Clouds...

The shock of delight you get when you hit on the right combination of words to talk about what you've just seen--say, the slow parade of words in Great Blue Heron for a particular bird that one morning stately alights, and statelily looks out to sea--is closely tied to why poetry is political, why our attempts to name what we know something about is a saving thirst, an instinctual need, a more-than-gesture towards what Adrienne Rich calls a more "humane civil life."

...and Dirt

Sometimes a garden is just a garden... Are our basest instincts noble enough? In and of themselves, can the struggle to grow things--to combat weeds and suffering alike so that people everywhere have a chance to thrive--retain its dailiness even in our ideas about them? Can we resist that everloving urge to try to make everything we do appear to be somehow more and more noble? (Obviously, even as I write this I'm finding it can be tricky.)

Just as Adrienne Rich comes at the earth from the point of view of one chasing down words to incarnate the birds of the air, Ron Sulllivan here comes at the earth from under the soil, and asks if it isn't enough that we engage in politics as ordinarily and with as much gusto as we do when we eat, laugh, talk across the fence, dance.