Fat,
black, slick,
galloping in the pitch
of the waves, in the pearly
fields of the sea,

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your kn
for a hundred miles through the de
You only have to let the soft anim
love what it loves.

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hum
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there t
Here the clam deep in the speckled

Needing one, I invented her—
the great-great-aunt dark as hicko
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.
Dear aunt, I’d call into the leav

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the bramb
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,

In the early curtains
of the dusk
it flew,
a slow galloping
this way and that way

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, lik
the wings of a moth in the beak of
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,