Here Lie...

  This isn't my house thank God but I'll tell you what it’s really like living here in the growing season. I know I said it was like living inside the Keebler Elf tree and proved it with these actual pictures but an even better analogy is coming to mind now: It's more like what that nutty little genius Emily Dickinson wrote.See if you remember this poem, where she pictures herself and the mystery person she addresses lying side by side in their graves, dressed just in the clean white bones maybe, or maybe still in their starched Sunday best with the undertaker's makeup pale upon their cheeks. You know it I betcha :

I died for Beauty--but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb When One who died for Truth, was lain In an adjoining Room-

He questioned softly Why I failed? "For Beauty," I replied "And for Truth, Themself are One We Brethren are," He said--

And so, as Kinsmen, met at Night We talked between the RoomsUntil the Moss had reached our lips And covered up our names

Emily didn't do punctuation, aside from these crazy dashes every few words, but doesn't that ring a bell somehow? The image of us carrying right on with the talk while slowly - slowly and wonderfully in a way - Nature knits the green blanket that will cover us all in the end.

You saw the picture of the ivy outside my study window . Now here's the mother dove who sat on my window sill all last summer hatching babies; whose descendants may sit here still when I and that boy I fell in love with lie all quiet in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, beneath the grand old trees and under the wide cold sky.

Mossy Thoughts

They’re calling it an end-of-summer heat wave but it doesn't feel like that to me. Whether temps shoot over 90° in the days or not, the nights are cool. It was over 90° here yesterday but just 65° at night and a simple window fan made me feel as cool as moss by a forest pond.I love moss and admire its short not-askin’-for-much root system that lets it take hold wherever it finds itself. I love too the way it sports that jaunty green-velvet jacket. At dawn today I looked out the window and saw an earth that looked springy and fresh and a far cry indeed from the parched and yearning thing it was so lately.I live near the ocean, if 8 miles can be called near, and when the wind comes out of the east and the clouds roll in, the blood-heavy smell of it fills every corner. You feel manacled almost, tangled about the ankles in seaweed, with small sucky things fixing on your limbs.It’s fine to feel that way on those east-wind days; it’s just another way to feel. But it’s not how I feel today. Today the sun shines and I mean to set short roots in my own forest floor and be happy for what is.... And, in that cheery spirit, this short hopeful verse by Colorado poet Reg Saner about moss:

Green Feathers

Five minutes till dawn and a moist breath of pine resin comes to me as from across a lake.

It smells of wet lumber, naked and fragrant.

In the early air we keep trying to catch sight of something lost up ahead,

A moment when the light seems to have seen us Exactly as we wish we were.

Like a heap of green feathers poised on the rim of a cliff?

Like a sure thing that hasn’t quite happened?

Like a marvelous idea that won’t work?

Routinely amazing

How moist tufts, half mud, keep supposing  almost nothing is hopeless.

How the bluest potato grew eyes on faith the light would be there.

And it was.