Motion

wolf-eye moon rides the sky tonight
orion low on the horizon, fights
the bear, the lion;
reflected in this pond, it's no yellowed pupil,
but maestro swan, stately and solemn -
a string quartet this movement, each stroke
sliding through the black-glass waters
silk smooth, there are lessons here
deeper than the night above
higher than the pond beneath
heaven's eyes are all-seeing,


When I was a child, every now and again our parents would treat us with a trip to the zoo. I liked the zoo. Snakes, monkeys, giraffes, elephants, the nocturnal house, crocodiles, penguins - every corner turned was a new exciting form of life. Only I, competitive as I am, can forge a game out of the zoo so easily as I managed. We would enter the snake house and you got points for how quickly you found each creature, or creatures, in the tank. If you found a creature but skipped on to the next window, and there were more creatures, you got less points. It became a game of motion detection, and spotting sly animals through their clever camouflage.
If an animal moved, I was most likely to catch it first. If an animal sat still, hiding in colors and clever spots, Phil was often more likely to notice it first. I once had a psychology teacher suggest that women have more cones (color vision) and men have more rods (black-white, motion vision, peripherals). I don't know, scientifically, whether this is valid or not. But I've always been incredibly capable at spotting motion.
I've always felt that humankind has a remarkable aptitude for adaptability. Every person has adapted and constructed elaborate defense mechanisms and responses to certain stimuli - responses to culture, relationships, events, fright, food, and so on.
Someone said once that it is possible to master something new every seven years. Now, this depends on what you want to master and how motivated you are, but I think that this is easily within the realm of adaptation and the evolution of knowledge and skill. I'm working, desperately, to train myself in a number of things. It is difficult, but I want to learn not only to spot motion, but really stop and swallow colors. In good paintings, sometimes colors and slurs of motion leap out at you, or you dive into the scene, a daydreaming machine. This is how I wish I could write poetry. Poetry with motion, poetry with color, poetry with a symbioses of these, a merging complete and wholly sanctified, a truth-beauty dream of mobile hues singing, saturated and living, bright as living things in the wake of a storm, thundering.


I don't know 
what death's ultimate 
purpose is, but I think
this: whoever dreams of holding his
life in his fist
year after year into the hundreds of years
has never considered the owl
~ Mary Oliver - Lonely, White Fields