The title of my blog, Epiphany of the Everyday, refers to some wonder I see and fall in love with daily. The poet Billy Collins talks about this in his poem Aimless Love, which starts:

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 fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

Collins writes about his loves. I draw mine. These charcoal drawings show the  tulip I fell for,

 

 

the last one left in the vase that over a series of days stretched and moved until its petals fell away,

 

and for the small pine cone that our resident squirrel had eaten down to its core.

Billy Collins continues:

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

Today, “my heart propped up in a field on its tripod”, I fell for another pine cone, much larger, half eaten. It’s on the shelf in my studio. I have charcoal in hand waiting to draw it, to say something about “the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it”.*

* Georgia O’Keefe, Viking Press http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/

For the entire poem, Aimless Love, visit http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Aimless_Love.html

For information on poet Billy Collins, visit http://www.billy-collins.com/

All drawings: © Constance Anderson