(386) the natural moment / gently swinging
when we are in the natural moment,
i try my best not to beautify;
the world, and, you in it, is already beautiful.
old poets did not do this:
they were surrounded by nature,
revelled in it.
and so composition-in-the-moment
was common; and, if it sketched curves
in the mind that were etched down in hand-writing,
so much the better.
but the piecemeal nature of attention
and the technology which has magnetized it,
has made being-in-nature fleeting and but glimpsed,
and so; because my memory is good,
i only beautify after the fact,
locked down in this room-with-a-window
(an improvement.)
i am sitting with my legs gently swinging
off the ledge of the deck above
an ocean of trees;
canopies, gently swelling and dipping,
to the horizon and beyond it.
beneath my hands the ledge is old, dried wood,
rough and grainy under my grasp.
behind me an old house with an old inventor
in the mountains,
who half-built free-standing power.
i wonder how he’s doing now; if he’s still happily
drinking chicken cup noodles out of mugs and
smoking two hundred cigarettes a day.
i am a child again,
singing bright, loud, and happy
to harmonize with the birdsongs below
in the ocean of trees,
which shake and rustle by wind in gentle, rippling waves
parsed apart by my slow breaths.
i will sleep sixteen hours to-day,
to re-synchronize with the wind and night;
with the trees, swaying in the ocean waves,
with the ledge, gently creaking.