A New Gray Day

I have been OUTSIDE. For a long walk, a three-mile walk through the cemetery. It's cold, but it's not unbearable. And I looked at little things. I paid a lot of attention. I have been starving for that outdoor pay-attention time.

I didn't take the dog, who is also desperate to get outdoors, because I hoped to see the foxes. I didn't. But I found their prints stamped into the snow all around the hollow tree where I photographed the five kits last spring. So I am hopeful that the female lies nestled in her underground den and that the next months will bring new life there again.

I was inspired not only by the mellow temperature (15!) but by the following poem, which appeared Friday in the exquisite blog Abbey of the Arts:

I am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic

~ Edward Hirsch

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater

and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,

each a station in a pilgrimage–silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies

are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text

and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel

and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs

as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,

a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

PS: For whatever reason, the image of the door won't enlarge. But, with a click, the other four will. The tendrils of ivy are actually over the rusted door of the mausoleum, and the bark belongs to an Austrian pine.