I saw this poem on the internet & Jeffrey O'Malley told me about this book--

 

--and not only does this Xin Qiji poem please me during this moment of new and (for me) much desired cooler weather (but also, so sad: the "moment" of our midwestern weather is so unpleasantly imbued with the new reality of lost transitions between seasons), but it seems, too, to fit with something vaguer about the now.

I found a spot on the third floor at work, where I can wait for my xeroxes to spit out and look out the windows at a nearly perfect view.

I remember the way that looking used to be almost exclusively a pretending.

Jeffrey O'Malley asked if I read this book to write Gwenda, Rodney. I'm such a fool. No. I did not. But now I see how important this book could have been to my thinking.

Scarry argues for looking as replication, the replication of beauty as something that crosses senses and modalities; I never even thought about "plenitude and distribution" in this way before.

"How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustment of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things."