clover close up

memory

tomatillo

The Plant, Chicago Back of the Yards

blueprint

Architectural seed pods.

leaf green

After a light rain.

"Oh earth, you're too beautiful for anyone to realize."

~ Patricia Lyons Simon Newman 2013

squash blossom

in summer clothes

pearls

This morning I failed to notice the pearl-gray moment just before sunrise when everything lightens; failed also to find bird song under the grinding of garbage trucks, and later, walking through woods, to stop thinking, thinking, for even five consecutive steps. Then there was the failure to name the exact shade of blue overhead, not sapphire, not azure, not delft, to savor the soft squelch of pine needles underfoot. Later I found the fork raised halfway to my mouth while I was still chewing the last untasted bite, and so it went, until finally, wading into sleep's thick undertow, I felt myself drift from dream to dream, forever failing to comprehend where I am falling from or to: this blurred life with only moments caught in attention's loose sieve - tiny pearls fished out of oblivion's sea, laid out here as offering or apology or thank you ~ Alison Luterman, Because These Failures Are My Job

prairie school

simple pleasure

true blue

Grape hyacinth (muscari) along a garden path

plum spot

    Thundercloud purple-leaf plum tree

    

    A front porch view.

wait and see

Bergen County / Main Line

Beauty in the everyday.

japonesque

1
five mallards floating
on the cusp of a new year
like Janus, two-faced

luminaria

Winter leaf light.

notes from underground

Sedum autumn joy: unearthed during fall clean-up.

wood house

Visitor

I am dreaming of a house just like this one
but larger and opener to the trees, nighter
than day and higher than noon, and you,
visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy
milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like.
For each night is a long drink in a short glass.
A drink of blacksound water, such a rush
and fall of lonesome no form can contain it.
And if it isn't night yet, though I seem to
recall that it is, then it is not for everyone.
Did you receive my invitation? It is not
for everyone. Please come to my house
lit by leaf light. It's like a book with bright


pages filled with flocks and glens and groves
and overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyr
in whom the fish is also cooked. A book that
took too long to read but minutes to unread -
that is - to forget. Strange are the pages
thus. Nothing but the hope of company.
I made too much pie in expectation. I was
hoping to sit with you in a tree house in a
nightgown in a real way. Did you receive
my invitation? Written in haste, before
leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed.
An idea like a storm cloud that does not spill
or arrive but moves silently in a direction.
Like a dark book in a long life with a vague
hope in a wood house with an open door.

~ Brenda Shaughnessy
Source: Poetry (September 2011)

orange pop

Autumn flowering Crocus speciosus.
So beautiful, so full of life, so sasha.

I'm your: "Here-I-Am"

"Don't waste me, 'cause I won't last long,
and I won't come back, I won't come back - "

~Diane Cluck, I'm Yr Here-I-Am

letting go

After a rainstorm.