The Hammer and the Nail
for Charlie Knauss ‘Word merchant‘, ‘big talker‘, ‘word man‘, ‘rather talk than eat‘, are names given he whose sandstorms of syllables darkened the lightness or lightened the darkness of conversations aimed at either lyrical, or philosophical impulse, about life’s genial quirks and oddities, or icy blasts of scientific research. He holds truths poetically alive with atoms changing and rearranging a stream of words that plunder and soothe in his love of challenge, his chisel’s love ...
Read MoreAutomne Memoires en Provence
He disappeared in the dead of winter… the brooks all frozen and the airports almost deserted… W.H. Auden float across chilly October mornings in St. Remy, singing your friendship out across the fields where last summer’s Lavender and Sunflower blooms chased the sun from horizon to horizon. Like Gypsy singers they sing their bright sadness into stillness coaxing leaves to desert their holy attachment to another season on the branches of Van Gogh’s delicate Olive trees and Avignon’s white Sycamores, and join the great loneliness of orange moons...
Read MoreSnow Trails
It’s been snowing all day, large dry flakes floating down without leaving a trace except on walking trails I’ve built that curve round the house like a Priest’s surplice, before descending to a mountain stream in the hollow, where massive boulders, heaved up from the earth long ago, make deep pools beside white water thrust against granite. Inuits believe snow has many voices and snow sticking to only one surface might be a voice ‘gently speaking’, a sign of grace, or maybe ‘the narrowness of the gate’. Next spring when I...
Read MoreLingering Scent of the Divine Light
for Agnethe and Jorgen For two minutes that felt like all of my life, after lunch with friends on the Serena stone terrace of an ancient farmhouse near Siena…soft syllables of voices floating on languid Tuscan light…all my desire to know surrendering to the hymnic drowse of Cicadas in the long grass…all thought buried in the Bells of Buonconvento rising from the valley below…brown- eyed Sunflowers chasing the sun that saturates everything in its color…the mind sliding away on revenant waves of unbound light and the stillness of love that multiplies the self, embracing me like some...
Read MoreHigh Mountain Melt in Wyoming
comes like the evergreen motion of spring, makes this boy who lives twenty five miles from anyone his age, his own best friend, makes May’s bright blue air…red pools of water on red-dirt roads and a mud dirty dog running beside him biting the air in celebration, his reason to be in this sense- drenched, sun-warmed spirit of the earth in revolution… sharing the dog’s delight to be alive, singing it in the endless soprano...
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