April 21, 2012

A restless night with wind at every window, the sound of it piling higher and higher, branches scraping, and the occasional bang or thump from something loosened and too near the house.  The sky is harsh with it this morning, clouds blowing up from the edge of the world, expanding impossibly then slowly vanishing as they move off to oblivion.  There is the excitement of motion everywhere, the cane, top heavy with new growth nods and dances, each long leaf like a scarf fluttering in time to music wind is making among them.  Most of the yard in shadow, the orange cat stepping carefully though the grass to sit up on the hidden boat and watch for rabbits, grooming, and waiting.  Sunspots appear at random to fade out like a dying fire, down to embers one moment, then bright as cloud moves aside, then shadow again.

This poem is full of the moment, the moment water runs down from one place to another taking us with it, full of the moment, in a day full of them.

Gravelly Run

I don't know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
 of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:

the swamp's slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars' gothic-clustered
spires could make
green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air's glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:
I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

A. R. Ammons

And so each moment makes its own story, no use to make any philosophies here, the moments just keep making their way down time's slip, so just go along with you, take all those beauties and get on down the road <smile>.  Some mornings it's just beauty passing by, like sunlight coming and going, and I just watch, making nothing of it but what it is, something lovely to look at, time spent watching it all and glad of it.