“O loveliness. O lucky beauty.” ~ Ellen Bass
when I’m asked if I remember— Which implies that I place
full trust in memory, that faulty, falling-down piece
of machinery that sits in a dirty garage among plastic
tubs and boxes of stuff no one wants to keep in the house
anymore and yet can’t bear to junk for good. Which is to say,
after all, I’m a creature of attachments: forever aspiring
toward that state of imagined rapture or transcendence but
never quite evolved enough to lift off the scales completely
as light. But I like to think I try— Every day,
I turn a fragment this way and that; in mindful
scrutiny, I wrap myself around it to investigate
what kind of joy it might have given me. Release, release,
is the instruction I am supposed to learn, though there are
days when it is impossible to sever the beauty from the pain.
In response to Via Negativa: Grownup.