Vision (Sweet Recess)
It’s odd: the sacred world can pass for years
Unseen, then fill your eyes, stopping you still,
As if God had stooped to whisper in your ears
Look there: the nuthatch on the kitchen sill,
Feathers rustled to fatness against the cold;
The neighbor’s listing shed, its siding (white
Once, gray and peeling now) recast in gold
By early evening’s kind alchemic light;
Unseen, then fill your eyes, stopping you still,
As if God had stooped to whisper in your ears
Look there: the nuthatch on the kitchen sill,
Feathers rustled to fatness against the cold;
The neighbor’s listing shed, its siding (white
Once, gray and peeling now) recast in gold
By early evening’s kind alchemic light;
Or one you love, framed in the entry way,
Wholly herself, and you for once abstracted
From fierce desire, its lenses and scaffoldings,
And left by language, which will not convey
The sense of stupid wonder that, though muted,
Fills the cage of your ribs with a riff of wings.
Wholly herself, and you for once abstracted
From fierce desire, its lenses and scaffoldings,
And left by language, which will not convey
The sense of stupid wonder that, though muted,
Fills the cage of your ribs with a riff of wings.
-Geoffrey Brock
Both “Vision” and Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” have been two of my favorite poems for so long that it seems only appropriate that I begin here paying homage to both. If the final lines of the Keats suggest some high-browed unity between aesthetic and truth, Brock suggests the existence of the sublime in day-to-day life.
I write, wonder, and analyze quite frequently, and I wonder how many snippets of thoughts will end up here, but regardless, if I can somehow encapsulate a bit of the beauty-truth relationship and the notion of wonder in the commonplace, I’ll be satisfied.
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