852. Insomnia - Linda Pastan

.
I remember when by body
was a friend.

when sleep like a good dog
came when summoned.

The door to the future
had not started to shut,

and lying on my back
between cold sheets

did not feel
like a rehearsal.

Now what light is left
comes up—a stain in the east,

and sleep, reluctant
as a busy doctor,

gives me a little
of its time.

851. Sunrise - Mary Oliver

.
You can
die for it -
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. but

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of china,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

850. A Meditation On John Constable - Charles Tomlinson

"Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?"

––John Constable: The History of Landscape Painting

He replied to his own question, and with the unmannered
 Exactness of art; enriched his premises
By confirming his practice: the labour of observation
 In face of meteorological fact. Clouds
Followed by others, temper the sun in passing
 Over and off it. Massed darks
Blotting it back, scattered and mellowed shafts
 Break damply out of them, until the source
Unmasks, floods its retreating bank
 With raw fire. One perceives (though scarcely)
The remnant clouds trailing across it
 In rags, and thinned to a gauze.
But the next will dam it. They loom past
 And narrow its blaze. It shrinks to a crescent
Crushed out, a still lengthening ooze
 As the mass thickens, though cannot exclude
Its silvered-yellow. The eclipse is sudden,
 Seen first on the darkening grass, then complete
In a covered sky.
             Facts. And what are they?
He admired accidents, because governed by laws,
 Representing them (since the illusion was not his end)
As governed by feeling. The end is our approval
 Freely accorded, the illusion persuading us
That it exists as a human image. Caught
 By a wavering sun, or under a wind
Which moistening among the outlines of banked foliage
 Prepares to dissolve them, it must grow constant;
Though there, ruffling and parted, the disturbed
 Trees let through the distance, like white fog
Into their broken ranks, It must persuade
 And with a constancy, not to be swept back
To reveal what it half-conceals. Art is itself
 Once we accept it. The day veers. He would have judged
Exactly in such a light, that strides down
 Over the quick stains of cloud-shadows
Expunged now, by its conflagration of colour.
 A descriptive painter? If delight
Describes, which wrings from the brush
 The errors of a mind, so tempered
It can forgo all pathos; for what he saw
 Discovered what he was, and the hand––unswayed
By the dictation of a single sense––
 Bodied the accurate and total knowledge
In a calligraphy of present pleasure. Art
 Is complete when it is human. It is human
Once the looped pigments, the pin-heads of light
 Securing space under their deft restrictions
Convince, as the index of a possible passion,
 As the adequate gauge, both of the passion
And its object. The artist lies
 For the improvement of truth. Believe him.