Billy Collins
From Memento Mori:
It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.
From As Usual:
After we have parted, the boats
will continue to leave the harbor at dawn.
The salmon will struggle up to the pools,
one month following the other on the wall.
From Thank-You Notes:
So I am writing now to thank everyone
who drifted off that day
like smoke from a row of blown-out candles–
for giving up your only flame.
Beth Powning
Summer passed. One day the swallows left; that night, the air was edged by the breath of winter. Goldenrod held tufts of seed fluff and the hawthorns bore shrivelled berries. In the morning, there were frost ferns on the window panes. Later, it was warm, and the air smelled of woodsmoke.
————
Rising from the glittering water was her childhood sense of being poised on the cusp of a boundless, beckoning future–wondrous, without shape, particulars or flaws.
Nigel Slater
There is a moment in April, somewhere between the end of the plum blossom and the height of the apple, just as the Holly Blue butterflies start to appear in the garden, that the early asparagus turns up at the farmers’ market. Tied in bunches of just six or ten, these first green and mauve spears of Asparagus officinalis are sometimes presented in a burlap-lined wicker basket, as if to endorse their fragility and their expense. Their points tightly closed, a faint, gray bloom of youth still apparent on their stems, it would take a will stronger than mine not to buy.
————
…I occasionally long for a simple white bowl of cauliflower cheese on a frosty day, especially when it has been made with love, and the sauce has been improved with bay and clove and the cheese is of the robust sort that makes the veins on the roof of your mouth stand out. If there is snow on the ground, then even better.
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Thank you, Mom and Dad, for encouraging me to read. Books are my favorite. 🙂
