The Last Word On Nothing

It was over 100 degrees several days this past week, where I live in Washington, and now we’re drowning in smoke. Needless to say, I’m craving something clean and cold. Maybe you are too? In which case, I pulled this from the archives for both of us:

Sometimes
in the spring
out walking
I get the feel
that the earth itself is speaking,
that it has its own language,
written in ice

each puddle in the dirt road
its own sentence
made new with meaning
each morning.
I think it is saying that we

can also be this resilient
remade and renamed after

the melt or crush of a day
simply with cold and the sleep that follows
and

the slow bond
of one element to itself
over and over and over
until made beautifully, fragilely whole again
and ready to say

something true
about the world.

This piece originally appeared in March, 2021