My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light! — Edna St. Vincent Millay Our place in the Berkshires is just over the hill from Steepletop, the house where the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived from 1925 until her death there in 1950. This is where Millay slowly retreated from the world — into the...
I was given several canna lily rhizomes by a neighbor a few years back. They were long and knobby, pale as parsnips, caked with dirt and dangling hairy roots. “They’re beautiful when they start to grow,” my neighbor assured me. “And they get really tall, though mine have yet to flower.” Great, I thought. Plants that don’t flower. Just what every garden needs. I waited until the overnight...
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars… These are Buck’s thoughts as he leads a pack of fellow sled dogs on a night chase to track and kill a snowshoe rabbit. ...
And I think of roses, roses, White and Red, in the wide six-hundred-foot greenhouses, And my father standing astride the cement benches, Lifting me high over the four-foot stems, the Mrs. Russells, and his own elaborate hybrids, And how those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me, to beckon me, Only a child, out of myself. What need for heaven, then, With that man, and those roses...
The wind was high on Florida’s Captiva Island this morning, whipping up whitecaps on the usually placid Gulf of Mexico and forcing the row of staid palms along the beach to bend southward in rigorous, calisthenic formation. But less than a mile down the island, a winding road led us back into a wide expanse of mangrove estuaries. They lay still and almost silent under the noonday sun. This...
We like March — his shoes are Purple. He is new and high — Makes he Mud for Dog and Peddler — Makes he Forests Dry — Knows the Adders Tongue his coming And begets her spot — Stands the Sun so close and mighty — That our Minds are hot. News is he of all the others — Bold it were to die With the Blue Birds buccaneering On his British Sky — Emily Dickinson (version of 1878) Though the...