
The bee is a promiscuous creature, never sampling the same blossom twice.
The bee is a promiscuous creature, never sampling the same blossom twice.
I walked seven miles alongside a creek. The stream ran on and on over rocks. A squirrel clambered over roots, rustling pine needles. Wild roses lifted pink goblets to the sun, rain drops shimmering on fragrant petals. Nature spared no expense. Even the short-tailed weasels popped their heads playfully from between rocks and ran in circles. I did not solve any problems for the world, not even my own. But the stream rustled: “Here I am! Here I am!” And the bird sang: “Just be!”
First, they perch on the front porch lamp. Then, they smuggle mud and twigs to lay masonry: each plucked twig, an expenditure of wings, each mud bead, stucco that trusses sprig to sprig. On tiled steps, their cup spills, the overflow of twigs that don’t fit, the clay slip of pearls that drop from beaks. Watching the nest grow, I don’t sweep discards. Each dry blade of straw is long as a tailfeather. Each clod of clay, an opaque pearl. Swooping and diving through air, the barn swallows catch insects on the wing, then scoop mud for the nest without once touching down. They are restless creatures of feather and flight. Day’s end, the barn swallows perch again on lamp and nest, and peer at me through clerestory windows. Looking within and without, in each other’s lives we see the detritus of misfit straw and misfired clay, that multiply like loaves and fishes. Yet, in each scrappy act, we see that love is restless once the work’s begun, that love meanders like a stream until its task is done.
Love is like a river. When blocked by debris it forges a new route. When it appears frozen on the surface, it moves still below the surface of the ice, swift as fins on a fish. Love is like a river. Love holds nothing back but gives all, rounds every corner. Hoard love in a Hoover dam of thirst and you damage the entire ecosystem. Yet the beaver tames the river just long enough to raise its young, then lets the river unwind. Everything depends on the river. Love is like a river. When you are hot, it soothes your ankles. When you are lost, the river says: “Follow me.” All of life, and even the earth itself, depends on the river. Because the river loves all, it nurtures both trout and blue heron. The river holds two opposing elements in its mind and resolves any conflict by giving itself over and over, drop by drop over to the hard heart of the rock, so that even bedrock, worn down by the river, is softer than the human heart. The river folds itself between a rock and the hard place of your heart—that parched watering hole— where love crafts the riverbed. Love is a river.
The axe is a mighty wedge. It can splice trees to fell logs for a home. The beaver’s tooth is a wedge. It shapes rivers. The wedge in your heart, well, let it be a ship wedge. For the ship wedge bears a ship—heavy as the grief of the Titanic—effortlessly, and then releases it at one stroke, and launches it, and sends it off to sea.
I was profligate with my prayer, Casting it into the water like food for ducks, And it went unanswered. Now I have it packaged neatly Into the mustard seed Small enough to slip Through the eye of the needle.
It doesn’t matter how much you love, Only that you love. You’ve seen how Everything swells, the bud into bloom, the thin lip of the new moon into the radiance of a full moon, spilling into the small pond. For love strikes where it will, if you are willing to receive it. It doesn’t matter how much you love, only that you are open to love, like a sail, hoisted to the mast, ready for the windfall, poised to ride the waves, precariously. It doesn’t matter how much you love, Only that you love, through thick and thin— Even when you are hollowed out as the drill hits the bone: The shadow recalls the light. The thorn, the fragrance of the rose. And when love seems cold as cinders, remember how the iron prod sparks the ember that still glows red. For love strikes where it will, if you are willing to receive it.
The words of a poem should dovetail like wood panels of a finely crafted cabinet. The words of a poem should glide, effortlessly, like a finely tuned drawer. In the box canyon where a canyon wren has nested, the canyon wren’s song glides across the canyon seamlessly like water over rock: each note articulated and composed with a craftsman’s precision. Even so, it isn’t the melody you remember. It’s the way your heart sang out. All along the song was within you but the bird gave it wing.
The hand that lights the wick is lightning. The breath that extinguishes the flame is rain.
Sun filters through ponderosa and melts snow, like a flame burning the wax that pools around the wick.