Thyme flowering among rocks

The poet Richard Wilbur died on Saturday. In his memory, here is his Thyme flowering among rocks, which uses haiku as a stanza form, rhyming the first and third line of each haiku.

This, if Japanese,
Would represent grey boulders
Walloped by rough seas
 
So that, here or there,
The balked water tossed its froth
Straight into the air.
 
Here, where things are what
They are, it is thyme blooming,
Rocks, and nothing but –
​
Having, nonetheless,
Many small leaves implicit,
A green countlessness.
 
Crouching down, peering
Into perplexed recesses,
You find a clearing
 
Occupied by sun
Where, along prone, rachitic
Branches, one by one,
 
Pale stems arise, squared
In the manner of Mentha,
The oblong leaves paired.
 
One branch, in ending,
Lifts a little and begets
A straight-ascending
 
Spike, whorled with fine blue
Or purple trumpets, banked in
The leaf axils. You
 
Are lost now in dense
Fact, fact which one might have thought
Hidden from the sense,
 
Blinking at the detail
Peppery as this fragrance,
Lost to proper scale
 
As, in the motion
Of striped fins, a bathysphere
Forgets the ocean.
 
It makes the craned head
Spin. Unfathomed thyme! The world's
A dream, Basho said,
 
Not because that dream's
A falsehood, but because it's
Truer than it seems.

richard wilbur