You know in what you are is gentle
in the unsleeping hours before light.
I am that same moving, the walnut tree

the rust. Morning is an empty lattice.
The lilac rustles in dark kindness
as the edges of the air turn to water.

When we lie together in this silence
I can't remember what we call ourselves.
If we are wakeful, as if by asking
in the calls of birds, we hear nothing

forming in the cathedral of their sound.
We have no need of questions, but I wake
to find that I was but the tongue
that tried to taste itself...

I was cleaning up the junk on here and your brief reflection about this blog having been "found" also got deleted. Sorry, Arnold

That red lady bug
on a tomato vine
maybe where the trellis twine
will brown;
not that that Chinese Cabbage bolted
too soon
into un-serious moments
of tiny yellow
tweezering, though it did
for eating;
and some mole burrows,
the few hoppy flea beetles
left, some lopped leaves-
potato,
a sunny morning makes it
all percolating
in that, which
as laughing does, so too
am I

1

The mud's fingers,
small worms
multiplying in the white
soapy cream
of thistle seed
along the garden beds
where yesterday
I planted lettuce seeds:
Red Oak, Red Romaine,
Golden Bunch.

2

I could sit here
and pick
ripe strawberries,
just,
the first,
humming a note
as sweet
and tart
and sudden
as the accidental kiss
you share with a lover
one afternoon
and know
that everything
is right.

3

Slugs are kind of disgusting
and destructive
but when one
prodigious specimen
pokes its Martian antennae
around the corner of the old barn
after the rain
in the most timid unhurriedness
imaginable, I can't help
but love it too.

1979

I spend a lot of time on an old rug spread out in a field of high grass.  When I sit in this place, as I am doing now, the tops of seed heavy stalks, the white domes of the dandelions and the stubborn thistles bend and roll in waves.    What is the grass a friend of mind asked once in a poem.  I find this a particularly beautiful question, for "the grass" is both one blade and the whole meadow forest.  One could just as easily ask what is the forest, but linguistically it would not capture so precisely the essence of the thing, for there is nothing that makes apparent unity of presence quite like a field of grass responding to the wind.