51/86: About Nothing
Dec. 8th, 2024 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rejectomorphNot much (nothing, to be honest) to say this chill, sad, late autumn Sunday. The bright light on red pokeweed stalks and their burden of dead, brown leaves livened only by flutters occasioned by vagrant breezes belies the clarity of the blue sky. Nothing but the sky itself is ever as simple as that sky. The world's details, sometimes so fascinating, are today merely tedious and wearying.
I wish my mind could lose itself in that blank sky, and become as quiet. It already is, I fear, as distant. As I didn't wake until after nine o'clock this morning I probably shouldn't nap, but I probably will. If I don't, I'll end up eating again, and distressing my guts to misery. So goes the slow catastrophe of age. Too late to do anything about it now, and too soon for it to do its own inevitable fix. Too bad I'm no longer good at distracting myself from the tedium of waiting.
Sunday Verse
by Richard Wilbur
A ball will bounce; but less and less. It's not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
So in our hearts from brilliance,
Settles and is forgot.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls
To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air
The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands,
Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres
Grazing his finger ends,
Cling to their courses there,
Swinging a small heaven about his ears.
But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all
Than the earth regained, and still and sole within
The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble
He reels that heaven in,
Landing it ball by ball,
And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.
Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's
Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls
On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:
The boys stamp, and the girls
Shriek, and the drum booms
And all come down, and he bows and says good-bye.
If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands
In the dust again, if the table starts to drop
Through the daily dark again, and though the plate
Lies flat on the table top,
For him we batter our hands
Who has won for once over the world's weight.
I wish my mind could lose itself in that blank sky, and become as quiet. It already is, I fear, as distant. As I didn't wake until after nine o'clock this morning I probably shouldn't nap, but I probably will. If I don't, I'll end up eating again, and distressing my guts to misery. So goes the slow catastrophe of age. Too late to do anything about it now, and too soon for it to do its own inevitable fix. Too bad I'm no longer good at distracting myself from the tedium of waiting.
Sunday Verse
The Juggler
by Richard Wilbur
A ball will bounce; but less and less. It's not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
So in our hearts from brilliance,
Settles and is forgot.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls
To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air
The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands,
Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres
Grazing his finger ends,
Cling to their courses there,
Swinging a small heaven about his ears.
But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all
Than the earth regained, and still and sole within
The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble
He reels that heaven in,
Landing it ball by ball,
And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.
Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's
Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls
On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:
The boys stamp, and the girls
Shriek, and the drum booms
And all come down, and he bows and says good-bye.
If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands
In the dust again, if the table starts to drop
Through the daily dark again, and though the plate
Lies flat on the table top,
For him we batter our hands
Who has won for once over the world's weight.
