in the moment

Poetry that has always riveted me to the page and enlarged my living is a poetry of the moment. A snapshot, a glimpse, a fragment of life. A message or story isn’t really necessary for me.

Here’s a glimpse – a poem by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass:

“Auto Mirror”

In the rear-view mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;
great things dwell in small ones
for a moment.

Great things dwell in small ones? Yes. This piece stops me in my tracks, forces me to experience the universe. Note that I didn’t write “to see” the universe. The key word in the poem, for me at least, is “dwell”. And I dwell in the moment, and the moment is alive. The good and the terrible are both there. True. Always have been, and will continue. But I want to be in the moment, in the instant.

*

Linda Gregg, a poet of detail and perception, gathers a flash of life in her poem “A Dark Thing Inside the Day”:

So many want to be lifted by song and dancing,
and this morning it is easy to understand.
I write in the sound of chirping birds hidden
in the almond trees, the almonds still green
and thriving in the foliage. Up the street,
a man is hammering to make a new house as doves
continue their cooing forever. Bees humming
and high above that a brilliant clear sky.
The roses are blooming and I smell the sweetness.
Everything desirable is here already in abundance.
And the sea. The dark thing is hardly visible
in the leaves, under the sheen. We sleep easily.
So I bring no sad stories to warn the heart.
All the flowers are adult this year. The good
world gives and the white doves praise all of it.

The dark thing in Gregg’s poem, literally the sea, will take on a wide range of possibilities for different readers. The poem’s title directs us to “the day” – a precise point in time, and Gregg’s lines, filled with strong imagery, unveil that particular day. “I write in the sound…” – in the moment. This is a large poem that I never grow tired of – returning to it again and again – gleaning something new with each visit.

*

When I experience the moment while reading poetry, or when one of my own poems finds my being, I float. I know when this happens, but I can’t explain or rationalize the why or how. This is the poetry, as Rilke writes at the close of “Archaic Torso of Apollo” that forces or alters the moment: “You must change your life” (trans. Stephen Mitchell). And I do change.

*

Poems like Zagajewski’s or Gregg’s enlarge the moment. The inside of my head loses all limits and becomes some sort of vast landscape. I like that place.