February 25

Perhaps a fool to mine for lesson, to find metaphors where plain things abide. To think the sapling does anything but struggle against the wind & wend towards the sun, to imagine the eagle in low glide over the valley carries with it some conceptual tiding. The world, after all, merely is, without predication, without ornament. & we, too, a mineral limb, a thing attached & derived. & maybe that’s all it has to speak, maybe the frenzied madrigal of sparrow & robin & merganser that each morning rips the air falls as quick into oblivion. Maybe the pregnant, roiling cloudscape or the fine drizzle or the patched protrusions of sunlight over Turtleback Mountain’s granite outcroppings are swallowed into time the way wave is into wave, or pebble into tide. Maybe the world knows no humility, no intentional grace, appareled instead not in “celestial light,” but in a stark & skeletal daily-ness. Maybe the gossamer does not tangibly appertain, a gauzy delusion we project. There is something, though, in its simple endurance, its extraordinary ambivalence, beyond invitation & beyond unveiling, an existence that cares not a jot for the epiphenomenal, the “consequitive,” to borrow from Keats. If our lessons bear down on our teleologies, they teach us nothing. Comb this dense copse outside the white window for evidence of firm conclusion. Sift pine needle & nettle, briar-swat & fallen bough. See the geese off in autumn & sit pond-side until spring yawns & thaws. We have only rediscovery, only ourselves in slow oscillation. But I swear, it’s enough.