Am I being vague? I don’t mean to be. I love words. And they love me. We’re naturally hesitant, wondering, each time we meet, who will be the first to speak. What should we mean? We aren’t nails hammered through wood. We’re more like butterflies, or bees with pollen on our toes. Documents? Manifestos? We laugh. We can’t all be bibles or epitaphs. Some of us must be free. Recently […]
Like the poem that follows, this collection, too, is a poem museum. At least I imagine it as such. But 1,000 pages? Was that really necessary? I wonder if I will ever know. . At the Poem Museum The other day, I went to the poem museum. There were poems of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Some were made of words and others were physical objects, or word-extensions that very […]
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 ]
It’s a pity, in a way, that each of us can’t, during the most heightened moments of our righteous anger, suddenly find ourselves surrounded by our ancestors — not just to the extent of our easily accessible family tree, but all the way to the beginning. For surely, in genetic, genealogical terms, we are not who we think we are; we are far different and far more than the knowledge […]
The winter light, the old books and photographs, pierce me through and through. I move among them with my teacup like a ghost. I do not bleed from my old wounds. They might be kisses, for all I know. Words are like that too. They never say themselves. They do not know how. Yet they rule the world, each a tyger burning bright, each of heaven, each of hell. Shakespeare […]
The little mimosa by the cedar has six leaves, a rich orange, leaning towards red. The tiny birch less than two feet away also has six — the top three are green, the fourth is yellow-green, and the two near the ground are yellow. The color references are crude approximations. Set in the wilderness as they are, among grasses, ground covers, mushrooms, and a scattering of needles, cones, and other […]
Words are stones worn smooth by lips. Imagine being kissed like this. Upon your breast, against my chest. Caressed by mist and fingertips where meaning is. . [ 925 ]
Fascinating are the little disturbances and imbalances that visit the body, as it reacts to the various impurities in its immediate environment, water-borne, air-borne, food-borne, human-borne — not even impurities, necessarily, but concentrations of different allergens, spores, molds, and the like. And to this list one would hasten to add words, thoughts, and images, all of which can be either toxic or beneficial. As rugged as it is, the body, […]
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 ]
