Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part – the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.
Because there is no substitute for vigorous and exact description, I would like to say how your eyes, at twilight, reflect, at the same time, the beauty of the world, and its crimes.
If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves. If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt. But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation. I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster. And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with some small and easy story.
Are the roses not also – even as the owl is – excessive? Each flower is small and lovely, but in their sheer and silent abundance the roses become an immutable force, as though the work of the wild roses was to make sure that all of us, who come wandering over the sand, may be, for a while, struck to the heart and saturated with a simple joy.
But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.
And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness – the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books – can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.
I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.
I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.
How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?
Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier?
Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules.
I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.
If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since we’re bound to be something, why not together.
A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.
Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light.
Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window between him and the darkness. Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city – turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.
He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a face; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.
I simply was not able to risk wrecking her world, and I could see no possible way I could move the whole kingdom. So I left her with the only thing I could – the certainty of a little more time.
Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vain-glory is the bane of us, the humans.