Saturday, May 7, 2016

Simone Weil 13




Gratitude is first of all the business of him who helps. How much I agree with you, Simone, yet wish you'd sometimes relent. There's a merchant of being on my street who sells iteration at a discount. It's all insistence, this rain clattering through gutters onto the fronds of our messy palm. The palm at the end of my mind is out the sliding glass door and past the green plastic watering can. When we speak of revision we assume we know what the word means. It took him 17 years to finish his poem, but was that the same one? The body revises itself downward, cells edited like flakes of skin on a red chair. There's loss in all this recasting of the past, for what we move too quickly by is the orchestra of weather, Saijo staring at the clouds as they passed his cottage, noting down their shapes, the climate's temper. I sit beside the rain. I cannot revise it, ever.

                                                                                 --for Tim

2 comments:

Janet said...

I love the way the weather acts like sound, is in fact orchestrated, as it passes and is gone. If that is not generosity, it's grace. There's no revising the rain but there's so much use in rain..

Karen said...

Love the voice of "How much I agree with you, Simone, yet wish you'd sometimes relent." I'm delighted when Saijo appears. My only edit would be cutting "cells edited like flakes of skin on a red chair." Climates do have tempers, I agree.