leavestothetree: Schuyler

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Back from a walk with Dawn, the daylight was just going.

Dawn stopped to pick a couple of weeds.

A tiny frog or toad hopped oh twenty times its length in front of me,

one more hop and it was in the barberry bush.

I thought, and muttered “poetry consists of ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’”

so that Dawn said, “What?”

Did Marianne Moore say that, or did William Butler Yeats,

or was one quoting the other?

Was this garden at dusk a real or imaginary garden?

Had that tiny toad been real or a dream?

Was this entire moment any more than a dream?

When young, one gets the potential validity of the idea

of the butterfly who dreamed he was a philosopher dreaming of being a butterfly,

but I find in my advanced years that no, I really feel as if I can’t tell

if I am philosopher or butterfly or what.

Then we went inside and made love and after that watched half of a movie.

On a walk, the sky and tree leaves were those of a sixteenth century Italian painting,

it was soquiet that the sound of the lively breeze (yet it was hot and humid) bounced

through my ear canals

In an eerie way, as if my life were an arty movie, like La Jette.

Crossing route 16 I almost caused an accident because a car stopped for me, as was

proper,

but the car behind that one had to swerve dramatically, I jumped back!

Ben, working on the garden in the front, quoted a line from a graduation speech

that had become mythical in his family for its silliness:

“a hole is a question, which when filled with facts is held together with meaning.”

Then Susie came out and by the time we’d finished talking I had made an important

decision,

to get a divorce, as it were, from our singing group (I had been a charter member, and for

seventeen years).

So then I wanted to tell Kate, and she and John were on their patio reading the Sunday

Times.

The air, the light on the leaves, the blossoming trees.

Then I was back home.