What Passes

Now is its season.

Frank Bidart

Wren, robin, willow warbler, the myriad flies, all

the small life of this morning garden busy, as my

eyes are, trying to take in the single moment, this

one, then the next, that one, while it’s happening,

not be distracted from the fact that being here—

being here, being here—is what matters, to fill

the single instant as the wind fills the garden

with its breath after breath beyond counting, in which

feeding birds and breeze-balancing flies and my

own two eyes are all abroad about their business

of singing, dancing, and whatever eyes might

be at, translating, I suppose, bringing over

what’s seen, till it’s at home in the idiom of sign,

zig-zagging from matter to meaning until all

is hypothesis and possibility, the air still there

but charged and enlarged by what it stands for—

absence, for example—and the flies and the

fretful birds being completely themselves and

what I make of them (rapture, for example,

dazzlement, the livid intersection where hunger

and hair-trigger fright have to share a heartbeat).

But when I see a tribe of tiny flies jiggling in place

on the wind like an urnful of atoms—making

a shape, a sense, beyond me—and when I see

how light shines in the spaces between them

with nothing behind it, nothing but a burly upsurge

of radiant cloud, and behind that nothing

but a shred or two of deep blue in which my eyes

are drowning, then I try to tell myself Forget

everything, except the fact that I’m an inmate

of weather, too, a resident alien like the rest

in a fatherland of shifting light and changing air,

a creature tuned as true as can be to the cadences

of absence and presence, the fullness of one

momentary good, all unspeakable effects

attending it: the simple sense of what passes

and passes for daily bread, and how to have it.