AG: Just one brief example of him (William Carlos Williams) noticing something around him – “The Horse.”
“The horse moves/ independently/ without reference/ to his load/ He has eyes/like a woman and/ turns them/ about, throws/ back his ears/and is generally/conscious of/the world. Yet/ he pulls when/he must and/pulls well, blowing/fog from/ his nostrils/like fumes from/ the twin/exhausts of a car.”
So his metaphor is, like saxiflage, taken from direct perception.
Or here, a more direct example of subtle, direct, exact, precise seeing something, like a Zen master painting a little calligraphic picture of birds: “The Maneuver”
The Maneuver
“I saw the two starlings/ coming in toward the wires./ But at the last,/ just before alighting, they/ turned in the air together/ and landed backwards!/ that’s what got me – to/ face into the wind’s teeth.”
So he actually saw the birds coming down on the wires no less – not on the branch of the rose tree – but on the wires, on the electric wires above his house – and, in descending, turning around “to/face into the wind’s teeth” – to land against the wind, which is the way starlings do land, actually. If you notice them.
Larry Fagin: (Amazing!)
AG: Yes, and then “that’s what got me” is his American-ese acknowledgement of the amazement. An appreciation of his own noticing and appreciation of their eternal history -that they’ve taken billions of years to learn that one. Billions of lifetimes to get to that.
to be continued