Another Library of America book purchase: William Wells Brown: Clotel and Other Writings. Violence at Oregon’s state capitol — flags, baseball bats, guns. Only humans are intelligent enough to express themselves in this manner. High winds from the east. Smoke and ash. Fires raging in the Cascades. Widespread evacuations. Windows closed against the elements. Early morning. Here in the dark, one thinks of the birds. The cricket in the rhododendron […]
One fall evening, as the stars appeared one by one, a cricket said to the wind, Fellow prophet, what is your opinion? Is anyone listening? And the wind replied, Only the end of the world. The cricket thought about this for some time. Alas, that is something I cannot imagine. You are fortunate. You have traveled, and that is a place you have seen. The wind paused. Feeling pity for […]
Each silence has its corresponding sound, and the other way around. The bird, the bee, the softly falling gown. The words by which they’re known. The waiting train, the one insane, the cricket, and the temple bell. The gentle rhyme, the end of time, the thing that makes you smile now. . [ 845 ]
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 […]
Cricket after rain still dry beneath the bush wilderness is the space between ferns your days are nerves my heartbeats rail cars September 10, 2019 [ 509 ]
Suddenly I notice that scratching my left arm near the elbow makes a cricket-sound. After being a cricket for a minute or two, I’m ready to be human again, albeit differently. Now I wonder if I was human before. And what if this is a sign that I’m becoming a cricket, or that I’ve really been a cricket all along, or that I was, or will be, a cricket in […]
Cricket in the fern, cricket in the bush —
oh, the lovers who never meet in this world,
turned poets, one by one, like us!
Minstrel
Primitive: Selected Drawings in Pixel, Pencil & Pen, 2010
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A calendar not marked by dates, but cricket wakes and thunderstorms. A journal of bright Shakespearean colors — and then, in wanders gray and takes the stage. A fallen leaf, written without hand or pen. A leavened moon. A risen when. [ 497 ]
It seemed almost rude last night to close the front door while a cricket was singing just outside. And yet a short while later, ready for sleep, I could still hear it, steady and measured, through the adjacent bedroom window. In less than a minute, I could no longer distinguish my heartbeat and breath from its rhythm and song. And I thought, the first and last word in all human […]
Reading Thoreau to the ticking of one’s body clock, until a visitor, upon entering the room, is as likely to find a cricket in the chair as someone with a book in his lap — that’s how it is. Earlier this afternoon, a hummingbird kept returning to the front window to feed on her reflection. As I read the season, I see now that in the earliest chapters, many clues […]
