This afternoon I swept the walk, the driveway, and the moss-covered patio area behind the house, which was buried in dry, frosted birch leaves. Then I ate two dates, two prunes, a piece of dried mango, and a fresh ripe persimmon. Lately I have had to delete several telephone messages, in which were the recorded voices of people telling us in ignorant, angry tones how we should vote. One man […]
Mushrooms and mildew — so much mildew, it’s possible the mushrooms have mildew. The alyssum and dahlias in the front flowerbed are white with mildew. Even the lilac has mildew. But the peppers don’t. Neither do the apricot or fig. I have mildew, but thus far it affects only the cerebrum, so I’m not worried. Such fogs we’ve been having — dense, dripping fogs, street-blackening fogs, window-streaming fogs, leaf-shimmering fogs, […]
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 ]
