Another hour spent outside watering in the smoke, which is much thicker this morning than yesterday. The air, though, is noticeably cooler. The windy time has passed; I saw several spiders calmly working on their webs. I also heard the squawking of a scrub jay, and a brief exchange between nuthatches. A squirrel caught my eye; like an ordinary pedestrian, it was making its way along the sidewalk across the […]
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 ]
Do words have skin and bones? They must, if they wear clothes. But some are ghosts, and many run naked in the night wind. . [ 861 ]
Life is incredibly generous. It gives us each our abilities, perceptions, and experiences, along with endless opportunities to come together and share for our mutual benefit what we have learned. And though we often use this gift as a means to conquer or to otherwise gain some kind of petty advantage, life never changes its attitude towards us. It gives us children; it gives us love; it gives us a […]
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 ]
We hear it said that words are symbols, as if in a sense they were lined up on one side, with reality on the other, and us in between — dirty things tainted by their own meanings, useful as a daily sort of common currency, but basically crippled as a means of expressing life in its great profundity and mystery, which are best trusted to silence. This is very much […]
Rain, enough to thrill the garden, but not to silence the scent of the grass seed fields. The delicate maples, red and green. The same towhee, in the same tree, sure each sentence must end differently. Flicker with an earth-brown beak, probing, searching, finding, swallowing. Little boy with a wet new bike, testing its frame against the curb, feeling the vibration in his bones. Funny how some words end up […]
In light of the sheer immensity of things, any endeavor, however well executed, is bound to seem trivial and small. We write poems, build bridges, send rockets to the moon; yet within this vast expanse, the page is small, the earth is small, the moon is small, the galaxy is small. How powerful, really, would a universal lens have to be to even show we are here? One partial answer […]
You look for love, when love is all there is. You can be numb to love, but you can’t exist outside it. You say, “What about hate? Hate is not love.” But love wants you well. Hate is love’s bitter pill. You don’t know, or perhaps you’ve only forgotten: Life is another word for love. It means “I will.” Recently Banned Literature, May 22, 2011 [ 742 […]
This is a very old poem, from a lost, undated manuscript, which was later typed on my old Royal and also lost, or likely discarded. Earlier today I found I’d included it in an entry of One Hand Clapping, the lines divided by slashes. It’s a curiosity at best. As no other record exists, I’ll file it here for gentle guests and future laughs. March 29, 2020 The Books […]
