Epigraph
“But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. —Vincent van Gogh”
Red Bird
“I am a God-fearing feeder of birds. / I know He has many children, / not all of them bold in spirit” (1)
Maker of All Things, Even Healings
“Maker of All Things, / including appetite, / including stealth, / including the fear that makes / all of us, sometime or other, / flee for the sake / of our small and precious lives, / let me abide in your shadow— / let me hold on / to the edge of your robe / as you determine / what you must let be lost / and what will be saved” (4-5)
Boundaries
“Someday we’ll live in the sky. / Meanwhile, the house of our lives is this green world. / The fields, the ponds, the birds. / The thick black oaks—surely they are / the invention of something wonderful” (10)
Straight Talk from Fox
“Death itself / is a music. Nobody has ever come close to / writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot / be told. It is flesh and bones / changing shape” (11)
Another Everyday Poem
“what a puzzle it is / that such brevity— / the lavish clothes, / the ruddy food— / makes the world / so full, so good” (12-13)
Summer Story
“I am scorched / to realize once again / how many small, available things / are in this world / that aren’t / pieces of gold / or power— / that nobody owns / or could buy even / for a hillside of money” (25)
The Teachers
“I listen to those teachers, / and others too— / the wind in the trees / and the water waves— / for they are what lead me / from the dryness of self / where I labor / with the mind-steps of language— / lonely, as we al are / in the singular” (27)
Summer Morning
“Let the world / have its way with you, / luminous as it is / with mystery / and pain— / graced as it is / with the ordinary” (30)
Sometimes
“Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it” (37)
Percy (Nine)
“Emerson, I am trying to live, / as you said we must, the examined life. / But there are days I wish / there was less in my head to examine, / not to speak of the busy heart” (39)
Both Worlds
“I rise from the chair, / I put on my jacket / and leave the house / for that other world— / the first one, / the holy one— / where the trees say / nothing the toad says / nothing the dirt / says nothing and yet / what has always happened / keeps happening: / the trees flourish, / the toad leaps, / and out of the silent dirt / the blood-red roses rise” (51-52)
There you were, and it was like spring
“Why are we made the way we are made, that to love / is to want?” (72)
I will try
“I did not come into this world / to be comforted. / I came, like red bird, to sing. / But I’m not red bird, with his head-mop of flame / and the red triangle of his mouth / full of tongue and whistles, / but a woman whose love has vanished, / who thinks now, too much, of roots / and the dark places / where everything is simply holding on” (75)
Red Bird Explains Himself
“‘Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow / and I was the song in the summer leaves, but this was / only the first trick / I had hold of among my other mythologies, / for I also knew obedience: bringing sticks to the nest, food to the young, kisses to my bride’” (78)
“‘I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed, / and thus wilderness bloomed there’” (78)