The rain in today's forecast only fell after the sun had set. I walked in the grey dusk spending a few minutes until full dark doing garden clean up. I have saved my overgrown okra, letting it dry and split to become sculptural additions to my pots. I have needed my mistakes to become their own form in their own order. I go away for a few days only to return to admire the reflection of the tree in the pond in the last moments of the December light.
All night in the dark valley
the sound of rain arriving
from another time
September when the wind
drops and to us it seems
that the days are waiting
I needed my mistakes
in their own order
to get me here
Here is the full moon
bringing us
silence
I call that singing bird my friend
though I know nothing else about him
and he does not know I exist
What is it that I keep forgetting
now I have lost it again
right here
I have to keep telling myself
why I am going away again
I do not seem to listen
In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree
-- W.S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning, published by Copper Canyon Press.
All night in the dark valleythe sound of rain arriving
from another time
September when the wind
drops and to us it seems
that the days are waiting
I needed my mistakes
in their own order
to get me here
Here is the full moon
bringing us
silence
I call that singing bird my friend
though I know nothing else about him
and he does not know I exist
What is it that I keep forgetting
now I have lost it again
right here
I have to keep telling myself
why I am going away again
I do not seem to listen
In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree
-- W.S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning, published by Copper Canyon Press.
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