Rain made the sky clear and cold two nights ago over the old hillfort beyond my little carriage house home. I could see the Corona borealis up above the high barn gates when I brought the dog in from her bedtime walk. There are night birds whose names I do not know, which makes them all the more strange to hear through the green dark. I heard them, and as usual wished I knew. The moon was a perfect half.
In the morning the cold was still here, just a little, and the smell of someone’s wood fire came up the drive, and it felt a good morning for reading poems aloud, ones that are food to me, ones that remind me of that animal grace Rilke wrote so perfectly of— “The free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain” (from “The Eighth Elegy” by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell).
Mare, Wolf, Swan…
So, without further ado, poems and tea with me (and my old stone wall)—