Incident in the Sublime

From the bluff the world below looks miniature,

But by what scale is something miniature,

A few brown fields bordered by evergreens?

Once, in Montana, a small girl slipped

At the edge of a prospect, and a man

Walking behind her, distractedly lost,

Reached without thinking and caught her upraised arms.

The mother was speechless; then grateful.

But the man kept walking.

                                                    Hours later,

Stopping farther up that mountain road,

He stood a long time on a different ledge,

Not wondering at the inexhaustible

Bierstadt or Cole whose river meandered

Below, and not at the Turner miles away

Building the bruised fist of a thunderstorm,

But at the immediate upraised yet

Impersonal arms of a six-year-old

Whose need could frame the entire list of it.