Mirage Oases

"Mirage Oases" (p. 531)

This poem talks about the illusions of oases that people see during hot days on the horizon, where mirages trick our minds into thinking that water exists in the distance. The first stanza introduces the "mirage oases" as places where people tend to "trespass," and this idea that an illusion can be trespassed seems to imply that these oases could be references to other, more concrete things such as personal possessions. The second stanza describes the contents of these mirage oases with grass, trees, and fish; it describes how delicate they are in that they can be easily "wrecked" after experiencing pressure (probably physical pressure). The third and fourth stanzas say that they only exist within our wishes and only when we are truly happy.

I found this poem particularly interesting because I would usually see these "mirage oases" when driving through the desert, where it seems like there is water on the road in the far distance. In this literal sense, I've seen such mirage oases and found that they appear in our line of sight. In that sense, such oases appear to be always "trespassed" in that when we travel forward toward them, they eventually disappear because we are too close (technically, we see them because the air molecules bend light such that we see the sky where ground should exist, giving the illusion of water, and this only works in large distances-in short distances, air molecules are not able to bend light enough). In the figurative sense of this poem, it seems that the "suspended wishes" in the third stanza refer to our wants that we cannot reach, so we resort to only thinking about them.