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

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

Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun

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

centerYou are standing at the edge… at twilight when something begins to sing, like a waterfall pouring down

The feet of the heron, under those bamboo stems, hold the blue body, the great beak above the shallows

Did you too see it, drifting, all… Did you see it in the morning, ris… An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and li… into the bondage of its wings; a s…

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…

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 quite four a.m., when the rapt… strikes me from sleep, and I rise from the comfortable bed and go to another room, where my books ar… in their neat and colorful rows. H…

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

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.

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…

Don’t call this world adorable, or… It’s frisky, and a theater for mor… The eyelash of lightning is neithe… The struck tree burns like a pilla… But the blue rain sinks, straight…