Attention and Love

Billy Collins, in his poem "Monday," writes that there are regular places for all workers to be - fishermen, barbers, clerks, miners - and that the right place for poets is at their windows looking out.

"What window it hardly seems to matter / though many have a favorite. // for there is always something to see -- / a bird grasping a thin branch, / the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner, / those two boys in wool caps angling across the street. "

The poet's job is to notice things.  The poet's job is "attention" to specific things.  And the world, filled with action and stuff, is always 'here' for the poet's noticing.  

In another poem, "Aimless Love," Collins addresses the KIND of attention he has for things he notices.  He has a kind of omnidirectional curiosity (love?) towards many, many things.

"This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, / I fell in love with a wren / and later in the day with a mouse / the cat had dropped under the dining room table. // In the shadows of an autumn evening, / I feel for a seamstress / still at her machine in the tailer's window, / and later for a bowl of broth. / steam rising like smoke from a naval battle. // This is the best kind of love, I thought, / without recompense, without gifts, / or unkind words, without suspicion, / or silence on the telephone. // The love of the chestnut, the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel. // No lust, no slam of the door -- / the love of the miniature orange tree, / the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower, / the highway that cuts across Florida."

In these two poems, he identifies a couple aspects of "right living": attention and love.  

In other poems, I seem to catch a glimpse of other parts of Collins' vision of right living.

In his poem "Velocity,"a kind of momento mori he recognizes the "speed lines" that should be seen on all things because we're racing towards death.  And in "Istanbul," (among other poems where he seems to be loafing and happy) he celebrates taking pleasure and in being grateful, filled up with gratitude like a cloud fills with rain. 

In these poems, he identifies a couple different aspects: gratitude and (realizing) temporariness (and so preciousness).  All of these things remind me of things I'm learning from Buddhism and meditation teachers.