(no subject)
I once read someone who said that now is different from before because now all men are prophets and can see and hear the things to come. There was a time when that was not true but it is now.
There are some things that I can remember only if they're in season and only in certain places (like a stand of trees smoking with some flower scent I couldn't identify or maybe had forgotten), like those memories of childhood no different from a leaf in your hand or the blackbirds you'd seen tonight through the fog, one or more than one blackbird flying through the fog.
And those memories come back to me in the way these poems do or as you looked when your eyes meeting mine met them with some quivering attention, struggling to hold your gaze but unwilling, unwilling to break it because this was yours and what you said once now you must live.
Why?
Because everyone can or they must, when it's like breathing. Because there is no difference between the end of speech and the beginning. Because all you say will be returned to you.
All?
Everything. You'll know (if you don't know you will soon): it will be like any other moment, and afterward like all others.
You learn how to love by speaking of the things you love.
To love is to know how to speak. To speak of the things you love. The bayberries are in color. The woods are loose with drumming. The tree frogs came out at 830 tonight.
We live in a lived-in place. The air is changed. What's paradise if not some flower, an egg, a stone you can weigh in your palm and then toss aside. You were there. It's a place, now, like any other you'll visit. Like all others. I know a place where you'll find blooming (every June) flowers just like this and have been there and can show you.
After the fog had lifted tonight I saw a sudden autumnal flareup in the northwest, and the clouds whispering like coals marked the red and the noonday yellow, the morning greens, and darkened to the color of moss. It spread out in all directions (yours, mine), and you didn't notice the ashes at the center till the extremest rings had moved past you and all happened in several blinks of the eye.
Listening, you could hear how things were moving a hundred miles off. A dark cloud -- the sunset was brighter in this darker filter -- turned blood red and then fled to blackness against the ash-white center of the sky -- now clustered with the eastern stars and broken here and there with pools of a darker blue into which more stars had fallen and were falling.
I saw last week that the female phoebe was no longer at the nest. She'd either flown off or been killed. The male started to sing again after she'd left, anxiously, even disconsolately, I thought, but continued to feed the nestlings alone. Another (unmated?) female took her place at the nest, this morning. The male's accepted her but is still singing his spring song as though he hasn't.
There are some things that I can remember only if they're in season and only in certain places (like a stand of trees smoking with some flower scent I couldn't identify or maybe had forgotten), like those memories of childhood no different from a leaf in your hand or the blackbirds you'd seen tonight through the fog, one or more than one blackbird flying through the fog.
And those memories come back to me in the way these poems do or as you looked when your eyes meeting mine met them with some quivering attention, struggling to hold your gaze but unwilling, unwilling to break it because this was yours and what you said once now you must live.
Why?
Because everyone can or they must, when it's like breathing. Because there is no difference between the end of speech and the beginning. Because all you say will be returned to you.
All?
Everything. You'll know (if you don't know you will soon): it will be like any other moment, and afterward like all others.
You learn how to love by speaking of the things you love.
To love is to know how to speak. To speak of the things you love. The bayberries are in color. The woods are loose with drumming. The tree frogs came out at 830 tonight.
We live in a lived-in place. The air is changed. What's paradise if not some flower, an egg, a stone you can weigh in your palm and then toss aside. You were there. It's a place, now, like any other you'll visit. Like all others. I know a place where you'll find blooming (every June) flowers just like this and have been there and can show you.
After the fog had lifted tonight I saw a sudden autumnal flareup in the northwest, and the clouds whispering like coals marked the red and the noonday yellow, the morning greens, and darkened to the color of moss. It spread out in all directions (yours, mine), and you didn't notice the ashes at the center till the extremest rings had moved past you and all happened in several blinks of the eye.
Listening, you could hear how things were moving a hundred miles off. A dark cloud -- the sunset was brighter in this darker filter -- turned blood red and then fled to blackness against the ash-white center of the sky -- now clustered with the eastern stars and broken here and there with pools of a darker blue into which more stars had fallen and were falling.
I saw last week that the female phoebe was no longer at the nest. She'd either flown off or been killed. The male started to sing again after she'd left, anxiously, even disconsolately, I thought, but continued to feed the nestlings alone. Another (unmated?) female took her place at the nest, this morning. The male's accepted her but is still singing his spring song as though he hasn't.