poetry pocket: the patience of ordinary things, pat schneider

and what is more generous than a window?

dear little voice,

how do you achieve a day?

it seems to me that it always completes itself effortlessly as weather.

sometimes so much so that like weather it leaves no trace; blurred into that old air that is the past, days that are ushered into nothingness as soon as they arrive and by what you cannot see: like clouds.

or like rain that coats the earth until the interruption of the sun.

it is simple and ordinary; the cloud’s flux; the day’s passing; the sky’s shattering into water; the endless arrangement between it and the sea. this powerful alien that lays its body each day in humility beneath your feet.

The Blue Sky Maiden (Yasuzô Masumura, 1957)

the most persistent relics of our ordinary realities are so essential that they often become forgotten: like the white wings of a gull that leave no trace, but give rhythm to the sky.

like salt. or the undulation of waves. so blessedly neutral:

The Patience of Ordinary Things, Pat Schneider.

need i remind you, little voice, of the properties of ordinary things? the way they aimlessly and absolutely fill the space you are in; how they do not withhold or tyrannise; how they are are both pragmatic and sacred?

after all, the day you were born was an ordinary day: a little body, a little cry, something as simple and effortless as sudden light.

annie dillard wrote that we cannot cause light:

“Although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise… I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”

- Annie Dillard, On Seeing

Eye and Finger, Chicago 1940. Nathan Lerner.

so, yes. pat schneider, in her poem, is praising the mystery of a tea cup. the sanctity of a left toe.

how we are held more by what we do not know than what we do.

it is true that in the spaces between the miraculous, amid our tears, we still live amid salt and birds. and sometimes we can stand beneath them together. and sometimes we can be very quiet, or say wow, or listen to the gulls give rhythm to our breathing.

and me?

i want to write words as certain as sand, clear as light, cold as the curled wing. as ordinary as a dish towel.

something as simple as sailing on solar wind.

how strange to think it: how at the edge of our ordinary, human days, there remains something so unobtrusively startling, so lucid, so tender, and so passed over.

such creative containers for little lives like ours.

love,

ars poetica.

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little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. my work will always be completely free, and takes considerable Time and Love to give to you several days a week. if it has brought you Joy, consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket.

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Devin Kelly

’s wonderful words on the ecstastic ordinary.