[Newspoetry] Mastery without Masters

[Donald L Emerick]

Mastery without Masters

When I watch many people
doing some kinds of tasks,
I often know enough about
some of those tasks to tell
a prime difference between
someone who has mastery
of what he or she is doing,
and someone who does not,
of whom I could not even say,
just by one watching of them,
that such a one is still learning
or that some other is too limited
ever to be any better than just now.

My observations defect from truth
in another obvious way as well,
for I can not, by any one watch,
tell that this moment was ideal,
for all or many of the observed,
or even some of the observed,
who would be at least enough.

I might have been watching when
everyone was abnormally distracted,
when none was quite himself or herself,
a moment of truth in which we know
we are rejecting something as us.

Surely, I theorize, most of the time
most of the people that I watch
are doing most of those things
most ways that they usually do.

My mistake is the "usual" suspect,
the one that I work my way around,
when I round up the usual suspects:
the usual could only be a theoretical idea
that thinks it sees itself in a every mirror,
usually, almost always, when one looks.

I do not say this
because I reject the usual
or think the abnormal better,
nor even to warn you and remind me
of jagged reefs beneath sloping waves
that the usual rules so well when
it leaps out from abnormal deeps,
splashes and disappears again,
the abnormal normally gone,
like mastery displaying
itself, carelessly.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick
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