For It All

By Shawn Michel de Montaigne

Love and hate, loss and betrayal, inspiration and perspiration. God and nature. Poetry that isn't saturated or diluted or made safe for general consumption. Read and be enlightened, enraged, enraptured, or educed. What you won't be is neutral.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawn Michel de Montaigne
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201220990

Shawn Michel de Montaigne

I'm a writer, illustrator, and fractalist. A wonderer, wanderer, and an unapologetic introvert. I'm a romantic; I'm inspired by the epic, the authentic, the numinous, and the luminous. Most of all, I'm blessed.

Book preview

1.

––––––––

There is the moment

and nothing else.

Tea and fiber, hard line of the ocean horizon,

birds at the feeder.

The blessed union of weight with wonder ...

Sleep, release ... the ballast unties me of gravity.

Morning.

Where does it all end?

––––––––

I scour the landscape ...

I plumb the sky—

there they are! flying away at speed—

or, sometimes, laterally.

Not so often towards me.

––––––––

Rare is the empty firmament.

It does not matter.

The sun traces its eternal arc ...

and I, its observer, cannot perish.

In looking, I become what cannot come to be.

––––––––

2.

––––––––

Medical charts.

It's a competition.

Whoever has the most dire chart wins.

They compete on a grassy hill overlooking the inlet.

I can't help but hear, being just a few yards away.

––––––––

The great mass of humanity.

These two represent it perfectly.

––––––––

For instead of the inlet—

its cerulean waters,

the loons floating peacefully on them,

the seals out on the point, and the gulls gathered nearby, resting, resting, resting ...

The untroubled surf rolling in, translucent jade-green as it topples over,

foamy-white as it thickly paints the sand,

the fishing trawler beyond, and the breeze,

becoming ever so more insistent,

or the feathers of clouds overhead,

contrasting the drifting dazzle of manless sky,

the sun today unblocked by rain or fog,

the serenity of it all,

the utter quietude,

the dance of energy, seamless and perfect,

all united, connected,

souls all,

purposeless—on the surface ...

random—but only to the inattentive ...

––––––––

Instead this—medical charts.

Her husband has cancer and had to be hauled away in an ambulance last night.

Her shingles landed her in the hospital last month—

and did she mention that her daughter was involved in a serious car crash?

––––––––

They're probably very devout, churchgoing Christians.

––––––––

And yet God is so infinitely far away from them.

3.

––––––––

(For a hero)

In that moment,

the light will gray.

Beyond it you will see an arch.