What we see
Tonight in my workshop we described the scene outside our window: a policeman supervised the removal by tow truck of a tar kettle that had, apparently, somehow collided with a streetlight before we arrived.
Each of us wrote the scene quite differently.
In The Art of Description, Mark Doty writes, “It’s incomplete to say that description describes consciousness; it’s more like a balance between terms, saying what you see and saying what you see.”
Did we change the scene by writing it? Did the scene change us?
::
In this excerpt from “Planetarium,” Adrienne Rich writes,
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
::
The light, a heartbeat, a mountain, the pulsar, a man, my body.
Or Doty’s balance between the terms.
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