He had a perfect way of saying the desert had been crossed: Where water needs the flowers, we’re no longer lost. And there we laid him; and here grows the moss. “Where Water Needs the Flowers” Recently Banned Literature, April 11, 2014 . Copper In Your Palm Air so heavy with pollen and perfume, you wear it home. Comb it into the bathroom sink. Some settles on the lacy fern. […]
Maybe I should burn all of the others and keep this one. January 17, 2021 . Until We Meet What if we think of words as bells, each with a sound that’s just arrived from a great distance — across fields, down mountains, over graveyards, swept along alleys and streets, and of we who ring them as angels without names? Songs and Letters, September 24, 2008 . [ 998 ]
If you will not buy my flowers, she said, then I will give them to you. And she thrust them into my hand in a way that let me know how poor I had always been, and how suddenly rich I had become. We met often after that, always and never quite by chance — such is the nature of miracles. She was little more than a child. I asked […]
September mad and breathing fire — while mountains burn, we valley firs cast off our words and add them to the sacrifice. Your gift is not despised. It sparks the angels’ eyes in paradise. . [ 864 ]
Some of us are armed with guns, others with guitars, paintbrushes, and poems. Love, though, is not armed, and it remains the strongest, tenderest, wisest, most patient, pliant force of all. Is there a better way to follow? Does one need politics and religion in order to live peacefully and to act with love? No. And yet we have created a world in which nearly all of us are armed […]
Up at three-thirty, for no particular reason, other than, like an oft-reheated meal, the sleeper was done, and then some. But the night joys are great ones, with dawn coming on. Dawn, the grand assumption. It is a cricket-morning, the first of the late-summer, early-fall season. Crickets cast no votes. They do not need mail boxes or polling places. They have no gerrymandered districts. They have rhythm and purpose. They […]
A profusion of Queen Anne’s Lace along both sides of the road, offset with patches of tall yellow flowers in bloom — whatever their name, or names, they are the same we see on our walks by the river, and which the bees love. In this gentle-warm atmosphere, one might think, or perhaps only wish, that the railroad tracks’ sole purpose is the transporting of dreams. From north to south […]
If I were to walk two hours in the heat, carrying my canvases through wild blackberries into the heart of the grass seed fields, and spend the day painting while hunger gnaws at my bones, and then come home exhausted with no means for my bills, and if you found me here, sitting on my only chair, ministered by angels and haunted by ghosts, what would you say to me? […]
To the angry and ignorant, even love is a conspiracy. And if indeed it is so, I say, let us all perish by it! “Mysterious Ways” Recently Banned Literature, February 21, 2017 Kiss Upon Kiss Embracing one another, we forgot to hate, and forgot to vote, and were so grateful for the moment, that seeing us that way, our children gathered around, and somehow this set us all to […]
To my mind, John Muir is a poet of the wilderness in the most divine literary sense — his praise and gratitude for the natural world is a song as sublime, inspirational, and wise as any sung by Homer or Whitman; in his hands, a journal entry seems the work of angels, here to recall man from the nightmare of his blind, narrow self. Muir is explorer, artist, scientist, dreamer, […]
