From "For My People" by Margaret Walker

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

    be written, let the dirges disappear.

Williamsburg

I have taken to cutting letters and words out of old magazine subscriptions and gluing them to my paintings.

In each case I find myself liking the painting more, even in those instances where I had been entirely unsatisfied with the painting prior. "Whatever my place in this garden, it was not to be the gardener."

Occasionally a fish jumps. 



Oh I have been so busy. I work to recall stooping by the fence in that backwoods garden, the sheep's eyes drooping, the telltale dirt and lanolin on my fingers. I rubbed its face for thirty minutes and then the bugles sounded.

Who knew about the Rockefellers. Who knew about the Scandinavian girls whose hair never saw sunlight. We walked cobbled streets in shoes that squished with rainwater, rain coats no match for it; umbrellas no match for it. The horses continued grazing. The sheep laid down beneath the trees and looked at me through their wet wooly locks.

Sitting on the bridge over the narrow canal I wasn't afraid of the ghost boy laughing. American wysteria wrapped itself around the governor's palace. The horticultural librarian stood beneath it, transfixed.

What can I say of the gardens. They were green, and everywhere.



When I return home Wilson is beside himself. Three whole days and a babysitter no match for his loneliness. I read today that cats see humans as inexplicably large, non-hostile cats. "Where is my inexplicably large, non-hostile cat," Wilson must have wondered while I was away.

from "Cabin Poem" by Jim Harrison

I’ve decided to make up my mind
about nothing, to assume the water mask,
to finish my life disguised as a creek,
an eddy, joining at night the full,
sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
to swallow the heat and the cold, the moon
and the stars, to swallow myself
in ceaseless flow.

from "If You Are Over Staying Woke" by Morgan Parker

...

Instead of

hyacinths pick

hydrangeas

Water the hydrangeas

Wilt the news

White the hydrangeas

Drink the white

Waterfall the

cricket songs

Keep a song mind

Don't smile

Don't wilt

funeral

funeral

"Visions at 74" by Frank Bidart

The planet turns there without you, beautiful.

Exiled by death you cannot

touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates

lived out and discarded, something crowded

inside us always craving to become something

glistening outside us, the relentless planet

showing itself the logic of what is

buried inside it. To love existence

is to love what is indifferent to you

you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful.

World that can know itself only by

world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.

You are an hypothesis made of flesh.

What you will teach the stars is constant

rage at the constant prospect of not-being.

                       

                      •

Sometimes when I wake it's because I hear

a knock. Knock,

Knock. Two

knocks, quite clear.

I wake and listen. It's nothing.

 

 

I need to remind myself
To live as I do
Not because it is safe
Not to avoid failure.

I live as I do
Because life is mysterious and precious
Dissipates,
Fast or slow, day by day
In a wonderful way.

At the end of my journey I want to say
I lived close to the beauty and quiet of wild nature.
I contributed to the lives of others with my work.

           - Roderick MacIver

clean

do you remember that blueberry farm in ohio and the peacock wandering silk-feathered through it, the round wooden house filled with sunshine and all of those windows? we picked blueberries and covered bushes tenderly with protective netting. it was hot and sticky work.

then we drove into the woods, thank goodness that ultramarathoner was there because she knew about these woods this creek-- have you ever taken off your clothes with people you met only that morning, right before driving to the blueberry farm, and stepped topless into the cold water of a creek in rural ohio?

what i remember most is that none of us were ashamed. other women standing there in the water with their hips shaped exactly as they were gave me courage, my hip bones poking out as they do and all of our nipples standing up, how many pairs of wet cotton underwear, who cares i plunged from the rock into the water again, again.