“how futile is man's poor, weak imagination 

by comparison with Nature's incredible genius.” 

from At The Earth's Core

by  Edgar Rice Burroughs

"There is a recurrent moment, for lovers of art, When we

shift from looking at a work to actively seeing it."

from the New Yorker, Looking and Seeing

by Peter Schjeldahl, May 8, 2017

"The wild keeps telling us something 

we want to pass on to the world:

Even far things are real.

from Whispered into the Ground

No sooner were we back for the coast then we 

visited one of my favourite spots, our friend's place  

on the prairie in Southern Alberta, where I managed 

to see one of my favourite animals. And no post

on the prairies would be complete without the poems
of William Stafford.

"That winter when this thought came-how the river

held still every midnight and flowed

backward a minute-we studied algebra

late in our room fixed up in the barn, 

and I would feel the curved relation, 

the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life

holding the earth round and ready

to meet itself again when morning came."

from Living on the Plains

"I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

to the sea,

then turned right along

   the surf

                         rounded a naked headland

                         and returned

   along the inlet shore:"

from Corsons Inlet

by A.R. Ammons

Botantical Beach Park, Vancouver Island

blogger font wonky again

Spring Red Wing dreaming of territory and conquests.

"Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men 

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien. "

from On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

by John Keats

Lately we alternate between skiffs of snow, 

spatterings of rain. hints of blue sky and a bits of cloud.

But it must be spring because we had to move the 

Forester so they can sweep the gravel from the street.

Yesterday we went for a walk in search of birds,

we found some.

"I remember you. You're the one

who lifted your ancient bones

of fossil rock, pulled yourself free

of the strata like a plaster figure

rising from its own mold, became

flesh and feather, took wing,

arrested the sky."

from Stone Bird

by Pattiann Rogers

Spring has sprung?

It’s harder to lose things and easier to find them, 

including yourself, in the light.” 

from Bathing the Lion

by Jonathan Carroll