Happiness

For Barbara Green Happiness. I am not used to this. (There is always something wrong.) Look at it the bright early tree. (I am trying to find out how you fell.) The leaves have already turned. (I want you to see this, how they glow outside the glass.) Morning light strikes differently. For so many years I hardly had time to know such moments. They struck me with such intensity I would have said battered me open. I never understood they were mine. I was panicked. Unhappiness caught up with me all the time. Did you know the speed of light never alters even when you go faster it will be still that much faster than you? (I am thinking that in your fall something momentous occurred.) What I see as beautiful I want you to see too. Next door, the workmen are hammering. Very soon we’ll go to lunch. For some reason this moves me to tears. How life is. (One does not have to explain what occurs. One only need say it has meaning.) Years ago, when I was young I traveled to Italy, took in the great sights. I was in awe, yet I did not understand seeing Masaccio’s frescoes fading like shadows into the walls, this would be the only time nor that I would never forget. Those muted shades are still with me, as possession and longing, and the view too of the square before that church the air, newly spring, that day, all of it. Life, I have finally begun to realize, is real. (All this time you recover from falling will sink indelibly into mind.) The leaves may fall before you are able to see them. Science has recently learned the line of existence is soft and stretches out like a field wind and light shaping the grass energy of sight giving consciousness force. In the meantime we live out our lives. (This morning we talked for so long everything became lucid. How can I say what I see?) At each turning perfection eludes me. One moment is not like another. Last spring the house next door caught fire. There was the smell of gas. We thought both houses would go. I vanished up the hill, went to the house of a friend where we listened for flames and to that aria from Italian opera, was it the one of love, or jealousy, or grief? My house was untouched. Now the one next door is painted, fixed. In place of perfection, the empty hands I turned out to the world are filled. With what? A letter half written, the notes I make on this page, this new feeling about my shoulders of age, that sad child’s story you told me this morning, the workmen’s tools sounding and stopping. What? As time moves through me, does it also move through you? I keep remembering what you said, ways you have of seeing (and that light must have curved with you fall.) This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world. 1986