Toward Emily Dickinson's Valley

All I know circles my head and floats like pollen toward Emily Dickinson's valley. Trout rise like silver buckles, kingfishers study me in turn. Oh grace, whose arrival is like a little mossy clearing come to unexpectedly, only ask and I will say yes.

We walk slower past the cemetery, taking note of the wild turkeys who graze in its southwest corner. Molly runs in happy circles when we pause at Watts Brook. When you turn east, be barefoot, because when you are barefoot you walk softer, and when you walk softer you remember God.

Sunlight through maple leaves fluttering in cool breezes. Red blush of clover from which bees rise like good ideas you didn't know you had. Jesus picks his teeth with a bit of straw and studies the chickens, who are indifferent to Rembrandt but not to Life.

You don't have to define love in order to feel love and that is what I mean when I say something is "inherent." Arguments about whether plants are intelligent make me sad, as if we are litigating the patently clear in order to avoid joy. My son walked a way down the brook and sat on a stone in the slow dusk, and watching his small silhouette given so fiercely to attention I remembered the stillness inherent in those who are given not to judgment but to love.

Later we talk about constellations and narrative, and how both turn on the hinge of image. We put daisy and dandelion greens in our salad and wondered aloud at the divine profluence. Who has studied garlic closely knows that Heaven resides in a lot more than grains of sand.

Take my hand? Our walks lengthen as they must, given all that we have now to share. Forgiveness abounds for those who are at last able to see the many brokennesses of which they have long been composed.

Distance dissolves now, or evolves maybe, and nothing that is gone remains gone, and nothing that will be is either absent or forgotten. I mean little poems tucked beneath buttercups, I mean how happy one can be, watching swallows sail through what we once called the sky.