Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked

The river
Of my childhood,
That tumbled
Down a passage of rocks
And cut-work ferns,

Understand, I am always trying to
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,

In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird
with its white eyes

At Blackwater Pond the tossed wat
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls

not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s n
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now—whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can

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

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black b
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out

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