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

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

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

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

I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines, walking

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

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

at twilight
when something begins
to sing, like a waterfall
pouring down
through the leaves. It is

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

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