More on: nature

I am much comforted by ordinary things by the whalebone covers of my missal sadly worn and warmer to my hand than amber or by the cry of gulls greedy as pagans for the bread we throw on seas so troubled and so terrible I am amazed God made them except I stand upon a…

Walking the baby at noon along our vacation road I turned toward a lit hum animating old oaks ryegrass salvia thistle wild distance folding six white boxes’ uncountable pale thoughts measuring the air our foreign bodies nearly colliding but clearer, wouldn’t— not mine, hum I heard only when the baby slept against me. I was…

–after Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia In the garden, all the apples have returned to us, dangling gold leaf shiny from the trees, and under their bowers we walk, our drowsy feet crushing the flowers, carnations, pinks, violas, dahlias— All of our dead have returned to us, their faces wrinkled with the labor of the…

Here—the terminus from which he begins. The road, tilted like a tipped-up tile, Points to those in trees pulling down branches. Wind rucks and buckles the cloak-covered path. Soon enough the day will be a ruin. Soon the crisp half-light of dusk will give way To the salt-light of stars, a gibbous moon. Although foretold,…

Chickasaw poet, essayist, and fiction writer Linda Hogan’s essay in the Image issue 79 is a lyric meditation on the migration of sandhill cranes and their connection to the Platte River in Nebraska. It explores the links between the natural world and human making—and sets forth a way of standing in awe before nature.    Image: The…

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, O I say now these are the Soul! —Walt Whitman By the second week in September nuthatches capture the last elderberries, excrement purpled and extravagant, sprayed drunkenly across my truck’s hood. I’ve been thinking about the God…

WHEN THE RED SUN is sinking behind the mist in the evening, the sandhill cranes begin to arrive. Long-legged, wings open wide, they come first sparely, two watchers, then in scatterings and finally in great numbers, lines of them crossing the sky to land before us hidden humans. The great birds fly across the mist,…

I’m reading The Little Flower on the train out of London: a book that says we can only do small things with great attention. Next to me, a suited, stiletto-heeled commuter hides her title. But when she leaves for coffee, I look. Chapter one: Focus on your core genius now! Reject rejection! Sort out incompleteness—Now!…

CERAMICIST ALLISON LUCE makes biomorphic portraits that seem almost excessively beautiful. Each piece revels in its physicality, its undeniable materiality, in its earthy substance—clay—and organic forms. Her four-part Serpent Tree series serves as an apt introduction to her work. In Primoris Ortus, for example, assemblages of swelling, vegetative curves stand alongside works suggestive of eroded rock…

The photographs are separated by the turn of the page, so that to look at one is to conceal the other. In the first, reindeer scatter westward, their antlers unblooming trees upon the cave’s wall, their hooves roots snaking through barren rock, seeking distant water. In the second, the scene is repeated, but darkly, stripped…