We Can All Be A Little Like Annie Dillard If We Will Only Open Our Eyes Poem by Dennis Ryan

Monday afternoon and evening, April 17, 2023; Saturday morning, April 22, 2023 at 7: 05 a.m.

'I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out
of water with floppy gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes
and see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper
stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite
cone.'
—Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Chapter 2,
'Seeing'

We can all be a little like Annie Dillard
if we will only open our eyes to the world,
see the forms of nature surrounding us,
be they only a back field of trees, grasses,
wild flowers and vegetables—a tiny stream
running through it—off Buck Jones Road
in Raleigh, North Carolina. Temporary respite.
But, oh, Annie's imagination as she applies it
to the creation of metaphors—she is unsurpassed.
No one is better: ask the Indian arrow shaft
that is Annie: "I am the arrow shaft, carved along
my length by unexpected lights and gashes from
the very sky, and the book is the straying trail
of blood." Who else, who otherwise could have
written such provocative yet memorable lines?
Answer— no one. I mean no one; Annie's eyes,
her mind, her hands are that fine and powerful.
I picked up Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by chance,
ana what opportunities it has truly afforded me!