This week’s guest poet is Alice Gribbin. She’s one of the sharpest poets I know, a singular voice; and I’m honored to share a poem of hers with you, my beloved readers.
Epithalamium
Describe colour.
Life has no opinions.
The good it would do describing
any of this, ahead of time, to see and take in
more than ever could be described—and take in
where?
Say what beauty is; the fact of it,
like temperature. Raking light on skin.
Every tree moving in a thousand directions,
bark like skin, raking light on leaves.
Life cannot stop itself.
The roses, bees drunk and pollinating
because they are bees, us loving because we have
no choice in the matter, pebbles on Mars,
the glory of having
no choice.
Life and its needing to exist,
like gravity pulls and
apparently only pulls—never pushes.
The good it would do not describing.
We can say our eyes are open.
And presence, expectation, assertion, action, ability,
joy, ability
as joy, observing the heavy boughs
and being sometimes unsatisfied.
You are the task, not the pupil (Franz Kafka, 1917).
The trees are very aware of oblivion.
The new minutes telling us:
life cannot stop itself, it cannot stop.
Alice Gribbin is an English writer living in Northern California. She's currently writing a book on aesthetic sensibility. She tweets @asgribbin.