The Wisdom of Inaction

Lines where sense outruns the words,

Image half revealed the mind fills in,

Beauty from imagination,

I'll bide my time.

Aftermath

The tides are easing

and the wind is dying down,

rolling toward a blaze of finishes,

but still the fading blue of night,

still the wash of water birds

and a thousand silent systems

teeming in a drop,

still the memory of memory

when all the rest has stopped.

Tonal

To the newly arrived,

the sky must seem a miracle.

the mind beneath,

expanding,

saturated in monochrome,

all there is of wilderness.

360

Enlarge for dog.

The yard brims with sunrise and mist.

How far must i travel

To awaken with this same joy

In the richness of living on earth?

The answer is three-sixty.

How wide the arc

To escape the bruises of getting?

The answer is three-sixty.

 I go nowhere for heaven.

Lying in a Hammock

  

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

—"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,"

by James Wright.

Detachment

The bee works

in the jewelweed.

Behind the hill, mist

lifts with the sun.

I would walk

the field all day

to understand,

a moving meditation.

To free yourself,

the poet said,

study nonbeing.

—after Wang Wei, circa 730 A.D.

Sonnet for the Travel-Weary, Ear to the Ground

On the surface of an alternate reality

  

With the right equipment

you can hear the primal fury

of an alternate reality

buried in the still earth

of a Neolithic village:

Swingtale baby in the heathen glow,

presto digi-station to the furbelows,

moto busker hillside ignoramus

grovel apples down the shadow curve,

keister elmwood rapper newly famous

check your inbox when the money goes,

priestess of the yeas without a gun —

midrash for your admiration, Baby,

nothing stays the same until we're done.

—necessitating the suspension of coherence.

The Feeling of Fall

Dog days are gone and suddenly

here is a cool, clean, elastic air.

We see birds at their leisure

having raised their families.

Great flocks of young redwings

lift off the fields and the trees.

The willows and poplars lighten.

The common gall is on the goldenrods.

And we gain the sense to do 

the duty that lies nearest to us.

—extracted from Thoreau's journals, late August, 1858 and 1860.