Delight

I took a wonder walk. I took a tree love walk. I took an appreciation of beauty walk. I took a watch the dogs frolic walk. I put on my flip flops and a sweatshirt, shorts. I looked up the tree trunks, at the leaves turning against the endless blue sky. I took detours to find certain trees. The red leafed one near where they are remodeling a house, making it higher and higher. Past the school that my sons went to, and maybe my daughter will go to. I forgot a bag, they're giving out free food, so people don't starve to death during the pandemic, because we are a Democratic city. City against rural in the election but I love the nature everywhere. Whitman goes skipping by. I think about places to sit but there's no pause in the city. Someone might resent my sitting on their stoop. What is the stoop etiquette? I know I could just take the not given, but I don't want to do that. I wish to be kind and just appreciate the beauty. They raked up the pine needles and pine cones, I can't put sap on my hands and make them sticky.

I come home, toss the catalogue at my wife, and she says, "they're still sending me these things." She hides her breasts. They droop low, gravity tugs at them like our daughter did, but they are still attractive to me. I could love her endlessly if she'd let me. I can't control everything make the world how I wish. I keep forgetting to wear a mask, as if I could wish away the deaths of as yet a quarter million. I listen to Duke and Coltrane. Grace and wit. My alarm rings. My daughter has her first Zoom class. Got to give up my computer, can't write any more.

[Poem] My Gaze Is Clear As a Sunflower - Fernando Pessoa

Translated by Richard Zenith.

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.

It is my custom to walk the roads

Looking right and left

And sometimes looking behind me,

And what I see at each moment

Is what I never saw before,

And I’m very good at noticing things.

I’m capable of feeling the same wonder

A newborn child would feel

If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.

I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born

Into a completely new world…

I believe in the world as in a daisy,

Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,

Because to think is to not understand.

The world wasn’t made for us to think about it

(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)

But to look at it and to be in agreement.

I have no philosophy, I have senses…

If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is

But because I love it, and for that very reason,

Because those who love never know what they love

Or why they love, or what love is.

To love is eternal innocence,

And the only innocence is not to think…