Category Archives: Inspirations

Mud Season ~ Tess Taylor We unstave the winter’s tangle.Sad tomatoes, sullen sky. We unplay the summer’s blight.Rotted on the vine, black fruit swings free of strings that bound it.In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields grotesque extruded peppers.We prod half-thawed mucky things.  In the sky, starlings eddying.Tomorrow, snow again, old silence. Today, theContinue reading “Monday’s Musing”

Moon in Aries sextile Pluto in Aquarius This week’s increased speed with which we receive, approach, and go about our lives must be tempered by the grounding influence of Moon, Jupiter, and Uranus’s presence in stable and resourceful Taurus if we are to make the kind of progress we want to. The week starts outContinue reading “Monday’s Muse”

(book at hand, on a snow day at home — actually, i pulled out Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace, and inside found a bookmark gift from years ago from the baker with his words which feel perfect right now…) This timethe quiet spaces thatfall betweenlike snow in a forestto cover the exposedgroundas thoughContinue reading “Monday’s Musing”

Early Frost BY Scott Cairns This morning the world’s white face reminds usthat life intends to become serious again.And the same loud birds that all summer longannoyed us with their high attitudes and chattersilently line the gibbet of the fence a little stunned,chastened enough. They look as if they’re waiting for thingsto grow worse, but areContinue reading “Another Monday already, another muse”

{book at hand, random page} Claims of the freedom advocates, like all other claims, are subject to the rule of reason. There is no such thing as a free person in the strict meaning of the term. Basic to human life are the drastic limitations inherent in the structure and functioning of the human organism.Continue reading “Monday’s Musing”

Grandmother in the Garden ~ Louise Gluck The grass below the willowOf my daughter’s wash is curledWith earthworms, and the worldIs measured into row on rowOf unspiced houses, painted to seem real.The drugged Long Island summer sun drainsPattern from those empty sleeves, beyond my grandsonSquealing in his pen. I have survived my life.The yellow daylightContinue reading “A Muse for Monday”

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer~ Mark Strand 1 When the moon appearsand a few wind-stricken barns stand outin the low-domed hillsand shine with a lightthat is veiled and dust-filledand that floats upon the fields,my mother, with her hair in a bun,her face in shadow, and the smokefrom her cigarette coiling closeto theContinue reading “A Musing for a Monday”

Everything (from the collection: uncomfortable ecologies) ~ Elizabeth Joy Levinson The white fingersof the sycamoresreach outagainst the cerulean sky,the moon white and translucent, Am I white and reaching and translucent? I am white and reaching and translucent.I am a killing frost at dawnor an ice storm I am trying to hold everythingat once.

Nine Good Things (because 9 is my list number, for so many reasons, and because this week I need to count some good things…)