He looked beneath the rock to find the god
that he had hidden there—that's Oscar
Wilde on Wordsworth's Sublime,

an aperçu so finely made
it's hard to read the Prelude now without it.
I wish I'd thought of it

the day the rock arrived in its leather guard
and was winched into place in our back garden.
Eight hundred pounds of pink unpolished granite

flecked with gray, a glacial boulder
from Elephant Quarry in the bootheel pits, slow
traveler from the colder ranks of somewhere,