February 4

A heron in its gliding landing, a trio of gulls in violent chase after an eagle that attempted, no doubt, to plunder their nest of eggs. Or the usual, the slant of sunlight, the ghostly luminescence of the moon. Any & all. That life boils down to its detail, that, as Ashbery wrote, “all time reduces to no special time.” My own demarcations a kind of restless whisper, a wind-blown leaf scratching over a parched & cracking pavement. & there is a comfort in this, truly, in the constant revolution of the earth, day-break & dusk, the cawing of one blackbird you forget in the hearing of the next. I have always felt a hesitation in writing anything that explicitly sought a wisdom in the natural world, though I’ve found enduring meaning in the works of writers that have made a professional practice of doing just that. A field in a poem of mine years ago was any field, its corn-stubble maybe local but never precise, its brown puddles fictions. But I think I err either way; making an emblem of the thing, or making a meaning of the thing. A felled branch sits in its quiet dust & gets along with the business of rotting. Or a vine crawls a lattice. There is no auratic meaning to glean, no specter of epiphany appertaining the mineral world. It is an order that resists explication. An acorn can appear in a poem & can metaphorize nearly anything, but in its natural state it is one miniscule, absolutely essential detail in a diaphanous ecosystem that knows nothing of a wondering gaze. “Soul-searching, these prescriptions / Are a medical faddism,” as Oppen said (that it should be rough in recalling seems appropriate). & so. How to be in the world, how to prospect one’s self, take one’s own measure, find a compass not given to the slow erosions of time. Hopkins believed fervently in God & asked “Comforter, comforter, where is your comforting?” I believe in none, but ask the same question. I will a meaning, I make it so. & so a river otter slaps wet against the pebbled beach. A potato bug blindly burrows in the black dirt. & a leaf sails along a breeze, scratching.

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