lily light

    Light lily lily light light lily light

    Imagically
    Lightli ly

    Outline stones for the wind

    All creatures come
    To mind to oneness

Light first and last, and lilies and lights along the way. The alleyway, in just that way and just that order, pleasured my eyes. Of course it was a happiness to say. “Only the lull I like” wrote Whitman. If I can see it, it must be moving; and when I see it, I am moving too. The lull is not a pause. The lull is an ensemble underway, and as I found, anything I might say would be an adverb. [157]

Donald Revell, The Art of Attention (Graywolf Press, 2007)

made new by translation

And so, via such stints of translation, the pleasures of writing have time and again returned to me. With ears for a new sound, with eyes rinsed clear of shady habit, I could hear a line I’d never written and see a beauty further than I’d known. I suppose that‘s all that a new poem is, to a poet: a cadence that was always on the wind but only just now heard as a music; an object always to hand but only just now lifted into the sunshine where it shows the eye a shape and shapeliness it had not seen to use.

—Donald Revell, The Art of Attention (Graywolf Press, 2007)