Creek:

Creek:

a concept my eyes
skim across like a
too-familiar word. 

Brown thing, 
wet thing. I almost
walk past the thing,

but blue on brown
catches my eye,
catches my breath—

there is sky on the water,
and a fish is breaking free
of clouds, his silver belly
its own sun. He jumps,

splashes,

shatters creek,

shatters sky.  

The Prompt

Sometimes, I move through the world as if it is made of concepts rather than of concrete and particular things. I see a tree, label it “tree,” and continue about my day without noticing that the seed pods have just dried to brown and the leaves are almost their summer size. I overlook the laciness of the lichen-splattered trunk, miss the beauty of that branch held out like a beckoning arm.

It’s easy to reduce the world to static concepts. Our brains want to be efficient. They have countless filters and filing systems in place to help them do this. And that’s a good thing! There’s so much to do and so much to absorb—we can’t notice everything. But we can be intentional about stepping out of these filters and into a fuller experience of our environment.

For today’s prompt, choose something whose particularity you have never paused to appreciate. It could be a tree that you walk past regularly but have never stopped to experience more closely. Or it could be something non-living that is integral to your life but used without awareness or thought: refrigerator, sock, doorknob, charger.

Take some time to notice and contemplate the particularity of this being or object. What sensory details reveal themselves upon closer inspection? What might this history of this object/being be? Where has it traveled? Who or what has it encountered?

I look forward to reading your poems—and to catching up on your poems from my last post! It’s been a very busy few days. I hope you’re well, friends, and I’m so grateful that you’re here.