after a bright moon

What a day. I don't know why I always feel the urge to try to describe what I see, but I do. Maybe I'm just trying to put a net over something.

I was walking outside and had good old Tintern Abbey in my head. I was stuck on one section... This is what I like about memorizing poems. Once they are internalized, parts seem to just surface now and again in connection with some feeling or memory. And sometimes they come up, slightly changed. This part, I kept hearing in my head, with the beginning line of, "For I have learned to look on love..." I realized later that of course that was not right. But so it is, and it fits just as well, I think.

For I have learned
   To look on nature, not as in the hour
   Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes                    90
   The still, sad music of humanity,
   Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
   To chasten and subdue.

In the sunshine, everything is rosy, slightly glowing. It's like a pregnancy glow... nothing much to see yet, just a subtle but unmistakable luminosity to the tips of the bare branches, and the soft smudge of yellow-green at the edges of the fir boughs. I sat a long while on some mossy bluffs overlooking the ocean. I love a bed of moss - the way it looks like a dense forest from an airplane window. Love blurring my eyes, and viewing the ground as if I was 10,000 feet above the earth, looking over forests and hills and rocky mountains, swamps and desert. I love that all of life is contained in every aspect of life. I love that even a mass of people looks like a land formation from afar, and that everything enormous is contained inside everything minute, and vice versa.
I also felt nostalgia and a prickling of senses that I couldn't identify. I don't know if I was reminded of spring or summer or fall or winter. But I also think that all seasons are present in each season, and that human life is the same way. We are never just one age, and continually slide up and down the spectrum of youthful to ancient and inspired to exhausted.

The ocean was quiet and contained like a lake today. It was divided in half, one side writhing on the surface as if with delicate snakes, the other pulled taut and smooth. Something far away was jumping in the water. The splashes were big enough to make me wonder if it could be a porpoise. And above me, of course, were eagles and ravens, and in the woods sweet chicadees and robins.

.