Meditation 70

12 June 2020

The lotus bud is nearly as lovely as the blossom-to-be. Flowers, too, have their practice; our sunflower came out petal by petal, and none were yellow. The brown-orange flower winked at us, until it showed its full surprise at having opened. Its inner circle filled with bright dots, the outer like bird feathers, but no cape. The flower is not a royal plant, but ordinary. I like the dailiness of this work. The struggle to get inside the moment that hangs like water droplets on a brown railing after hard rain, to hear the petal’s hinge as it opens, or the cat that scratches to get in, this is a poetics. Or a poem, and then another poem. I’m supposed to widen my focus, zooming back from a yellow dot on the flower’s face to a garden of pots to mountains to island. But macro feels better at 61, like finding a droplet in the ocean, held fast by water pressure. The foam is either salt or detergent; you don’t want to know because it scares you. Scab torn from skin, we see fresh blood beneath it. Everyone’s freshly converted; long lines to pull on the rope around Stonewall Jackson’s neck. The question of where in history we are, inside or outside or in the salt wound of it, means little. Little became X, escorted by cops from the scene of his assassination. We want our martyrs to be saints. The lives of the saints are in their absence.