My amazingly inspiring friend Renee shared a poem she liked by a new poet she discovered recently, and what moved me even more than the poem itself was her description of it: “So here is one of my favourites. It won’t really work in electronic format, but, oh! on the page, this single poem with its beautiful typesetting hits me right where I live. Not only do I find it generous and true in its imagery, but it is able to awaken gratitude in me when it seems far away. And that, I find, is one of the ways to feel happiness also. To be full of pure gratitude is, if not joy itself, then something awfully like it.” Here it is:
As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse (Billy Collins, from Nine Horses)
I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.
I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,
and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow
so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.
Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,
singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.
