“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.”

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.

I go out and there she is, still of course, sitting on the nest, dead-center invisible in our flowing, still young and staked acacia; crown an almost perfect circle, dark greens blurring now in this high wind, wrestling it, compliant too—and you have to stand still and look in to see her, there where the wind splits open the head, slashes the branches, and you see her—heart, jewel, bloom, star—I can’t help but look, wind-slicings keep revealing her, felt-still, absorbent of light, sound, gaze, idea—

Night eats color,   Flower bouquets lose their fake ornaments.   Day falls into the leaves like sparkling fish   And struggles, like the lowly mud,   The shapeless dreams and trees   Nurtured outside this shriveled, deridable despair.   And the space that was chopped down   Tickles the weeds there by its feet.   Fingers stained with tar from cigarettes   Caress the writhing darkness.   And then the people move forward.