that great capacity

We have the capacity to remember dreams and to be surprised by beauty; on every beautiful day, if we are right, we open our eyes and are happy to see it. Our memory for beauty diminishes as we sink and so as we re-encounter it the joy we feel is undiminished, or greater perhaps if it triggers the old memories of beauty and we experience not only the happiness at what is before us but happiness at the remembrance that such things exist at all. I suppose that depends on how far one has sunk. I think of this today as it is sunny and clear, unhumid and comfortably warm. This is beauty for us because the light and the warmth please us physically and psychologically, and the acceptance of this happiness begins to please us spiritually. Is that what it is? Not just happiness, but the acceptance of happiness that brings peace? As our memories of heat and cold collect we are only surprised by the change in season as our bodies age and receive the temperature more sensitively. When what we expect and what we feel are divergent we feel surprise. I do not know what this means then that we are all surprised constantly by beauty.

Mary, I saw your shoulder

Mary, I saw your shoulder
why don’t you come over here?
Mary I saw your shirt
and now my time’s run up;
I couldn’t believe them
when it was snowed on the pavement
but this game was young
and now my dear I’m called back home.
Mary, though, I saw you smile
and I’m all ruffled feathers
only meant to lay down;
I don’t have it anymore
but I’m not lost.
Just lend me something.

part IV: Tower Grove

End it. Make no play about
It, anymore, but cut it
And bag it and dump it
To compost. This all is
What has wrought you;
Iron and days and time
The forge of all this you own:
120 by 80, your lot, your home.
Winter’s coming, the birth of
The year, the beginning of time -
For nothing has nothing created;
That is the nature of things.

All this reading, all these years
(Oh not that many but then
One score and ten is something,
No?) Yes – and
Now it is time to rake up
The remnants of the season
And stuff them tight and
Bring them to soil. End it:
Today, before they arrive.

She looks on through the window
Briefly, her arms in her sweater
And her mind on the peace,
On the table leaves and candles
And you hold fast the handle
Of the rake and pull it to work
For once.

The East and West are fences
You didn’t build, the North is
Cold and South is the Earth and
Home you’ve filled: here are
The cats you feed, here is
The life you lead, here is
The blood she bleeds, here is
The book you read. The house
You own. It is done.
You are here, and this
Is yours. It is done.

in Russia

A fundamentalist cult in Russia waited in a cave for the end of the world, which is happening in May. We are not alone and the mark of the true believer is the knowledge and faith that all of this is over.

from the police

We talked a bit outside about the poor in Brazil, about a nine year-old sleeping in a doorway and the American response: “this happened in the States, well, there’d be a revolution!” It happens in the States but out of sight. A police officer pulled up behind my friend’s car to begin issuing parking meter tickets; my friend and I walked inside the cafe still laughing talking and as we got in he walked upstairs and I sat at my table with a book out. I glanced up once to see him leave through the back door. I watched the cop examine his car my friend’s car, give it a ticket; Illinois temp tags months, years out of date and most likely forged anyway; a child’s carseat (a carseat!) and the windows are open and the doors are unlocked and the stereo plays French hip hop and the quarterpanel is scuffed and it can jump up to 110 on the freeway in seconds. The cop wrote out more tickets and disappeared down the block, and I waited reading drinking coffee, hand on my phone. I waited. The cop waited. The cop drove away. As I opened my phone I saw my friend run over from across the street “I watched from the other alley had to run a bit; the car is reported missing you know” and he drove off to collect his son and I went to work.