.
She doesn’t notice the cricket’s temperate pace
Or the v’s of traveling geese overhead.
If like sleeping beauty she were to
Suddenly awake with the kiss of a prince
It would be impossible to guess if it was
Late in the fall or very early spring.
She doesn’t garden but buys
Flowers and produce at Farmer’s Market
And appreciates a gorgeous sunset
Without the need to describe it in words
Or fix it in the lens of a camera.
Her house inside is unadorned
The yard simply grass that
Changes from green to brown
When she isn’t looking
Much like herself.
But driving down a country road
When the leaves on trees are
Red, orange, yellow and every
Unnamable color in between
She thinks Heaven
Must look exactly like this.

by Carol Oberg, first published in The Avocet, a Journal of Nature Poetry.

Editor’s Note: The imagery in this poem conveys meaning through the denial of it—the narrator’s vision is limited, but the imagination is not.