Tag Archives: nature
What it was like
What it was like to be here at the end, sun rising red in the smoke of another wildfire, this burning world: the destruction of innocents, the ascendance of demagogues, the rapacious appetites of the worst among us. What it was like to speak to a vanishing posterity, disembodied generations blind to Nature, deaf to […]
A better telling of a better story
Squirrels snort spring though estral arteries, leaping the lengthening days, tails backlit by sun. Shall I care more for the latest manmade drama than their tussled play, their animal exuberance, the heated unions that will bring forth kits — naked, blind, burgeoning, beautiful — a better telling of a better story? Shall I bemoan my […]
National Squirrel Appreciation Day
Really. This gallery of images goes out to squirrels everywhere whose beauty, acrobatics, comic timing, perseverance, adaptability and fabulous tails continue to impress and delight any human with sense enough to appreciate them. Most especially, I remember Chloe, whose intelligence and charming sense of entitlement graced my life for five years and inspired this prose […]
Mary Oliver is dazzled by heaven
So I got up finally, with a grief worthy of you, and went home. Just over the threshold, she cannot move quickly or carefully enough. Oh, what is that beautiful thing that just happened? On ageless legs, the last word she heard with mortal ears still sounding: Come. The angels themselves weary of our meanness, […]
The world’s most perfect couple
She lays herself out on the slow current, neck extended, orange paddles holding her steady as he circles, bobbing his shimmering head, then climbs aboard, mates, nibbles briefly her elegant nape, dismounts and circles once more, fast — an exhilaration, an exuberance — exhausting his fletched desire before settling beside her on the bank, resting […]
Fraternity now, and football
At the end of the rut, the bucks grow weary, great heads bowed beneath battle-worn racks, here and there a desultory joust, a soft grunt cast in diminishing wind toward indifferent does. What was it all about? Majesty tattered, they plod and limp, half-dazed as if emerging from a potent spell, speak to former rivals […]
Cabbage white in autumn
Today we induct into the Hall of Heroes a cabbage white, its wingspan little wider than a half-dollar, an artifact you may or may not remember: cool in the palm, serrated edges, the sharply embossed portrait of a young president whose life would likewise be truncated by the weather of the world. (On the coin, he still […]
For the bear who broke my fence
As you ready, you trouble our leavings: the forgotten feeder, the spilled seed. Your hunger accretes in the dark autumn air. Urgent. Insatiable. Hyperphagia, the scientists say. You say eat. You say drink. As you ready, you dream cubs from the world of spirit, from the world of ancestors. You dream their tiny bodies blind […]
How not to complain
Too tired to ripen, late tomatoes hang obdurately green from withered vines, their yellowing lattice home, now, to an orb-weaver, Araneus gemmoides, whose tiny cat face, etched on her ballooning abdomen, blesses me when I kneel to consider each sacrifice on the gossamer altar: What’s required to live, and what, to die; whether it’s the […]
Meditatio Ephemera 