Things! Things!
How I love them,
how I adore the specificity of things,
their fragile absolute edges,
their color which can turn in a moment.
The cruel missionaries from heaven
teach us a hatred for things,
how shallow things are, and fleeting,
like the billion year stone on which I am standing
is at fault for slipping away slowly over time
or the wave somehow bad for its quick appearing and disappearing
like the magician who makes the rabbit disappear into the hat
from which it was born.
It is the intense brevity that makes things dear.
God, who is forever and the same,
we can go to tomorrow
or the next day if we’re busy.
But the tree with its leaves falling,
the snake sloughing off its amoral skin,
the bird rising up and floating down
until it lands gently in the nest of death,
these abrupt blessings are not to be missed.
The rest, after all, are ideas,
whether Plato’s or Kant’s
or some truck driver from Des Moines
just come from a church service
held in the back of a semi
parked at a truck stop
at the junction of I-70 and I-79,
it matters not.
Ideas,
some are useful, some elegant, some pleasant
in and of themselves,
but when they disrespect things,
insult things,
revile things,
whether a mountain or a frog,
or a wooden chair slid under a table,
things which throw themselves wholly into being
moment by moment,
again and again,
then I must protest,
I must side with things,
even an old china plate
laced with veins of unseemly grime.
2009