I haven't been writing as much as I thought I would in the last few days. I have been enthralled with the nuances the eyes and ears and senses and pre-senses are alert to in the present moment--from the crack of asphalt to the pattern of silver and grey tiles in the bathroom to the panoply of textured trash in the desert.
Alas, the current of the current moment had been 'escaping' me for a couple of years, and now that I am here, now, it's such a sublime and full-time experience I have just only cared to bask with it.
Yesterday, I read an e-mail that Mark Nepo sent to Oprah (she asked him about poetry):
"After years of looking, I can only say that searching for small things worn by the deep is the art of poetry. But listening to what they say is the poem.
. . . To walk quietly till the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not."
It's not so much walking quietly, as granting the Universe the benefit of the doubt, stilling your preconceptions and foregone conclusions about what you are about to sense... that's "listening to what they say." Then the miracle in everything isn't obscured by any interpretive overlay, and is radically simple, plain and obvious.
from STUDY OF THE OBJECT
The most beautiful is the object
which does not exist
it does not serve to carry water
or to preserve the ashes of a hero
it was not cradled by Antigone
nor was a rat drowned in it
seen
from every side
which means
hardly anticipated
the hairs
of all its tines
join
in one stream of light
neither
blindness
nor
death
can take away the object
which does not exist
~ Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Polish poet
ART CREDITS: Nobody's Fool, by Shinique Smith