You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.

Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.

The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.