Beauty Hurts

Beauty hurts.
Beauty demands too much.
Beauty makes me feel small and skinless.

I like a little buffer of numbness
Between me and the world.
Just a little extra hide.
A carapace.
Is that wrong?
It works for me.
I'm open to experience.
I just don't need it to ravage me all the time.

I get caught out.
I get ambushed.
The beauty lurks in unexpected places,
Like a brigand,
And I am not always on my guard.
It leaps into my eyes. I close them.
It's too late.
It has already leapt in.

It stays with me.
Burned onto the brain.
I get no respite.
I close my eyes.
I get no respite.
The beauty burns and burns.

I am a small person.
All I want is to be small and comfortable.
The beauty mocks me with a glimpse of greatness.
A taste of deep feeling.
A hint of a higher grace.

I don't want that.
I want to wake up slowly from a blank sleep
And eat a little cereal
And read something sad in the newspaper
And shake my head
And have a muffin.
I don't need the sublime ache of awareness.
It doesn't help me.
It doesn't help me get through my day.

New York Blooms

One week a year, New York blooms.
Between their scarecrow bareness and their lush green plenitude,
The trees give a brief riot of white, as if to say

We are not so sad amid the gray and the brick;
We are not so tame as you may think we are;
We are Nature in her glory, and our bounty is a kind of overcoming.
Be thankful, and do not flatter yourselves;
You may flourish, but we flourish also.

New York does not reply.
She has other calls to answer.
But she relaxes her shoulders a little,
And begins to forgive the winter.

One Certainty

Crane your neck out the window
As the eve-lit trees rush by,
Or stroll among their twilight shapes
While starlight pricks the sky;
Stop and take a photograph,
But you can never win –
However hard or well you try,
You will never take it all in.

Face the trembling vagrant;
Do not avert your eyes –
And nurture in your deepest heart
The terror of goodbyes;
Take the coldest breath of life
And press it to your skin;
Smell the bullet; taste the knife;
You will never take it all in.