More on: nature

Praise the mockingbird,

unashamed that he is alone, praise the beetle,
the hornet, all night’s shy & vicious ornaments . . .

not in weakness, but in tender
resolution to give way, be broken. . .

This silence before
love pulls itself
apart, against
the current of its own
longing, is the most terrible
silence I know.

Of course complicating considerations can occur with the immaterial, too, as you might be into time and gravity but not augury or angels—or you might be into some angels, like the six-winged amber ones, but not the messenger of death.

When photos of a million horrors
made the papers, a million eyes stopped
and stared, the way a glass of water stares,
and the railcar around it coming to rest.

I used to ask myself why humans go through sacrifices and insist on creating things that no one asked for or cares about. But not anymore. I realize that, in my case at least, it is simply an instinctive drive to do, and that’s my way of being.

You are alone naked in a forest, surrounded. Alone, surrounded by a live ossuary of trees, shed twig, spell of oval stone.

I was fire from which air is withheld, a charged element.

Wanting to be that place where inner and outer meet, this morning I’m listening to the river inside, also to the river out the window, river of sun and branch shadow, muskrat and mallard, heron, and the rattled cry of the kingfisher. Out there is a tree whose roots the river has washed so often…

the white-haired child is there, upright in the mire a son of Adam seeking the orient within seeing himself in the eyes of the pack that combs the countryside, spurred on by brass horns his fortune has no bounds he pores over matter which unnerves his world especially the timid ones striding on ibis legs,…