Let Every Line be its own Revelation

For twenty years I have referenced this line by Edward Hirsch "Let every line be its own revelation" from his poem, The Horizontal Line (Hommage to Agnes Martin) thinking that it was an elegant way to express the idea of paragraphs being conveyed by singular marks. I recently re-read the poem and realized that my whole understanding of opera Divina (painting as prayer) comes not only from my ecclesial monastic studies, but likely originates in my understanding from this poem and specifically this concluding section. 

Someone left a prayer book open in the rain
And the printed lines blurred
Ink smudged our fingers when we prayed 

Let every line be its own revelation
The line in the painting was surrounded by light
The light in the painting held its breath
On the threshold of a discovery
If only she could picture
The boundlessness of God drawing
An invisible thread through the starry spaces
If only she could paint
The horizon without limits
A horizontal line is a pilgrimage

A segment of devotion wrested from time

An infinitely gentle mark on a blank page

The stripe remains after everything else is gone
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It is a wisp of praise with a human hand

It is singing on a bare canvas 
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(The Antioch Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, Angels & Devils (Spring, 2002), pp. 272-276) 

Agnes Martin, “Summer” (1964): Synthesizing both Abstract Expressionism and minimalism. Accessed https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/agnes-martin-a-matter-of-fact-mystic