Wednesday, December 19, 2018

learn by little







Learn by little the desire for all things
which perhaps is not desire at all
but undying love which perhaps
is not love at all but gratitude
for the being of all things which
perhaps is not gratitude at all
but the maker's joy in what is made,
the joy in which we come to rest.
 


~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings
art by Auguste Rodin 


in time a man disappears







In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from 
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to 
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks.  Let others come.





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~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings

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Saturday, December 15, 2018

small beauties








After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp, 
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have - as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world. 
 
 
 

--Sharon Olds
 'Little Things' from The Gold Cell