One Morning

For a brief instant I saw it-that we are somehow alive in this utterly inexplicable world, world of stones in valley creeks, world of tree leaves by the thousand shimmering with a sudden breeze in them, world of spring clouds spreading against a blue mountain sky, and vanishing. I felt for a moment the incredible wonder of it all, the wonder of eyes & ears and mind to drink it in and delight in it, the wonder whose deeper emotion is a kind of ecstasy—the joy to be alive and extant as mysteriously as the rest. Somehow this is the poet’s estate– to arrive at some understanding of the actual significance of things, to be guided by this recurrent sense of the latent joy of things. In his hour of beatitude the man comes aware of an order of reality so rarely expressed by the prosaic arrangements of this money-minded world, a reality whose hieroglyph is the opening of blue-vein’d morningglories with dawn in them, or the first flakes of snow in a silent woodside. He knows, and get swallowed in it too easily, that the human world is a montage of pretexts and presumptions at some psychic remove from this primordial state he glimpses ‘out this side of his eye.’