A Poem For Thursday

“Joy” by Denise Levertov:

You must love the crust of the earth
on which you dwell. You must be
able to extract nutriment out of a
sandheap. You must have so good
an appetite as this, else you will live
in vain. — Thoreau

Joy, the ‘well … joyfulness of
joy’—‘many years
I had not known it,’ the woman of eighty
said, ‘only remembered, till now.’

Traherne
in dark fields.
On Tremont Street,
on the Common, a raw dusk, Emerson
‘glad to the brink of fear.’
It is objective,

stands founded, a roofed gateway;
we cloud-wander

away from it, stumble
again towards it not seeing it,

enter cast-down, discover ourselves
‘in joy’ as ‘in love.’