More on: nature

Hiking in Switzerland with a bad back and doctor’s orders not to fall, through meadows of bluebells and buttercups, daisies and tiny orchids of pale lavender, tiger-striped mossy rocks, forget-me-nots, even the thistles tender in their bristly buds. But danger lurks in beauty of the shining rock slippery with summer melt when here the trail…

The Eighth Day after Creation Then what a falling-off there was, unruly man, a violent God— when earth gave way, and rocks sprang up, volcanoes poured their fire down and mountains rose with jagged crags to form a world outside the plot. Though here today among the glaciered peaks pine stems still grow straight up…

Understand the light, then, and recognize it ————————–—Corpus Hermeticum ——————–Memory is a kind of accomplishment ————————William Carlos Williams I Birdsong on the book page, birdsong on the brown rug; fanfare of birdsong above the radio orchestra; birdsong in shafted light of the wooden blinds. In one moment I heard them—by which I mean they’d all…

Embarrassed by the awe he felt as a boy touching a mimosa shut along the vein, tiny leaves blinking into supplicant palms, the man came to understand that astonishment. Beyond vegetable with a reflex— didn’t venus flytrap also clamp, and don’t sunflowers turn?— he grasped the aesthetics of mimosa’s fruitless act, effect which refused its…

Betsy Sholl’s poem “The Harrowing” is published in Image issue 73. This web-exclusive interview with Sholl features questions from readers of Image.    How do you connect with secular readers? Part of me wonders if, when it comes to art, these distinctions between secular and sacred really apply. A poet has to write from a point…

My corkscrew willow’s the last each autumn to loose its slender fingers of dried gold; first each spring to clutch my heart with, overnight, a thousand fisted buds. Today, the last thing I would wish is another emblem of grit and continuance; still, my willow models a fierce, therapeutic rage, lashing the glass in a…

Luc Olivier Merson, 1897 When the deer appeared in the yard, I was slicing tomatoes for dinner, the knife ringing the plate with each slice, but the deer hear everything, so I stopped. The husband saw them too. It’s the end of summer, he said to me, in my head. We saw the female deer…

In the white of the yard the snow provides, they arrived, making form seem careless dream while they fed. From their sentences (like guides) I know they swung back hoof to front, to seem to letter selves through white in slow confessions. I want to know the faith they’re lurching toward. Something like faith in…

“I didn’t get in trouble whenever I drank, but whenever I got in trouble I was drinking,” says Wayne. We’re sitting together with ten inmates in folding chairs. I like Wayne, I like his thinking, I even like his God and his prayers. The herd of Morgan horses in his pasture comes alive with light…

We planted the seeds in the spring And up they came innocuous as crabgrass. The tomatoes soon lorded over them, And even the jalapenos, sad lumps Hanging from their limbs like mittens From children playing in the snow. They stayed that way all summer, And before the frosts of November We pulled them up, declaring…