A Poet's Journal: February 19th, 2015

 

February 19th, 2015

To the east, Jupiter is arriving earlier in the evening sky each day; today, a perfectly dull white dot in the fading blue expanse.  Looking at it, one feels as if he were falling into infinity.

I have always read Thoreau in winter and spring; his words are filled with the melancholy of these months, and no matter how many times we come over the same passage, it remains steeped in a relationship that is filled with the turnings of human life.  Keats has been read as a complement alongside, though I find it difficult to veer from only one or two of his most mystical passages.  We have written so many words, but none of them has ever been enough to keep us silent; the hardest thing is perhaps letting them go, for the word always dies but our feeling for it always wants it to continue on the same plane, eternal, and for this reason confine ourselves to the most rudimentary meaning.  If we cannot look at anything as if it were a part of the ephemeral, as if it were falling into infinity, then we do not really see what is in front of us, nor hear what has been spoken.

Douglas Thornton