Beauty

Beauty creeps from a snow-bank where it was deposited after being scraped, pushed, compacted and left to remain until spring finally melts it. It resides in solid water, and after all these days, continues to amaze me. Today it defies the snowplow and the encroachment of a town and paper mill into its domain. Beauty does not accept its sentence and creeps out from cloistered piles. It wakes in the night and grows intricate appendages, adorning itself for the opening reception of another show.

This is not the real world, I thought to myself on the way to Sandy’s this morning. After just a few strides from my door and my heated room, I landed, like an alien in ethereal animation, inhabited by fantastic creatures. And they don’t know it. Maybe they used to know, before the great forgetting, and they ceased to be senescent, retaining the art of a bygone culture.





Beauty stands erect beside the source, the sun, today, as if made, like it, to nurture new life. Bits of diamond dust pass from a column of light to me, imparting their sparkles. My camera sees them as white spots, but it does not know them as I do.











When piled up high in disposal heaps and left to die, beauty doesn’t pout, does not form dark and twisted poetry. Instead, it gathers strength and rises from the grime, forms shapes for the sun to see and reflect to me.








On the surface of its piled-up fate
no angry image does beauty paint
but grows from what it has within
and what it finds without
fronds and winged seeds and forest trees
likenesses in miniature
Or is there something else it wants to show?








Beauty doesn’t shun
the dead the plow scraped up
and threw with it to die
but builds a little monument
above a fallen twist of grass
to hope and life anew









We make for our enjoyment, replicas of beauty, Styrofoam and frosted glass, but seldom do we place ourselves in such a cold and hostile place to see it real at Sandy’s, inside a single pane.









When beauty encounters, in its descent, a pile of machine-ground woodchips for the mill, not a tree or child it surely prefers, it doesn’t gather there in ugly form, no patterns of contempt, but acts as beauty calls.




Isn’t life really more like stories we tell ourselves about our daily experiences, rather than hard science. Life seems more like magic or alchemy or something I don’t know how to theorize about. This solid beauteous water.