BeagleWarhol2 - The Monday Morning Memo

The Three Goals
by David Budbill,
from Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse
(Copper Canyon Press).

The first goal is to see the thing in itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
No symbolism, please.

The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal in the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

“When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp.

Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, scarlet shadows like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices.

Do you hear? That is the grass harp, always telling a story — it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.”

- Truman Capote

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