the original Q

But let's get back to the original question: 

what makes a fish happy?

-Chuang-tzu

windsocks

Give me the exuberance 
Of Spring windsocks

Streaming reds and greens and yellows 
In Michigan sunlight

[shimmering?] 

Where Night Is

‘Pure Idiot Glee’ to find oneself a child where night is, engulfed, enmooned and sunk where this ice-in-the-grass wide Orion darkness is cast, cold chimneystones and whole histories of chimneystone dim, out of mind, where unseen geese sleep in sheds, streets inexplicably silent long hours – whole nights—emptiness where ancient rays of stars find their earthen shore, beginningless / endless realm of night who sunstruck day is brief winter interlude, where now the shining insects that danced a million tireless spawnings on the drowsy June air

the power fails

The power fails, 

houses go suddenly dark, 

limitless night in every direction 

‘where once a town was’—

only a moon haze 

above frosted shingles

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.’

School Street

A day of deep grayness and stillness in the leafless trees and a sky pouring out of itself a dull somber light, casting the entire hushed landscape of bark and cattails and scrap lumber into Trappist photographs.

A very interior kind of day, all the earth and sky drawn into a deepening meditation as if to say, “this, this, of 1000 years.”

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

Across the Brooklyn Bridge

Walking the crest this rich warm Manhattan midnight, 

the world's wavering mirage is seen—

Plates of moonlight froth on the East River below,

Greengold lights of the intrepid steel Gotham awaiting,

  rat tat tat

the pneumatic hammers of the red vest union Jack’s

Astride the moving link

Of headlights on the drone roadway beneath—

All of the temporal plane with its movable Orange traffic cones

Hazard flash of public work trucks

Lined on the rail

How far the Verrazano cable glints on the Jersey shore,

Roar of motorcycle unseen,

Flip-flop chip clop

padding the big city bridge