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If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly I could see to write you a letter.

There’s more in words than I can teach: Yet listen, Child! — I would not preach; But only give some plain directions To guide your speech and your affections. Say not you love a roasted fowl But you may love a screaming owl, And, if you can, the unwieldy toad That crawls from his secure abode Within the mossy garden wall When evening dews begin to fall, Oh! mark the beauty of his eye: What wonders in that circle lie! So clear, so bright, our fathers said He wears a jewel in his head! And when, upon some showery day, Into a path or public way A frog leaps out from bordering grass, Startling the timid as they pass, Do you observe him, and endeavour To take the intruder into favour: Learning from him to find a reason For a light heart in a dull season. And you may love him in the pool, That is for him a happy school, In which he swims as taught by nature, Fit pattern for a human creature, Glancing amid the water bright, And sending upward sparkling light. Nor blush if o’er your heart be stealing A love for things that have no feeling: The spring’s first rose by you espied, May fill your breast with joyful pride; And you may love the strawberry-flower, And love the strawberry in its bower; But when the fruit, so often praised For beauty, to your lip is raised, Say not you love the delicate treat, But like it, enjoy it, and thankfully eat. Long may you love your pensioner mouse, Though one of a tribe that torment the house: Nor dislike for her cruel sport the cat Deadly foe both of mouse and rat; Remember she follows the law of her kind, And Instinct is neither wayward nor blind. Then think of her beautiful gliding form, Her tread that would scarcely crush a worm, And her soothing song by the winter fire, Soft as the dying throb of the lyre. I would not circumscribe your love: It may soar with the Eagle and brood with the dove, May pierce the earth with the patient mole, Or track the hedgehog to his hole. Loving and liking are the solace of life, Rock the cradle of joy, smooth the death-bed of strife. You love your father and your mother, Your grown-up and your baby brother; You love your sister and your friends, And countless blessings which God sends; And while these right affections play, You live each moment of your day; They lead you on to full content, And likings fresh and innocent, That store the mind, the memory feed, And prompt to many a gentle deed: But likings come, and pass away; ’Tis love that remains till our latest day: Our heavenward guide is holy love, And will be our bliss with saints above.

One rat across the floor and quick to floor's a breeze, But two a whisper of a human tongue. One is a breath, two voice; And one a dream, but more are dreamed too long. Two are the portent which we may believe at length, And two the tribe we recognize as true. Two are the total, they saying and they saying, So we must ponder what we are to do. For every scuttle of motion in the corner of the eye Some thought of thought is asked in us indeed, But of two, more: there we have likeness moving, And there knowledge therefore, and therefore creed.

I went to the dances at Chandlerville, And played snap-out at Winchester. One time we changed partners, Driving home in the moonlight of middle June, And then I found Davis. We were married and lived together for seventy years, Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, Eight of whom we lost Ere I had reached the age of sixty. I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, I made the garden, and for holiday Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, And by Spoon River gathering many a shell, And many a flower and medicinal weed — Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys. At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all, And passed to a sweet repose. What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you — It takes life to love Life.

Our labor realized in the crowns of marigolds, blue eyes of the hydrangeas, smell of lavender and late bloom of the hosta’s erect purple flower with its marvel of thick green leaves. In our twilight every year we trimmed back and the garden grew more lustrous and untamable as if the eternal woods and animals asleep at night in its beds were claiming it back. The water in the pool shimmered an icy Tuscan blue. When we arrived we swam until the stress from the grueling life in the city released our bodies. Later we sat under the umbrella and watched a garter snake slip into the water, careful not to startle its flight-or-fight response. Its barbed-wire coil. Comet of danger, serpent of the water, how long we had thwarted the venom of its secret lures and seductions. It swam by arching then releasing its slithery mercurial form. Through the lanky trees we heard the excited cries of the neighbor’s children—ours, the boy in our late youth, of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager. It was a miracle, our ignorance. It was grace incarnate, how we never knew.

The kilted porter shook my hand in welcome, drained it of blood and gave me back my luggage. I signed the register in my own name for the first time in my life of low celebrity. In the lounge bar, there were pictures by Margarita but no sign of margaritas by the pitcher. All night, the couple in the next-door room failed noisily to make love even once. The signature tune of the air conditioning was a surface B-side for any one-hit-wonder. Weary, I ordered up the late night menu from room service, but sleep wasn’t on it so, after an hour of mentally undressing myself, I donned the pyjamas with the killer bee motif and there on the bed I wrote a dozen identical postcards to friends I’d forgotten. No doubt to keep the cold tap company, the hot tap had opted to be a cold tap too. Funnel-web spiders wove their lazy way toward each other across the scarlet ceiling and when I solved the riddle of the shower, no blood came gushing, but no water either. By the bed, a Gideon Bible in Esperanto and a phone-book listing Lumsdens of the world; in the mini-bar, flat Vimto and a half-pint of someone else’s mother’s milk, turned to fur. The TV had one channel, showing highlights from my worst performances in every sphere. At three, in the courtyard, a chambermaid choir sang a barbershop version of ‘I Will Survive’. The only time I dared to close my eyes, dervishes under the bed began to talk dirty. When I left at nine and settled my check, they told me clearly Don't come back.

I 'Is it really a revolution, though?' I reached across the wicker table With another $10,000 question. My celebrated pamphleteer, Co-author of such volumes As Blood on the Rose, The Dream and the Drums, And How It Happened Here, Would pour some untroubled Muscatel And settle back in his cane chair. 'Look, son. Just look around you. People are getting themselves killed Left, right and centre While you do what? Write rondeaux? There's more to living in this country Than stars and horses, pigs and trees, Not that you'd guess it from your poems. Do you never listen to the news? You want to get down to something true, Something a little nearer home.' I called again later that afternoon, A quiet suburban street. 'You want to stand back a little When the world's at your feet.' I'd have liked to have heard some more Of his famous revolution. I rang the bell, and knocked hard On what I remembered as his front door, That opened then, as such doors do, Directly on to a back yard. II Not any back yard, I'm bound to say, And not a thousand miles away From here. No one's taken in, I'm sure, By such a mild invention. But where (I wonder myself) do I stand, In relation to a table and chair, The quince tree I forgot to mention, That suburban street, the door, the yard— All made up as I went along As things that people live among. And such a person as lived there! My celebrated pamphleteer! Of course, I gave it all away With those preposterous titles. The Bloody Rose?The Dream and the Drums? The three-day wonder of the flowering plum! Or was I desperately wishing To have been their other co-author, Or, at least, to own a first edition Of The Boot Boys and Other Battles? 'When are you going to tell the truth?' For there's no such book, so far as I know, As How it Happened Here, Though there may be. There may. What should I say to this callow youth Who learned to write last winter— One of those correspondence courses— And who's coming to lunch today? He'll be rambling on, no doubt, About pigs and trees, stars and horses.

An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Causes Now in Operation —subtitle of Lyell: Principles of Geology The mountain road ends here, Broken away in the chasm where The bridge washed out years ago. The first scarlet larkspur glitters In the first patch of April Morning sunlight. The engorged creek Roars and rustles like a military Ball. Here by the waterfall, Insuperable life, flushed With the equinox, sentient And sentimental, falls away To the sea and death. The tissue Of sympathy and agony That binds the flesh in its Nessus' shirt; The clotted cobweb of unself And self; sheds itself and flecks The sun's bed with darts of blossom Like flagellant blood above The water bursting in the vibrant Air. This ego, bound by personal Tragedy and the vast Impersonal vindictiveness Of the ruined and ruining world, Pauses in this immortality, As passionate, as apathetic, As the lava flow that burned here once; And stopped here; and said, 'This far And no further.' And spoke thereafter In the simple diction of stone. Naked in the warm April air, We lie under the redwoods, In the sunny lee of a cliff. As you kneel above me I see Tiny red marks on your flanks Like bites, where the redwood cones Have pressed into your flesh. You can find just the same marks In the lignite in the cliff Over our heads.Sequoia Langsdorfii

You may think, passer-by, that Fate Is a pit-fall outside of yourself, Around which you may walk by the use of foresight And wisdom. Thus you believe, viewing the lives of other men, As one who in God-like fashion bends over an anthill, Seeing how their difficulties could be avoided. But pass on into life: In time you shall see Fate approach you In the shape of your own image in the mirror; Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth, And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest, And you shall know that guest, And read the authentic message of his eyes.

Elegy for my sister I take the penny from father’s hardwood drawer. I turn the standing upright penny, its copper head cold, turn and turn till a small whorl-well of a circle bores into the center of the brick laid in our fireplace. Brick dust cradle. Thumb place. This fireplace is wingless and cold. The penny multiplies in swarms. Nine cloud coffins full of pennies are open and floating as bees float, looking for my ears. Lynne’s car washed violently down off the cliff. I am too young to drive. Today, all memory ruins downstream to the bee-swarm, becomes a plea from then till now and grows reason’s garden pulled out at the roots. There’s an ocean treading its own water to the waist of the coastline, water-skin flexing. I am standing upright: absent-me in a house full of grief and thievery. Above the thumb place. I was a child there once, both boy and girl, standing upright. I turned the penny over on the desert brick, in the fire, stepped into the cold downstream ruin of  bees swarming in the hard rain’s garden. I did not know what I was doing. It was all made of the same shape and sound down there.