On my walk today
the goose on the lawn looked at
me then looked away.
It blazed in the Spring
sunshine, as strong as the clouds
above the water.
I felt honored. I
stood there letting it sink in,
with nothing to say.
Why record this? I
felt like a fool standing there,
but a peaceful one.
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Author: Tom D'Evelyn
Tom D'Evelyn is a private editor and writing tutor in Cranston RI and, thanks to the web, across the US and in the UK. He can be reached at tom.develyn@comcast.net. D'Evelyn has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. Before retiring he held positions at The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard University Press, Boston University and Brown University. He ran a literary agency for ten years, publishing books by Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, among others. Before moving to Portland OR he was managing editor at Single Island Press, Portsmouth NH. He blogs at http://tdevelyn.com and other sites.
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Metaxyturn Diaries 
Perhaps the goose felt equally foolish, Tom. Who knows?!
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this is a perceptive account of encountering the extraordinary in the ordinary. It gets at the paradox of trying to describe or put into words the irreducible steps of sacred ritual. It thus helps teh reader see the pardox of the superfluous yet valuable description of such exchagnes between teh human and the beyond-human. (I think of William Desmond’s point about the Greek ‘hyper’ conoting at once ‘below’ and ‘above’ or again Jack Karouac’s beat beatific). The poem is a kind of medium of divine encounter, an echo but also a recreation and recalling of that passage of peace it recounts.
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