What Happens When A Poet
Sees A Flower?
___________________
What's the mystery at the very heart of poetry? What's
the
compulsion to write it out, to capture the elemental impact of
seeing which demands response; what happens when a poet sees a
flower forcing an antiphon to that moment when another person
may simply think 'pretty' and pass on by, is always
the same: Death. Every time.
To look at beauty is to be cut to the quick with its transience.
And it is that ache which truly marks the spot where words become
lines that rise as smoke does from embers: instead of tears, which
are exhausting, or anger, which is pointless, a poet will pick up
a pen and write out a personal Dies Irae.
A poet sees a flower, and will defy its extinction by making
permanent one small instant of seeing, one nanosecond of
transcendency to rise up from what is truthfully a subconscious
sense of desperation. Poets are wrathful children who know they
eventually will be torn from their home, so words are nothing more
than shaken fists at life's unbearable
brevity-- and not just life,
but all things: feelings, time - and finally, memory.
For those who admire the pre-Raphalite art of the latter
nineteenth century, the illustration at the top of this editorial should
be naggingly familiar- but not totally. And I chose it specifically
to illustrate the crux of this piece: To see beauty is to see through the
eyes of the already dead, to mourn-- even while writing a hymn
of praise. The woman is indeed dead, though she sees.
The painting is John Millais 'Ophelia'-
I've turned her upright. Given her poppies beautiful
enough to stop time-- and that's what happens when a poet
sees a flower. In the original painting, Ophelia
is floating
in a stream - eyes open - flowers all around her. And I think
she serves as a perfect symbol of the reality of death,
which for the poet, is what gives birth to sight.
As poets, we live in the tension of that very contradiction:
we're dead but alive; perhaps even alive because we are dead.
For it is only in the precious awareness of the fleeting, that we
are compelled to write it out. We write to wail and to celebrate.
We write in defiance, and despite. We take nothing for granted; know
time is short, so our wails become songs strewn as petals already
falling. We are the 'See-ers': we are the ones who embrace both,
and allow that contradiction to blossom into lines. We are
cameras snapping photos of the now - and the now after
that - and after that-- in an ongoing dance with
mortality, eyes wide open.
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