1
Who knocks? That April –
Lock the Door –
I will not be pursued –
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied –
Dear March — Come in –/ Emily Dickinson
2
& as you chore, touch
the ankles & hairs of your befores
who look up from their work
in the field or at the chisel
to tell you in their ways: You Live!
from The Black Maria/ Aracelis Girmay
3
we don’t know
to un-
wrap these blind-
folds we
keep thinking
we are
seeing through
In cold spring/ Reginald Gibbons
4
Having swum in the ocean
Salt considers soup a shallow pond
For salt, every meal is a jail
One day, an extra salty flavor
Makes me cough and cough
It feels like cold fish bones scraping my throat
Maybe it’s salt telling me
I’m going to prison in your body
Don’t ever forget who I am!
Salt / Huang Fan
5
like the tree I can lose myself
layer after layer
all the way down to infinity
and that’s when the world has eyes and sees.
The whole world
loves this unlayered human.
Eucalyptus/ Linda Hogan
6
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.
The Way In/ Linda Hogan
7
A lamentation of geese
Squirrels
pad
their acorn accounts
Fashionable spruce
knows how
to wear snow
Seasons/ John Haag
8
It’s time to care about
the caribou
Quietly
the doe does
as does do
Snowgeese know
no snowgeese show
in the snow
Footsteps/ John Haag
9
yet however hard we try to
find the great nothingness
to escape the layers they
are always here unforgettable-
ably wrapped around us re-
calling what we were deter-
mining what we’ll always be.
Layers/ J. Laughlin
10
It might be none of my business,
but it might be a good idea one day
for everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them
for the sake of remembering
whatever it was they thought deserved
Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,
the lapping of the lake water
The Chairs That No One Sits In/ Billy Collins
11
Red blood cells live some hundred days before they are worn out by their silent hustle—looping and looping, pounded through the heart’s chambered cathedral, rushing out to the farthest reaches of the body with the good news of oxygen
Cell/ Naomi Cohn
12
Like a hundred gray ears
the river stones are layered
in a pile near the shed where mourning
doves slow their peck and bobble to listen
to a chorus of listening.
Listen/ Didi Jackson
13
The three of them are enveloped –
turning now to go crosstown – in their
sense of each other, of pleasure,
of weather, of corners,
of leisurely tensions between them
and private silence.
The Rainwalkers/ Denise Levertov
14
Once
a single cell
found that it was full of light
and for the first time there was seeing
Sight/ W.S. Merwin
15
I am on my knees, will you have me,
world?
Confessions of a Nature Lover/ Bob Hicok
16
the diaphragm pumps like a bellows
and the soul pulls out all the stops—
sings at the top of its lungs, laughs
at its little jokes
Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan
17
The Meadows – mine –
The Mountains – mine –
All Forests – Stintless stars –
As much of noon, as I could take –
Between my finite eyes –
Before I got my eyes put out — (336)/ Emily Dickinson
18
insulated, uninterrupted,
save a perched sparrow’s whistle,
or the thrashing of
a lemon in the garbage disposal.
Hearing Loss/ Noah Baldino
19
Shedding toughness
peeling layers down
to vulnerable stuff
And I’m blinking off old eyelids
for a new way of seeing
Shedding Skin/ Harryette Mulen