Immaculate Each Leaf, and Every Flower

And everywhere the smaller birds again noising, filling

steadily all the cracks between spells of rain…

                                                       *

As if song could still mean something useful.

                                                       *

Or a kind of pleasure, like forgiveness, came easily and,

summer storm that forgiveness is, passed quickly through.

                                                       *

And the undersong that has been your own voice saying No –

No I’m not afraid.

                                                       *

                       What we cannot do

              What we cannot undo

                                      All the work we must do

                                                        *

As for ruin – yes, but faintly.

                                                        *

The gray of doves.  The gray of doves, in shadow.

Carl Phillips

GET OUT AND VOTE PEOPLE OR GRANDPA WALT WILL COME GET YA!

From Election Day, November 1884

If I should need to name, O Western World, your 

   powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara--nor you, ye limitless 

   prairies--nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite--nor Yellowstone, with all its 

   spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, 

   appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones--nor Huron's belt of mighty 

   lakes--nor Mississippi's stream:
--This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, 

   I'd name--the still small voice vibrating--America's 

   choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen--the act itself the 

   main, the quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous'd--sea-board 

   and inland--Texas to Maine--the Prairie States--

   Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West--the 

   paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling--(a swordless 

   conflict,
Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern 

   Napoleon's:) the peaceful choice of all…

Walt Whitman

Happy Hallow's Eve!

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness — for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

From Spirits of the Dead by Edgar Allan Poe

***

Unbidden

The ghosts swarm.

They speak as one

person. Each

loves you. Each

has left something

undone.

          •

Did the palo verde

blush yellow

all at once?

Today's edges

are so sharp

they might cut

anything that moved.

          •

The way a lost

word

will come back

unbidden.

You're not interested

in it now,

only

in knowing

where it's been.

Rae Armantrout

***

Tree House

Start with a tree,
an old willow with its feet in the water,
and one low branch to let you in
and a higher branch to let you
upstairs,
and a lookout branch to show
how far you've come
(the lake before you,
the woods at your back),

and now you are close
to those who live in these rooms
without walls, without doors:
one nuthatch typing its way up the bark,
two mourning doves calling the sun out of darkness,
three blackbirds folding their wings tipped with sunset,
twelve crows threading the air and stitching
a cape that whirls them away
through the empty sky,

and don't forget the blue heron
stalking the shallows for bluegills,
and don't forget the otter backpaddling past you,
and the turtles perched on the log like shoes
lined up each night in a large family,

and don't forget the owl
who has watched over you
since you were born.

Be the housekeeper of trees,
who have nothing to keep
except silence.

Nancy Willard

Two for Friday!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

******************************************

The Surprise

                 St. Augustine

Light shafts down on
the assembled congregation of sails

billows my shirt      sends me to where thin countries
stretch like needles    to a low and distant shore

from which    suddenly     canoes appear

Lola Haskins