blessèd
            with a line from rosemerry wahtola trommer

the poem you’re going to write tomorrow
is unfailingly held somewhere today,
no telling where,
but an incipient poem is always in the space 
between things, invisible,
suspended in stillness,
fiercely alive with potential energy.

it does not belong to any one or any thing
but is nonetheless poised in starting position,
present, available on the runner’s block
ready to arise
the moment unforeseeable
shifts take place
within its
force fields,
its unpredictable force fields!

            —the time you fell off your bike, age ten,
            and got yourself a big ol’ bloody knee,
            that knee now perhaps doing a boxer’s shuffle,
            limbering up to embrace a new word
            you learned just two days ago:
            hypnopompic—

that energy! measured in joules
and joy and jarring road blocks,
arranging and rearranging
through interaction,
configuring and reconfiguring
once you sound the starting horn.
perhaps you leap up only
to stare into space

at first, before beginning
to download the divine.
at the same time, 
measured in astonishments,
piecing itself together here in front of you,
is what you are writing right now.

this poem, emerging out of the ether
letter by letter on your laptop,

            —tap tap tap, tap tap—

this poem that was yesterday the unfathomable 
poem you’d write tomorrow
about whose particulars
in that moment
you knew
not one 
blessèd
thing,

not
one.

i remind myself:
open fully to this running that is not a race
that is not even running,
that is wild participation in catalyst 
and wind, wonder and words,
movement and interplay,
quiet collision and holy collaboration. 

—dotty seiter

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Notes about poem and art:
• In the same way that enlightenment is not a single event but a long-term living breathing unfolding, the understanding of where-a-poem-comes-from is also a “blessèd” ongoing process.
• And where does art come from? Same place, I think, as poems! Did I set out to paint this particular piece? I did not. But measured is what came into being when I sounded the starting horn, ink and sketchbook at hand.