‘But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady, unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed graduations, and at the last one pause…’
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Mark Doty, Atlantis
Suppose we could iridesce,
like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer - would you want
to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They'd prefer,
plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting
forward, heedless of stasis.
They don't care they're dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn't care that they were living:
all, all for all,
the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,
or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.
- from 'A Display of Mackerel'.