Of Mere Being

Earth on foot 17

September 11, 2025

At a cafe, Baltimore, Maryland, near Johns Hopkins University, 11am, cool, cloudy

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

——Wallace Stevens

Today I am contemplating this poem, discovered while reading How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom. I especially love those last two lines. So evocative! Bloom recommends memorizing poems: “Committed to memory, the poem will possess you”; and that the Romantics understood the proper work of poetry: “to startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life.”

Of mere being in Baltimore, sitting with a cappuccino (before noon, of course! Otherwise, what would the Italians think!)

After walking the San Martin Road loop through trees and rivulets, I place my number on the outdoor table and retrieve my pen. Two small dogs sit beside me, one in sphinx pose with its front legs extended in two parallel lines. This fluffy creature stares at who knows what.  Fixedly. Nearby, a woman with black hair, black shirt, black glasses… except, look again—that coal black head includes a cobalt blue hue plus bangs. On the bench next to her, a woman in a billowy sleeveless dress taps her phone; her wavy, auburn hair forms a halo beneath her baseball cap. At the picnic table, a sixty-ish woman sits solo. Thin, with legs crossed, her right Nike sneaker toe delicately touches the sidewalk. Every page or so she looks up at the sky, long neck extended like an egret. Gazing down at the pages once more, her lips move as she reads. I decide, for reasons unknown to me, that she is intelligent.

Across the courtyard, a twenty-ish man sighs heavily. He sits in front of his open laptop and types steadily. Black AirPods fill his ears. Circling us all, popcorn-style, brown birds flit. They peck the sidewalk at invisible things.

The new sage notebook proves inviting for creative pursuits. I wrote a lot, and drew a tree with my cartridge pen whose ink flows with pleasing smoothness. I looked up at a decisive moment while rendering, to ascertain what angle the curb took, but it was gone. An SUV had parked in front of it.