An infant is a pucker of the earth’s thin skin; so are we.
We arise like budding yeasts and break off;
we forget our beginnings.
A mammal swells and circles and lays him down.
You and I have finished swelling;
our circling periods are playing out,
but we can still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do know.
~Annie Dillard from For the Time Being
Even the plainest among us become beautiful when bathed in the right light…
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When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
–Â Mary Oliver, August
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
~Victor Hugo
Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
Louise Glück from “The Red Poppy”
Except to prompt a fit of elegy
It is for us no more, or if it is,
It is a sort of music for the eye,
A rugged ground bass like the bagpipe’s drone
On which the leaf-light like a chanter plays.
~Richard Wilbur from “A Wall in the Woods”
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey, like men
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
~Ted Hughes “Thistles”
This was one of those perfect days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.
–Â Â Sarah Orne Jewett
Shadow is the obstruction of light.
Shadows appear to me to be of supreme importance in perspective,
because without them
opaque and solid bodies will be ill defined;
that which is contained within their outlines and their boundaries themselves
will be ill-understood
unless they are shown against a background
of a different tone from themselves.
~Leonardo da Vinci
August spilled across the sky at dawn; morning has broken…
Barnstorming 