""Oh look!" 

There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple, 

Fearless and gay as our love, 

A bluejay cocked his crest! 

Oh who can tell the range of joy 

Or set the bounds of beauty? "

from A Winter Blue Jay

by Sara Teasdale

May long weekend, Victoria Day and snow.

"She sends me news of blue jays, frost, 

 Of stars and now the harvest moon.

That rides above the stricken hill"

from A Letter From Home

by Mary Oliver

Books

"The stories you remember feel like mirrors,

And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,

As though the years were pages."

from A Private Singularity

by John Koethe

"If you asked 

the sources of his glee he would shrug  

his thick shoulders and roll his eyes  

upward to where the turning leaves  

take the wind, and the gray city birds  

dart toward their prey, and flat clouds  

pencil their obscure testaments  

on the air. For a moment  

the energy that makes them who  

they are shatters the noon’s light  

into our eyes, and when we see  

again they are gone and the street  

is quiet, the day passing into  

evening, and this is autumn"

from Salt and Oil

by Philip Levine

Dawn, Vancouver, British Columbia

"This is not 

a photograph, it is a moment 

in the daily life of the world, 

a moment that will pass into 

the unwritten biography 

of your city or my city 

unless it is frozen in the fine print 

of our eyes.

from Salt and Oil

by Philip Levine

A trip to visit family and friends and the new Ripley's Aquarium Of Canada, Toronto

"sun, 

split like spun 

glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness

into the crevices— 

in and out, illuminating 

the 

turquoise sea 

of bodies. The water drives a wedge 

of iron through the iron edge 

of the cliff; whereupon the stars,"

from The Fish

by Marianne Moore

"Ancient as ocean’s shifting hills, who in sea-toils

Travelling, who furrowing the salt acres

Heavily, his wake hoary behind him,

Shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead

Over wastes gray-green crashing, among horses unbroken

From bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels,

Tide-ruin, wash of lost bodies bobbing

No longer sought for, and islands of ice gleaming

Who ravening the rank flood, wave-marshalling,

Overmastering the dark sea-marches, finds home

And harvest."

from Leviathan

by W.S. Merwin