reality | how to pay attention

Close as I ever came to seeing things
The way the physicists say things really are
Was out on Sudbury Marsh one summer eve
When a silhouetted tree against the sun
Seemed at my sudden glance to be afire:
A black and boiling smoke made all its shape.

Binoculars resolved the enciphered sight
To make it clear the smoke was a cloud of gnats,
Their millions doing such a steady dance
As by the motion of the many made the one
Shape constant and kept it so in both the forms
I’d thought to see, the fire and the tree.

Strike through the mask? you find another mask,
Mirroring mirrors by analogy
Make visible. I watched till the greater smoke
Of night engulfed the other, standing out
On the marsh amid a hundred hidden streams
Meandering down from Concord to the sea.

Tagged insects, nature, paying attention, perception, reality, trees

Oct 10 2013

Philip Booth

Day 28 | Glove by Philip Booth

Glove
Philip Booth

A good leather left one,
the one I’ve got left.
For two winters now I’ve warmed up
the car with one hand; every
November I look at my wife
and ask her straight out: What
did you do with the right one?
The whole first winter I kept on
waiting. This whole last winter
I half got used to the cold.
Now, in late March, good sun
keeps slacking the drifts: who cares
where the right one froze itself stiff
or went begging? Wherever it was
I let it get lost, it’s gone,
gone for good. Just to keep
balances more or less even,
as of this morning
I threw out the left one.
Whatever it is I’m maybe
up to, next summer will tell.
I mean to get on as bare
as can be, as bare as
I’ve just become.

Tagged clothing, loss, nature, reality, senses, weather, winter

Oct 09 2013

Philip Booth

Day 27 | Chart 1203 by Philip Booth

Chart 1203
Philip Booth

Penobscot Bay and Approaches

Whoever works a storm to windward, sails
in rain, or navigates in island fog,
must reckon from the slow-swung lead, from squalls
on cheek; must bear by compass, chart, and log.
Parallels are ruled from compass rose
to known red nun: but still the landfall log
risks set of tide, lost buoys, and breakers’ noise
on shore where no shore was. Whoever plots
his homing on these Eastward islands knows
how Sou’west smoke obscures the sunny charts,
how gulls cry on a numberless black spar.
Where North is West of North, not true, he pilots
best who feels the shore for standpipe, spire,
tower or stack, who owns local knowledge of shoal
or ledge, whose salt nose smells the spruce shore.
Where echoes drift, where the blind groundswell
clangs an iron bell, his fish-hook hand
keeps steady on the helm. He weathers rainsquall,
linestorm, fear, who bears away from the sound
of sirens wooing him to the cape’s safe lee.
He knows the ghostship bow, the sudden headland
immanent in fog; but where rocks wander, he
steers down the channel that his courage
dredges. He knows the chart is not the sea.