Every year the lilies are so perfect I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding the black, mid-summer ponds. Nobody could count all of them -- the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses [...]

A blue preacher flew toward the swamp, in slow motion. On the leafy banks, an old Chinese poet, hunched in the white gown of his wings, was waiting. The water was the kind of dark [...]

I have been thinking about living like the lilies that blow in the fields. They rise and fall in the edge of the wind, and have no shelter from the tongues of the cattle, and [...]

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean — the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is [...]

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the [...]

I’ve been trying, my darling, to explain to myself how it is that same freight train loaded with ballast so a track may rest easier in its bed should be what’s roused us both from [...]

There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on [...]

Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like— though evidence suggests eight complexly folded [...]

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, [...]

Light splashed this morning on the shell-pink anemones swaying on their tall stems; down blue-spiked veronica light flowed in rivulets over the humps of the honeybees; this morning I saw light kiss the silk of [...]