Painting of Salvador Dali by Doug Auld
The Manger of Incidentals
We are surrounded by the absurd excess
of the universe.
By meaningless bulk,
vastness without size,
power without consequence.
The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry.
Merely phenomenon and its physics.
An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can
recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart.
Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers,
not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication.
We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish.
The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter.
We are blessed with powerful love
and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile.
It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight
that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music
out of noise
because we must hurry.
We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland
of the cosmos.
Jack Gilbert
Posted over on Poi-tre
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