A sprig of dry lavender rolled between thumb and forefinger. A headboard for a bed thrown into the bushes that looks like a ladder. Taped to a pole, now fading: REWARD FOR SILVER GLASSES IN BLACK SOFT BAG ON SAT / 30 / CALL OR TEXT 07957321765 THANKS.
The non-believer is attempting to learn the holy-man poem. To make it his own, he imagines You (cummings’ capitalized deity) as an Experience, a Way of Being (WOB) rather than Daddy-In-The Sky harvesting gratitude off His beholden begats.
And what is this elusive WOB? Well, no less than a kind of transcendent quiddity: ears of ears wakened, eyes of eyes opened. A buried self, recently dead-asleep, but by the end of the poem more fully alive to the grace of each day.