Tuesday, September 09, 2008
FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
SEPTEMBER 10, 2002
A pocketful of grey. A sky reserved like a boy too shy to ask that girl with braces to dance. There is a rush of something coming, but there is not urgency yet. We hope every girl we love with be the girl. We hope every day will be the one we've chosen.
It was very hot yesterday, humid. The air is cool now, but still heavy and thick - you have to chew it before you can breathe it. Well - perhaps I exaggerate a small bit. You can go off and get the historical data somewhere else. If you're here, you're here for color. Get your hard fact somewhere else. I want always to write about nothing.
The tock tock of the grandfather clock marks moments rushing away like a white-water stream. Every moment gone is a moment we've filled - filled with what? How do you spend yourself? Will you be proud some years hence when you are asked to give account of all these lost moments?
Climb inside a single instant - you can now understand obsession. You wash your face and put on duty, and you never forget your obligation to beauty.
There is already sunlight like spilled cream on the concrete of Washington Street. Watch you don't slip in it. Leaves have started gathering in patches on the lawns, bemoaning their fate as they do every year. These are the common leaves. The leaves afire come later, orange and golden, red. And just as much ended. Beauty doesn't trump death, but the memory of beauty does. That's why you write.
The emptiness of enough. The fullness of not enough. Every day is the day the Lord has made.
It's nearly a year since jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania. All those souls lifted - that has made that ground holy. We have a need to preserve our sacred places. For me, the chunk of field and empty sky where a hawk tree stood til last summer. How do we mark our sacred spaces - with pictograph and petroform as earlier people did? Not exactly, though eons hence perhaps someone will have to wonder over the lay of our rocks, the cast of our bronze.
While the work is archeology and anthropology- somewhat cold and disinterested - the task of understanding sacred sites is also holy work and there is room in it for more than the professional. There is room for poet and farmer and any and all of us who care about these places.
SEPTEMBER 10, 2002
A pocketful of grey. A sky reserved like a boy too shy to ask that girl with braces to dance. There is a rush of something coming, but there is not urgency yet. We hope every girl we love with be the girl. We hope every day will be the one we've chosen.
It was very hot yesterday, humid. The air is cool now, but still heavy and thick - you have to chew it before you can breathe it. Well - perhaps I exaggerate a small bit. You can go off and get the historical data somewhere else. If you're here, you're here for color. Get your hard fact somewhere else. I want always to write about nothing.
The tock tock of the grandfather clock marks moments rushing away like a white-water stream. Every moment gone is a moment we've filled - filled with what? How do you spend yourself? Will you be proud some years hence when you are asked to give account of all these lost moments?
Climb inside a single instant - you can now understand obsession. You wash your face and put on duty, and you never forget your obligation to beauty.
There is already sunlight like spilled cream on the concrete of Washington Street. Watch you don't slip in it. Leaves have started gathering in patches on the lawns, bemoaning their fate as they do every year. These are the common leaves. The leaves afire come later, orange and golden, red. And just as much ended. Beauty doesn't trump death, but the memory of beauty does. That's why you write.
The emptiness of enough. The fullness of not enough. Every day is the day the Lord has made.
It's nearly a year since jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania. All those souls lifted - that has made that ground holy. We have a need to preserve our sacred places. For me, the chunk of field and empty sky where a hawk tree stood til last summer. How do we mark our sacred spaces - with pictograph and petroform as earlier people did? Not exactly, though eons hence perhaps someone will have to wonder over the lay of our rocks, the cast of our bronze.
While the work is archeology and anthropology- somewhat cold and disinterested - the task of understanding sacred sites is also holy work and there is room in it for more than the professional. There is room for poet and farmer and any and all of us who care about these places.
