Even just 5 minutes of sunshine

relieves my Rainy Day Blues.

Like Going Home Again

This is where it started: love of flowers.
Like going home, but really at home.

(If you're unable to see the slideshow, see the photos here.)

And The Dogwood Burned Fuschia

Overnight almost every pine needle on almost every pine tree browned and wind-whipped almost every pine needle flew off almost every pine tree and blew and swirled and each and every one plastered the leaf-labeled ground and almost every pine needle from almost every pine tree glowed amber and brown on wet wood and emerald grass and yellow, red, and orange leaf. 

A Letter to a Friend

Dear S,

I love the Cambridge garden photos you post, and the beautiful prints that your Iowa artist friend creates of trees, and animals, and flowers. I only wish I could grow such beautiful things, either in the soil or on the page.

Once a year, though, I think of myself as a gardener, or a forester, in spring when the flowering trees I planted all bloom: crabapple, Kwanzan cherry, dogwood, redbud. 

I made these few snaps for you today, just so you can see what are missing here.

I hope your spring is just as beautiful!

Your friend,
R

Living in the Light

The Shapes of Leaves
by Arthur Sze

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:

our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,

and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours 
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool, 

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

Dogwood Winter on the Way

Last Supper

by Charles Wright

I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what,

Full moon blood orange just over the top of the redbud tree.

Maundy Thursday tomorrow,

                         then Good Friday, then Easter in full drag,

Dogwood blossoms like little crosses

All down the street,

                    lilies and jonquils bowing their mitred heads.

Perhaps it’s a sentimentality about such fey things,

But I don’t think so. One knows

There is no end to the other world,

                                    no matter where it is.

In the event, a reliquary evening for sure,

The bones in their tiny boxes, rosettes under glass.

Or maybe it’s just the way the snow fell

                                         a couple of days ago,

So white on the white snowdrops.

As our fathers were bold to tell us,

                                    it’s either eat or be eaten.

Spring in its starched bib,
Winter’s cutlery in its hands. Cold grace. Slice and fork.

A Cry

Photographing dogwood berries -- more than I've ever seen on the tree, I heard the telltale cry of a hawk, looked up, and saw him or her perched in my black walnut.  I snapped, but the gray sky and jerk of my hand produced only a shaky image, not nearly so bold as the call and call and call to a young one in the woods behind my house.

The red berry, hawk's cry and flight into the woods, chilly temperature and foggy rain -- all excite me: I can't wait for fall, and winter, and spring, and summer again, for each unexpected moments of pleasure.