1
Raise your
heads, pals, look high,
you may see more than
you ever thought possible,
up where something might
be waving back, to tell her
she has seen the marvelous.
Woman Waving at Trees/ Dorothea Tanning
2
The river is something that happens,
like exercise or illness, to the body
on any given day
I am rivering.
Preface/ Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
3
You have to remember this isn’t your land.
Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
Our Valley/ Philip Levine
4
leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air
Summer/ Carlo Betocchi
5
I warn, “They won’t last, out of water.”
Out of Water/ Marie Ponsot
6
You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.
Song of the Open Road, 3/ Walt Whitman
7
What wd it be to be water, one body of water
(what water is is another mystery) (We are
water divided.) It wd be a self without walls,
with surface tension, specific gravity a local
exchange between bedrock and cloud of falling and rising,
rising to fall, falling to rise.
Springing/ Marie Ponsot
8
Oak leaves so full of late summer
sun even I thought, “Obscene” and stood stunned
for a moment. My God. The urge to rest like the birds
on the phone wires, chatting like barristers
at the end of the day.
Achingly Beautiful How the Sky Blooms Under at the End of the Day, Through the Canopy/ Gabrielle Calvocoressi
9
If you see the moon and don’t say
oh my god look at that moon.
Poem Beginning with a Retweet/ Maggie Smith
10
Just as a poet uses the same language as everyone else, only for other things and in other ways, a walker walks the same city as other pedestrians, only with a different purpose and perspective.
Poets and walkers look up more often than other people.
Sixteen Theses on Walking and Poetry/ Mátyás Dunajcsik
11
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Postscript/ Seamus Heaney
12
As is always the way,
you tell yourself, in
poems—Yes, always,
until you have gone there,
and gone there, “into the
field,” vowing Only until
there’s nothing more
I want—thinking it, wrongly,
a thing attainable, any real end
to wanting, and that it is close, and that
it is likely, how will you not
this time catch hold of it: flashing,
flesh at once
lit and lightless, a way
out, the one dappled way, back—
A Kind of Meadow/ Carl Phillips
13
what lights up
the lightbulb filaments
of your recall Old Man
this streak of fire
through the thin wire
of memory and mind
what line
from which poet?
What Lights Up…?/ Keki Daruwalla
14
My God, it’s loud down here, so loud the air
is rattled. Who with the hissing of trees,
the insect chatter, can fix devotion
on holy things, the electrical bugs
so loud the air is stunned, windy the leaves’
applause redoubled by the clapping wings
of magpies?
Babel/ Kimberly Johnson
15
There was no line, no roof or floor
to tell the water from the air.
Morning Swim/ Maxine Kumin