I got down on my knees, opened the window, rested my elbows on the sill, and stuck my head out the window to breathe some fresh air. While I did, I watched the subtle movements in our backyard (lemon trees, other trees, stone steps, an elusive black-and-white cat, border by other apartments on all sides). Dew gathered in the upturned, cupped hands of leaves, glinting in the light as the leaves slightly shake, as if to drop the heavy burden filling their palms. One leaf on another tree fell, collided with other branches on the way down—I thought to myself, how lucky that I looked out in time to see a leaf fall, but then again there are probably leaves falling all the time. A bug, not a normal fly, judging by the way it hovered at one point in the air, like a hummingbird.

I saw all this and it started to seem like it might be beautiful. And, as I do when something starts to seem like it might be beautiful, I started to write a poem in my head—trying out lines, forming stanzas. But I was discouraged, for least a couple of reasons.

First, poetry did not seem to be an apt art form for capturing this backyard scene. It was primarily an experience of sight. It was quiet in the morning. All I could taste was the faint remnant of toothpaste and all I could smell was the crisp air. The only physical feelings were my knees on the hardwood and my elbows on the sill. My eyes were the windows where the beauty shined through and it seemed that there was too much of it for words.

Dozens of trees, hundreds of leaves on each of them. The trunk of one tree so broad that I probably couldn’t have gotten my arms all the way around it. Branches of the lemon tree sagging, lemons almost touching the ground. Millions of grains of dirt on the ground. The dry birdbath, the cushion on the ground that perhaps someone brought out to sit on and then left. Light playing off of all of it in myriad ways.

And I could have gone on like this—using my words to describe what I was seeing. But it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem that a reader would enjoy a catalog—separated by commas and periods, organized in the typical block-of-text prose—of what I was seeing. I am not a painter, a drawer, or a sketcher, but I think these art forms would have been more apt for the backyard scene. “A picture is worth a thousand words” proves true in this instance. Our eyes are eyes. They are not lips and brains. What part of us processes the written word? What experiences are most appropriately communicated in the written form?

Second, in a note from an editor regarding a recent collection of poetry, the editor wrote (paraphrasing) that happenings are beautiful because of what they can tell us, not just because they happen. I have been mulling over it and I’m still not sure if I agree with this. Might things be beautiful just because they happen? As humans, we want to have things our way. We want cars so we can travel fast and far on roads. We want tall buildings so that we can cram more people into cities. We want our lives to mean something. And we want our art to mean something too. Why is all the most popular art focused on the same handful of themes? Love, violence, success, failure. Is there a place in human art for a backyard to just be a backyard without personifying it? Without analogizing it to the ecstasies and miseries to which we are accustomed because we are human?