[Image: “Autumn, Sliced and Diced,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

Landscape Mode

Overlooking the Cumberland River,
Clarksville, Tennessee,
Early November 1996

In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,

ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet

with shining gusto trees along the shore, Orpyland
beyond the frame, the blue horizon hidden in a sea
of possibilities. And beyond this there’s jazz: Jimmy Giuffre’s

Train on the River stretched out strong like a pet cat
and that’s that. But not quite. This poem paints
poorly what sketchers and colorists do best. The rest

should come out empty, allowing you to fill in your own
basic emptiness, your openness, your self-portrait
forged and cataloged; on quiet exhibit, on temporary loan.

Descended from clouds immensely more ancient than China,
you never quit becoming the background, the field in a sky
whose subtle earthiness sails over our heads altogether.

(Al Young [source])

…and:

Every Day

Three men spoke to me today.

One, bereaved, told me his grief, saying
Had God abandoned him, or was there
no God to abandon him?

One, condemned, told me his epitaph,
‘Groomed to die.’ On Death Row he remembers
the underside of his gradeschool desk, air-raid drill.
He never expected to live
even this long.
He sticks his head back down between his knees,
‘not even sad.’

One, a young father, told me
how he had needed his child, even
before she was conceived.
How he had planted a garden too big to hoe.
He told me about the small leaves near his window,
how he had seen in them their desire to be,
to be the world.

With this one I sat laughing,
eating, drinking wine. ‘The same word,’
he said, ‘she has the same word for me and the dog!
She loves us!’
Every day, every day I hear
enough to fill
a year of nights with wondering.

(Denise Levertov [source])

From elsewhere:

When you were young—unfathomably, microscopically young, an embryo of five, six, maybe eight days past conception—you were a blob of pluripotent stem cells: uniform cells bound for a multitude of bodily fates. You were an entity made of potential. To use the analogy of Mr. Potato Head, you were all potato. Or plastic maybe. You get what I’m after. To stick to our flawed analogy, you can think of your DNA as the kid with the vision for the Potato Head she’s about to build. Under its sway, your pluripotent stem cells began to differentiate. Some became blood cells, some bone, some neuron; humans have four hundred, even five hundred, cell types in all. The cells grew and multiplied and assembled themselves and soon there were recognizable pieces—eyes, teeth, mustache, hat: all the bits that together produced the delightful, one-of-a kind Potato Head you are today.

(Mary Roach [source])

…and:

Animal of the Earth

For the first time I understand
I’m an animal too.
Bones.
Warm breath.
Moving shaggy arms
To encircle another.
Looked at
By beasts
That fly
Walk with four feet down
Crawl
On tiny scales that shine with flecks of spring.
I’m
The only animal
That wants to write a book
That moves so uncertainly through the cold
That spends so much time
Gazing at the sky And listening for itself
Among the rustling sounds.

(Tom Hennen [source])

…and (on her childhood alertness to wonderful words):

By the time I’d learned sublime, I’d already seen its chased grays and lit hurricane greens in the Hudson River School painters’ skies (firmament!), those parlous heights brightening to revelatory, those gorges blackly, mossily seducing. I’d already read Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and to that, too—though I apologize now for the taxonomy of purples I made of it in high school English class—I retroactively applied the word.

My Aunt Pasq made us Easter bread—dense, yeasty and saltless with a hard-boiled egg, shell and all, held fast in its braided center. My grandmother grew tomatoes in her backyard. I had, for “sublime,” the words bread and tomato. I had the phrase “go pick a nice tomato for dinner.” And once out there, alone with my task, I had all to myself the teetering six o’clock light, the peeling and tender, pink-skinned birch shadowing the grass and me, the fence hung with flower boxes we’d watered just that morning, the fence keeping back the weedy graveyard on one side of the house and grocery’s parking lot on the other. That is, sublime was all around—loose, though, and rampant, unaffiliated with the word for it. Even now I say it sotto voce, preferring egg, bread, tomato, birch, wet fence.

(Lia Purpura [source])

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Aside to friends in the US: