We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it. - Mary Oliver

What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

Owl Poem

One has to say this for the rounds of life
that keep coming and going; it has worked so far.
The rabbit, after all, has never asked if the grass
wanted to live.
Any more than the owl consults with the rabbit.

Acceptance of the world requires
that I bow even to you,
Master of the night.

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing.