nurseries trampled by swim fins; three or four vanloads of tourists

every hour murking once-crystalline water with sand (and

more, which would bring this poem down too far to ever rise again)—

nature is never spent: there lives the dearest freshness in this fusion of robin’s egg

blue and chartreuse, this jungle-and mangrove-fringed

scoop of sky that never stops crooning each new

magical morning into being; oh, it’s Genesis over and over again,

the weight on my shoulders

—what humans do to each other and to the world—lifting

each time I slip, before the crowds descend, into

this sun-blessed union of fresh and salt water

where once revolved a jubilation of fishes, a jeweled profusion,

symphonic silence blooming

in ever-declining numbers, a fact which my heart

has almost come to accept—here in the realm

of the Maya, Doomsday looming—because of a certain

refugium, whose location, deep down things, I shall never reveal:

a limestone maze of channels, whose praise I shall never

stop singing, my world-bruised spirit transported, transfused.

with gratitude to Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889, from whose poem

“God’s Grandeur” springs the title of this one, along with two more clusters of words