Accurate Beauty

It was Yves Saint-Laurent who said, “Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?” And I want writing that is elegant now, simple and without flourish, the sort of elegance that tells a truth. That forgets itself, the garb of words. 

I went looking. Here is Linda Gregg’s poem:

Elegance

by Linda Gregg

All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.

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What is elegance but accurate and unexpected beauty? John O’Donohue says, “Beauty invites us towards profound elegance of the soul. It reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us.” 

And Coleman Barks writes in a brief intro to one of the sections in The Essential Rumi that elegance is, “The sudden opening of one’s eyes to the elaborate, extravagant beauty around us.” 

And here is Rumi on how beauty wells up into our inner being:

“Because I love this, I am never bored.
Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of springwater
in my ear and in my inner being.” 

Beauty is never boring, beauty is accurate.

Elegance carries with it kindness. Elegance rattles and elegance sings. But it is not easily attained.  

Elegance

by Hafiz

It
is not easy
to stop thinking ill
of others.

Usually one must enter into a friendship
with a person

Who has accomplished that great feat himself
then

Something
might start to rub off on you
of that

True
Elegance.