the will to live

What I am trying to muster is not a physical, keep-your-lungs-going kind of thing. Living is a lot more than breathing, than organs smoothly operating. The way I mean to do it is more like flying, like knowing the world from both earthly and aerial views; more like what these poets and a young I have described:

Octavio Paz:
Freedom is wings,
the wind in leaves, pausing over
a simple flower....


Neruda:
To
rise
to
the
sky
you
need

two wings,
a violin,
and so many things....


Little Lara:
butterfly wings
can’t take you high but
they will carry you low
where you can see
and they will sparkle under the sun’s light
as you rise
into the deep blue sky

delicate butterfly wings will carry you
where you can see


Cowboy Junkies (Townes Van Zandt lyrics):
to live is to fly
low and high
so shake the dust off your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes


E.E. Cummings:
who are you, little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)


A.R. Ammons:
I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper--though
that, too--but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.


What I am trying to muster is not a physical, keep-your-lungs-going kind of thing.
I am trying to regain a certain way of seeing the world that once came as naturally to me as breathing; a way of making the moments of life into the verses of poetry.