"Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." Henry David Thoreau

Cosmos, Jungho Lee

From The Wood Between. Check it out.

Days Off

Illustrations by Frank E. Schoonover, 1877 - 1972, appearing in the book Days Off by Henry Van Dyke, published in 1907.

"As imperceptibly as Grief" by Emily Dickinson

Sarah Ross

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away—

Too imperceptible at last,

To seem like Perfidy—

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon—

The Dusk drew earlier in—

The Morning foreign shone—

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone—

And thus, without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful.

"Possum" by Matthew Wimberly

"Possum Generations" by Caleb Smith

As I go on unnoticed under the clouds

And back onto the logging path

Toward home, I stand at a fork

Beside a rusted vine of barbed wire

Wanting, for whatever reason

(For only a breath) to see myself at seven

Coming upon this spot

Stopping in the same trough of trail,

Eyes looking into a scaffold of trees—

Finding a possum someone strung up

As a warning in a low branch, dead & rotting. I remember

How evenly the skin decayed

Over the jaw

Exposing a wide grin, a laughter—

The body stretched into the outline of sorrow

A broken branch stabbed through

Its side. Dust & fur shed from vertebrae

In summer’s flat light

When I knew little of death—

Only the color it made of bones,

Opaque claws turning turquoise

Before being changed altogether

Into slivers of smoked glass.

And the naked tail

Stiff and furless

Was not terrible & grotesque

But (became beautiful)

A fine lace spun in the wind

The body untouchable

As the night sky.

Always there would be

Something in the bend of that shagbark—

A recess carved from memory

(Where the animal eroded—

A smile unchanged for months.)

I walk ahead until in the distance my porch light

Casts a glow, whorling against the fog

Like a lullaby to no one.

It’s almost winter

Frost covers the wooden steps.

Overhead the constellations are recognizable.

I can hold them one at a time

On the flat of my hand—

Light years scaled down

Across my knuckles.

"The Night Migrations" by Louise Gluck

"Night Reflections" Robert Kipness 1969

This is the moment when you see again

the red berries of the mountain ash

and in the dark sky

the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think

the dead won’t see them-

these things we depend on,

they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?

I tell myself maybe it won’t need

these pleasures anymore;

maybe just not being is simply enough,

hard as that is to imagine.

"The Night Migrations" by Louise Glück from Averno. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

"Talk About Walking" by Philip Booth

"Walking Man" by Jack Baumgartner

Where am I going? I’m going

out, out for a walk. I don’t

know where except outside.

Outside argument, out beyond

wallpapered walls, outside

wherever it is where nobody

ever imagines. Beyond where

computers circumvent emotion,

where somebody shorted specs

for rivets for airframes on

today’s flights. I’m taking off

on my own two feet. I’m going

to clear my head, to watch

mares’-tails instead of TV,

to listen to trees and silence,

to see if I can still breathe.

I’m going to be alone with

myself, to feel how it feels

to embrace what my feet

tell my head, what wind says

in my good ear. I mean to let

myself be embraced, to let go

feeling so centripetally old.

Do I know where I’m going?

I don’t. How long or far

I have no idea. No map. I

said I was going to take

a walk. When I’ll be back

I’m not going to say.

"Talk about Walking" by Philip Booth from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999 (Viking Press).

"Angling Reveries" by C.N. Ward

"Evening Fireside Stories" by Louis Rhead, 1914

From Fisherman's Verse, compiled by Williams Haynes and Joseph LeRoy Harrison.

Duffield and Company, New York, 1919.

"A Ritual To Read To Each Other" by William Stafford

"Fireflies" by Ito Sozan, 1926

If you don’t know the kind of person I am

and I don’t know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,

but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider--

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

"A Ritual To Read To Each Other" by William Stafford from Stories That Could Be True. © Harper & Row, 1982. 

"To a Thundercloud" by George MacDonald

Robert Marchessault

Oh, melancholy fragment of the night

Drawing thy lazy web against the sun,

Thou shouldst have waited till the day was done

With kindred glooms to build thy fane aright,

Sublime amid the ruins of the light!

But thus to shape our glories one by one

With fearful hands, ere we had well begun

To look for shadows-even in the bright!

Yet may we charm a lesson from thy breast,

A secret wisdom from thy folds of thunder:

There is a wind that cometh from the west

Will rend thy tottering piles of gloom asunder,

And fling thee ruinous along the grass,

To sparkle on us as our footsteps pass!

"To a Thundercloud" by George MacDonald, 1824 - 1905.

"The Kinglet" by Floyd Dalton Raze (1911)

Franco Testa

The golden-crowned kinglet that all summer long

Has brightened the wood with his presence and song,

Oh, where has he gone that I see him no more

On the bough of the pine where I saw him of yore?

His wee, tiny nest hangs aloft in the tree,

All empty and cheerless and lone as can be,

Where erst in the cool summer breezes it swung

A hammock and home for his clamorous young.

Now loud through the fir boughs the autumn winds blow

Where soon will be gathered the cold winter snow,

Aloft in the birch is the call of the jay

But never a kinglet to greet me to-day.

He has left the old home with a solemn "good bye"

For a spot that he loves 'neath the far southern sky,

Yet I know as he murmurs his "tsee, tee, tee, tee,"

He'll sometime be thinking of summer and me.

"The Kinglet" by Floyd Dalton Raze, from The Home of the Wild Rose and Other Poems, 1911.

"Stories" by Stephen Dunn

"Missing Home" by Michael Whelan

It was back when we used to listen to stories,

     our minds developing

pictures as we were taken into the elsewhere

of our experience or to the forbidden

     or under the sea.

Television was wrestling, Milton Berle,

Believe It Or Not. We knelt before it

     like natives

in front of something sent by parachute,

but when grandfather said “I’ll tell you a story,”

     we stopped with pleasure,

sat crosslegged next to the fireplace, waited.

He’d sip gin and hold us, his voice

     the extra truth

beyond what we believed without question.

When grandfather died and changed

     what an evening meant,

it was 1954. After supper we went

to the television, innocents in a magic land

     getting more innocent,

a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock,

the end of our enormous childhood.

     We sat still

for anything, laughed when anyone slipped

or lisped or got hit with a pie. We said

     to our friends

“What the hey?” and punched them in the arms.

The television had arrived, and was coming.

     Throughout the country

all the grandfathers were dying,

giving their reluctant permission, like Indians.

"Stories" by Stephen Dunn from Local Time. © Quill Press, 1986.

"Half Moon in a High Wind" by Carl Sandburg

"The Moon -- Together" by Crystal Liu

Money is nothing now, even if I had it,

O mooney moon, yellow half moon,

Up over the green pines and gray elms,

Up in the new blue.

Streel, streel,

White lacey mist sheets of cloud,

Streel in the blowing of the wind,

Streel over the blue-and-moon sky,

Yellow gold half moon. It is light

On the snow; it is dark on the snow,

Streel, O lacey thin sheets, up in the new blue.

Come down, stay there, move on.

I want you, I don't, keep all.

There is no song to your singing.

I am hit deep, you drive far,

O mooney yellow half moon,

Steady, steady; or will you tip over?

Or will the wind and the streeling

thin sheets only pass and move on

And leave you alone and lovely?

I want you, I don't, come down,

Stay there, move on.

Money is nothing now, even if I had it.

"February" by Margaret Atwood

"Snowy" by Vicky Mount

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here

should snip a few testicles. If we wise

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over

again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits

thirty below, and pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood.

"Twilight Comes" by Hayden Carruth

"At the Edge of Dusk" by Catherine Hyde

After Wang Wei

Twilight comes to the little farm

At winter's end. The snowbanks

High as the eaves, which melted

And became pitted during the day,

Are freezing again, and crunch

Under the dog's foot. The mountains

From their place behind our shoulders

Lean close a moment, as if for a

Final inspection, but with kindness,

A benediction as the darkness

Falls. It is my fiftieth year. Stars

Come out, one by one with a softer

Brightness, like the first flowers

Of spring. I hear the brook stirring,

Trying its music beneath the ice.

I hear - almost, I am not certain -

Remote tinklings; perhaps sheepbells

On the green side of a juniper hill

Or wineglasses on a summer night.

But no. My wife is at her work,

There behind yellow windows. Supper

Will be soon. I crunch the icy snow

And tilt my head to study the last

Silvery light of the western sky

In the pine boughs. I smile. Then

I smile again, just because I can.

I am not an old man. Not yet.

"Twilight Comes" by Hayden Carruth, from Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991. © Copper Canyon Press, 1992. 

"Winter-Time" by Robert Louis Stevenson

"Winter-Time" illustration from A Child's Garden of Verses,

by Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire.

Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,

A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;

Blinks but an hour or two; and then,

A blood-red orange, sets again.

Before the stars have left the skies,

At morning in the dark I rise;

Ans shivering in my nakedness,

By the cold candle, bathe and dress.

Close by the jolly fire I sit

To warm my frozen bones a bit;

Or with a reindeer-sled, explore

The colder countries round the door.

When to go out, my nurse doth wrap

Me in my comforter and cap;

The cold wind burns my face, and blows

Its frosty pepper up my nose.

Black are my steps on silver sod;

Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;

And tree and house, and hill and lake,

Are frosted like a wedding cake.

From A Child's Garden of Verses, first published in 1902.

"I Looked Up" by Mary Oliver

"Frost" Shiro Kasamatsu

I looked up and there it was

among the green branches of the pitch pines—

thick bird,

a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back—

color of copper, iron, bronze—

lighting up the dark branches of the pine.

What misery to be afraid of death.

What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

When I made a little sound

it looked at me, then it looked past me.

Then it rose, the wings enormous and opulent,

and, as I said, wreathed in fire.

"I Looked Up" by Mary Oliver, from Owls and Other Fantasies. © Beacon Press, 2003. 

"At the Beginning of Winter" by Tom Hennen

"Ice Dawn" Linocut by William Hayes

In the shallows of the river

After one o' clock in the afternoon

Ice still

An eighth of an inch thick.

Night never disappears completely

But moves among the shadows

On the bank

Like a glimpse of fur.

Meanwhile

Trees

Grass

Flies and spiderwebs

Appear alone in the flat air.

The naked aspens stand like children

Waiting to be baptized

And the goldenrod too is stripped down

To its bare stalk

In the cold

Even my thoughts

Have lost their foliage.

"At the Beginning of Winter" by Tom Hennen, from Looking Into The Weather. © Westerheim Press, 1983.

Morning After the First Snow

Morning After the First Snow, Okuyama Gihachiro, 1950's

From The Wood Between

"Homecoming" by W.S. Merwin

"Moonrise Over Usk" by Flora McLachlan

Once only when the summer

was nearly over and my own

hair had been white as the day's clouds

for more years than I was counting

I looked across the garden at evening

Paula was still weeding around

flowers that open after dark

and I looked up to the clear sky

and saw the new moon and at that

moment from behind me a band

of dark birds and then another

after it flying in silence

long curving wings hardly moving

the plovers just in from the sea

and the flight clear from Alaska

half their weight gone to get them home

but home now arriving without

a sound as it rose to meet them

"Homecoming" by W.S. Merwin from The Moon Before Morning. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014. 

"Kindness to Animals" by Anonymous

Illustration by Walter Beach Humphrey

Little children, never give

Pain to things that feel and live:

Let the gentle Robin come

For the crumbs you save at home,--

As his meat you throw along

He'll repay you with his song;

Never hurt the timid hare

Peeping from her green grass lair,

Let her come and sport and play

On the lawn at close of day;

The little lark goes soaring high

To the bright windows of the sky,

Singing as if 'twere always spring,

And fluttering on an untired wing,--

Oh! let him sing his happy song,

Nor do these gentle creatures wrong.

"Kindness to Animals" by Anonymous