Living

Roger Hall

Living

 

The fire in leaf and grass

so green it seems

each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves

shivering in the sun,

each day the last day.

A red salamander

so cold and so

easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet

and long tail. I hold

my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

 

Denise Levertov

Have you ever had this? Where the colours around you, or the moment you're in is so vivid, so piercingly alive, that you can't imagine life going on? For me it's mostly been instances - times when I thought "This must be the pinnacle. The very sharpest point of sight, the place and moment when everything has come together into focus." 

 

It should be the end. The culmination. Like last things. I love how Levertov moves through time and brings her scope ever tighter - "Each summer the last summer...each day the last day...each minute the last minute." It's a deep pattern running through our lives, the fact that we are most aware and awake and alive when Death is in the room. I don't mean in a macabre sense, I mean in the sense of knowing how to fully immerse ones' self because time is passing, seasons, days and minutes are leaving our hands. 

 

Last things ask us to pay attention, to absorb, to embrace. 

Leave the lesser things behind, reach for what matters. 

 

It won't always be here. 

Canal Bank Walk

Carl Larsson

Canal Bank Walk



Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.



Patrick Kavanaugh
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin
 

“Grow with nature…” I like that. People as plants. I can’t say I comprehend this poem, but certain parts of it seem so true. (I’ve decided it’s good not to know everything, to be in the process of learning, and have a sense of my ignorance. We want answers, we think everything should be knowable, graspable, and as it were –masterable (not a word, I know). But what a miserable world that would be.)  The lines that really get to me are these – “O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web of fabulous grass and eternal voices…feed the gaping need of my senses…for this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven from green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.” I don’t know what Kavanaugh meant to say, but I do know that Eden-call, that longing for a world unworn, where I am new as well, clothed in field and sky, and growing with nature. Yes, I know that.