Wednesday of Lent Week 4  When the blackbird  flew out of sight
It marked the edge Of one of many circles  (Wallace
Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)   Great poetry
often shocks us to a new level of wakefulness by drawing our
attention to something so obvious we can’t understand why we
hadn’t seen it for ourselves before. But when we try to put this
new perception into our own words we come up with very flat
sounding clichés.  True insights are delivered and interpreted
in the package they come in. Truth is always embodied, however
hard we try to make it abstract and pin it down like a dead
butterfly in an exhibition case of ‘timeless truths’. Truth is
as embodied and temporal as we are – but also lives in the
transcendence that makes us fully alive, fully awake.  What is
Stevens describing here? Perhaps the sense of a residue or a
remnant of experience that remains after the main event has
passed. The blackbird has gone out of sight but the person
watching it is left with a vivid sense of the