Sunday, April 30, 2017

Beauty

 A staircase at Royal Château de Blois, France

Beauty is a bank of clouds and the riverbank
Beauty is the fine tip of your favorite pen
Beauty is the butter churn, the salt mine, and the breakfast plate
Beauty is a dozen eggs, a dozen cookies, a dozen months 
           each year
Beauty is an infant’s hand grasping your ear lobe
Beauty is the osprey nest, the eagle's nest, and learning
            the difference between them
Beauty is primary—a blue stamp, a yellow letter, a red mailbox
Beauty is bare feet on a warm beach, toes sinking slow
            in the surf-soft sand
Beauty is the Moroccan orange tree and the Californian lemon
Beauty is the cat purring, and beauty is the cat
Beauty is the grandmother’s garden of tended and amended soil
Beauty is the hemisphere and the blogosphere
Beauty is a screen of pixels shaping the face of your love,
            and beauty is your love
Beauty is quick—a glimpse through the train window
Beauty is slow—a dinner with as many conversations as courses.  
Beauty is a pair of dancing shoes with holes worn through,
            and beauty is the music that wore them out
Beauty is the staircase and every shadow ever cast across it
Beauty is a sink on a second story, water piping up
            from deep below the earth to wash your hands
Beauty is a hot shower
Beauty is a sky of stars and planes and satellites
Beauty is the embroidered pillow and the night full of dreams
Beauty is the truth, told straight or slant, with pen or brush 
            or body or sound or tongue or hands or clay or glass
            or stone or flowers or tile or might
Beauty is Creator and created
Beauty is here 
           and beauty is now