Heaven Gathers Where Attention Softens

Light seemed to emerge from the trail itself. One's steps went lightly over it, at times rising, seeing above the breezy tops of trees the heron flying away in the mist. Oh warblers, spiraling songsters, you always make me so happy.

And a single brown apple wedged in the high gray interstice of the crab apple tree beneath which one stops, amazed as always at where the gift shows itself, and how luminous it is, and yet how plain and simple as well. You end up talking about Emily Dickinson's relationship with the Old Testament (a reflection of her abiding editorial impulse with respect to God and death) and they stop taking notes and listen, as they always do when you talk about Emily Dickinson. Shreds of violet in tangled grass.

Oh when will the heart consent to its last journey? I study the fence where the bear went through, consider the half-assed repair job, and remember my grandfather who never said it aloud but more lived it so you couldn't escape it: any job worth doing is worth doing right goddamnit. Well, the bear made us all happy, as bears do in New England in early spring.

I brushed dirt and pine needles and other detritus off the sheets, thinking of Jorge Guillen, whose poems I cannot find despite hours looking last night. Your firing squad is my billowing spirituality which encompasses everything in gauze and then takes it on the Ferris wheel to snuggle and woo. Cows bellow in the distance and one laments the lost era of bells.

Thinking too of James Wright, to whom L.S. pointed a good quarter century ago, and how reading him I had that feeling - a hallmark of those days - wait, you can do this in a poem? Well, we are all in relationship with the desire to find - and yet also not find - the ears to hear. More tea, another kiss for the dog curled in the shape of a button, and a plate of roasted veggies in sauerkraut for breakfast.

Let the day go where it will and worry only that you are not resisting the yes for which it longs. The fir tree was luminous as well, so much so that it enfolded me, and I could feel myself falling into the pond and perhaps even beyond and so I did the only thing I could do to resist: take a picture, write a sentence. One finds glass bottles everywhere - and takes them home and cleans them - and then fills them with pebbles washed clean by brooks and puts them on a shelf and it makes me happy, it just does.

Stay close to night and solitude and what wordiness arises there, beloved. Heaven gathers where attention softens thusly.