The Heaven Of Animals

Here they are.  The soft eyes open.   
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

To match them, the landscape flowers,   
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

-- James Lafayette Dickey (2 February 1923 - 19 January 1997), popular American poet and novelist, appointed eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966, "The Heaven of Animals" from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992