The feet of the heron, under those bamboo stems, hold the blue body, the great beak above the shallows

Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. It is heaven-sent. It flows through me like the blue wave.

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the… to buy me, and snaps the purse shu… when death comes

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hum… equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there t… Here the clam deep in the speckled…

The river Of my childhood, That tumbled Down a passage of rocks And cut-work ferns,

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black b… Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out…

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories,

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your kn… for a hundred miles through the de… You only have to let the soft anim… love what it loves.

Understand, I am always trying to… what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape and so, last week,

Needing one, I invented her— the great-great-aunt dark as hicko… called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting… or The-Beauty-of-the-Night. Dear aunt, I’d call into the leav…

All winter the water has crashed over the cold the cold sand. Now it breaks over the thin branch of your body.

The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest

At Blackwater Pond the tossed wat… after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls…

In winter all the singing is in the tops of the trees where the wind-bird with its white eyes

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice—