The Eternal Moment

"To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force - the imagination." - William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

Today, I think I understood the eternal moment. To be entirely content in one moment, entirely at peace with whatever has led me here, and whatever is ahead of me... "All times contemporaneous in the mind." (Ezra Pound) Not just living in the moment, but living in all moments, letting the imagination "refine, clarify, and intensify that eternal moment"... Sorry if this makes no sense. If you take a class on Pound and Williams, you may understand what I'm saying. Or not. I don't understand half the things I said in that class...

Anyway, something about this poem seems relevant, but I haven't spent enough time with it to really know why... (PS I love the last line)

Anytime - W.S. Merwin

How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it
now in the transparent light
with the flight in the voices
the beginning in the leaves
everything I remember
and before it before me
present at the speed of light
in the distance that I am
who keep reaching out to it
seeing all the time faster
where it has never stirred from
before there is anything
the darkness thinking the light

Just Now

Thanks, poetry buddies, for making me read Merwin... (PS we need a better name than poetry buddies!)

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever
believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

- W.S. Merwin

To Paula in Late Spring

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment.

-W.S. Merwin