.

yesterday while standing on the 39th floor
of the TD Centre, panoramic view of a city
in rain, and looking down on Front Street,
the ferry docks and islands, then back
at Wellington with everything beyond
stretched out on a grid that too easily
travels the mind away from green like
Hegel galloping headlong into absolute
knowing, towards words like propaedeutic
which can't be easily worked into casual
conversations but do fit some analytic
notion of the ungraspable, absolutes,
their paradox, and wanting to peel
grey off the city like a layer of
sunburned skin, to pare it back to
its originary state, back to something
tender, this truimphalist narrative
that reflexively returns me to the
space within, to visual art
contextualized in this spatial
metaphor and its obvious implication
that art will always rise to this
kind of elevated state high above
the everyday, encased in some
god-forsaken steelandglass excuse
for architecture perhaps but
juxtaposed to nothing but a bird's
eye view, while standing there I
was ungrounded by a beautiful
irony, that art is a completely
sensible way of being-in-the-world,
is concrete in a different way than
the 21st Centuried business (man's)
grasp of sense-certainty (ie. the
fuck or fight paradigm), that
children intuitively understand
this and that all of us begin by
knowing that the heart of art
always beats with a little haiku,
and while standing 39 floors above
the mundane, remembered a baby girl
I know who recently saw a flower
up-close for the very first time
and responded by opening her mouth,
just that, and later, after moving
through a day that was filled with
strange coincidences, was inadvertently
led to the writings of a haigin who
observed the very same event and
thankfully left a haiku-trace
of t/his experience

The tiny child
shown a flower
opens its mouth

(Seitu-ju, 18th C)

it is not rational self-correction
but sense-certainty
that reunites
a watchful eye
with its feeling heart

and all these words, like people spied
from 39 floors up, seem ... small