He has no words, still what he tells about his life
    is clear.
He does not own a computer.
He imagines the river will last forever.
He does not envy the dry house I live in.
He does not wonder who or what it is that I worship.
He wonders, morning after morning, that the river
is so cold and fresh and alive, and still
I don’t jump in.

There Are a Lot of Mockingbirds in This Book

Yes, there are many
    of those wondrous creatures
        who live in the thorns
            and are musical all day

and the Lord knows
    when they sleep, for they sing
        in the dark as well,
            as they stare at the moon,

as they flutter a little
    into the air
        then back to the branch,
            back to the thorns—

but this isn’t nature
    in which such birds
        want, each pair,
            their own few acres—

this isn’t nature
    where the sweetest things,
        being hidden in leaves
            and thorn-thick bushes

reveal themselves rarely—
    this is a book
        of the heart’s rapture,
            of hearing and praising

and never forgetting
    so that the world
        is what the world is
            in a long lifetime:

singer after singer
    bursts from the thorn bush,
        now, and again, and again,
            their songs in the mind forever.

Prayer

May I never not be frisky,
May I never not be risqué.

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean,

leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving movement,

still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.

At the Pond

One summer
    I went every morning
        to the edge of a pond where
            a huddle of just-hatched geese

would paddle to me
    and clamber
        up the marshy slope
            and over my body,

peeping and staring—
    such sweetness every day
        which the grown ones watched,
            for whatever reason,

serenely.
    Not there, however, but here
        is where the story begins.
            Nature has many mysteries,

some of them severe.
    Five of the young geese grew
        heavy of chest and
            bold of wing

while the sixth waited and waited
    in its gauze-feathers, its body
        that would not grow.
            And then it was fall.

And this is what I think
    everything is about:
        the way
            I was glad

for those five and two
    that flew away,
        and the way I hold in my heart the wingless one
            that had to stay.

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.