July 19: Searching for Beauty, Sandra Beasley, "Inventory"

I am sitting in my office at the university at the moment.  The hallway is dark.  The place shuts down at 4 p.m. during the summer.  Everybody goes home, and the lights, one by one, blink out.

I was looking for something beautiful to write about in this post.  I thought about sitting by a window and gazing out at Lake Superior.  I contemplated hiking into the forest and gazing at all the green around me.  Tried listening to music, reading some Sharon Olds.  Nothing is striking me as beautiful this evening.

Maybe I'm trying too hard.  There's an empty Diet Coke bottle sitting on my desk.  The fluorescent light is striking it, and it's glowing like an icicle on Christmas morning.  There's a ratty copy of Shakespeare's plays on my bookshelf, its binding frayed and torn, and it looks like it belongs in the Library of Alexandria.  My office mate has a picture of her two sons sitting on her desk in a filigreed metal frame.

Maybe beauty is always around.  I just don't take the opportunity to notice it very often.

Saint Marty is pretty hungry at the moment.  Food sounds beautiful.  A double cheeseburger would be the freakin' Sistine Chapel.

Inventory

by:  Sandra Beasley

We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.

We forget the display is blind.

Your fanned tail really a cupped palm,

gathering each hen’s quiver to your ear,

your feathers the green-blue glamours of

reflective absence. No one

ever praises the ass of the peacock,

grin of quills that does the heavy lifting,

or how you eat anything from ants

to Styrofoam, from cheese to chicken.

Road roamer, flower devourer:

the one who’ll pick a fight with a goat.

Preen all you want. What I love of you

will be the bare undercarriage,

the calamus. I am done with beauty.

Only a blinking eye can measure the light.

Beauty's in the eye of the beholder . . .