Category: Poetry

Beauty is each impulse that makes us drop the dishcloth, the phone, the remote — so we can pick up a pen, a paintbrush, a camera to “fix” it in some form and try to make it our own.

there are different kinds of beauty. A mountain range takes my breath away, as does a sea at storm. But there is also something sublime in a mother who’s fallen asleep holding her sick child–the pain of her experience, her fear of what could happen to her child, the child’s fear transmuted into rest by its trust in its mother–that’s something beyond the prosaic and the everyday. You simply have to be willing to see it, rather than to close your eyes to the possibility of wonder.

my partner and I drove past a long, long freight train standing still. Even now its beauty enlarges and humbles me: the winter sunlight, the multicolored graffiti entwined on every single car, the absence/presence of people–who drove that train? who adorned it?–and the stillness–where had it traveled already?

It’s when there’s no turning back; you’ve tasted sweat of a dream, lips soaked in a poet’s verse, mending with his voice smoke from Parisian chimneys on an autumn evening, as the rain falls.

The natural world serves as my most consistent doorway to it–whether through a mackerel sky at sunset, the geometry of garden flowers, striations in stones, the hover of raptors, the myriad shapes of insects, the wind swirling grass, or light playing on water. I’m awed by fractals and iridescence.