One of the Astonishments

Aurora Borealis (wallpaperswide.com)

BARENAKED LOVE

Have you ever been just skipping, skipping down a dusty path

beside a river that is very busy making merry water-drops, and there

you are, without a loftier intention than to feel your blood pump

faster through your toes, but even THAT you wouldn’t know to

speak about because you hadn’t got as far as making a decision to

intend a single thing, that’s just the kind of disengaged and free and

sans souci you were just then, for nothing pulled at you except

perhaps the need to breathe, which once you get the hang of it is

seldom terribly demanding.... Well.

In retrospect, you see that

without meaning to you’d found the perfect way to BE that day, for it

was warm enough to go without a jacket, clear enough for

cheerfulness, and quiet—there were noises, only mossy plopping

sounds from water-drops at play, just that, without the bother of

intending something waterish or damp-related, such as plotting

nasty weather—for example, sleet or floods or twenty feet of snow.

The water-drops in fact were (like you) having effortless amusement,

finding all enchanting that might wander into their awareness,

nothing judging, satisfaction popping in and out (and now that it’s a

memory a few months old, obscurely you’re reminded of how Miles

Davis played the trumpet, just as ready as the audience to be

surprised at what the instrument produced with his assistance, in the

way of pitch and timbre and intensity).

ASTONISHMENT

Aurora Borealis from Space--NASA

Oh lordy. Do you know what happened then? It’s something that

would NEVER have if you had planned it; such phenomena cannot

be MEANT because you’re not aware that they exist. It’s one of THE

ASTONISHMENTS, and only afterward can you identify or give a

name to it, because when you are in the midst of it your brain is

incapacitated by your rapture and your reverence and you suspect it

might be sacrilege to sully it with labels made of ordinary consonants

and common vowels, and the skritch your voice delivers trying to

articulate it verges on profanity. But as a poet, what have you to do

except find language for what’s holy, beautiful, astounding, and

resistant to description? So before you name it (if you say it now,

your hearers’ minds will close around an image formed in haste and

inerasable), you tell them what it looked like:

A parade of all the colors in a mother’s heart when first she sees her

newborn baby — only brighter, warmer, with such opulent

abundance in its light it couldn’t keep itself contained...

OR...

A Child's Garden of Verses

The sum of all the energy, the vastness of it spread like playing cards,

expended from the time a small child thinks he wants to plant a seed

until the flowers bloom and then the boy goes out with scissors

(carried safely, as his papa taught him), clips a couple dozen stems

and wraps them in wet newsprint, takes them to the back-porch door

and opens it but (clumsy with anticipation) lets the rusted spring,

which shouldn’t even work it’s that old, yank the wooden door back

shut (which, making such a satisfying clattering he laughs and hopes

it didn’t wake the baby)—all that energy so far, is everybody keeping

up? PLUS don’t forget the boost it got when all the planning and the

effort and the waiting and anticipation culminated in the

presentation of the mix of reds and pinks and greens and purples in

their many shapes—some daisylike, some curly-petaled, some like

velvet-covered nests and others tiny yellow buttons—to his mother,

as he watched her face so as to know if she were just pretending to be

pleased, but from the deep pool of the heart came happy tears, which

if somehow one could collect and bottle them would cure ill will

throughout the world... so add the energy from Mother’s

overflowing of emotion, and the child’s, to all the rest... that’s what I

saw that skipping-by-the-river afternoon, those colors and that

energy erupting from I couldn‘t tell you where but I will say the

name I dared to give to it: barenaked love.... authentic love,

undecorated, unadorned, unsaid... a true and honest love that is

enough no matter what it does or doesn’t do... a show, aurora

borealis–obvious, of love that makes you realize that what on

Monday you believed you knew of love is like a snowflake landing

on your mitten and you say about it, “This is snow,” and then you go

to bed, and when you wake, voila, it’s Tuesday’s blizzard. Oh.

Carl Larsson, Flowers on the Windowsill

AH, LIBERTY

That splendid energy is what you saw and wondered if perhaps it

might have ruined you for anything more subtle, ordinary,

commonplace, but that is not the case; in fact, do you know what?

Behind that spear or flash or momentary drenching, when the love

seemed all there was, you knew at once the drab and plain were

necessary for the brilliance to appear, like clear skies at a festival

when the balloons go up. How else could it have been precisely what

it ought to be, and permanently etched in consciousness... have set

aright what threatened peace, and steadied everything except what

absolutely HAD (though not without a sting) to be released?

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle

Now understand, it sticks there in your memory, and the effect is not

to make the unremarkable less prepossessing than it started out.

Because, you see, there’s love on every street in every town, you just

don’t often notice it when colorlessly gowned and not barenaked. In

galoshes and a raincoat, love blends pleasantly, as Mrs. Piggle

Wiggle might if she were one of dozens on a bus, though if you paid

attention you’d see liveliness and magic snapping in the bright eyes.

What love does is fill you up with inspiration so you want to add a

splash of it to anything that isn’t dancing, shimmering, or spiced...

not discontented with the way things are, you simply have too much

by far to hold, and it is frisky, eager to be in the throng, and bold; it

strains and scrambles to be free, like twenty or a hundred frogs

you’ve got in pockets, cuffs, tucked in your shirt, beneath your hat,

stuck to your brow, and never have you wanted a companion more

than now.

LOVE LAUGHS OUT LOUD

So what you do is skip a little farther on the river path until, oh,

marvelous and happy day! There’s Christopher! You ask him, did he

see it too, barenaked love? He did, and he is awfully glad you named

it just exactly that, for he’s a bit more reticent than you. And then you

take his hand, and pretty soon you’re skipping, tripping over frogs

but keeping perfect time, the two of you, and laughing ’til you fear

you’ll (pee your pants), of which the thought brings on another tidal

wave of laughter—which, you are delighted to discover, is a rocket

launcher, flinging you into the fairyland you thought was strictly

fictional, where laughter is not only mandatory but beyond a doubt

the sweetest, most appealing, bright and blissful, silly, spilling-over

lovely, make-you-crazy thing to do for fun with someone who, like

you, has seen barenaked love appear out of the blue completely

unexpectedly that very serendipitous, amazing afternoon.