Free Late in the Day by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

garden,
    be furniture, or food,
    and firewood only in a pinch
    because nothing else grows here.
    Theirs is the dour hardihood
    of growing on serpentine and hardpan
    with little or no water but what you steal
    from your nextdoor neighbors,
    so that nothing else grows here
    I celebrate the gnarled cranky stem,
    grey-green pungent leaf or scaly needle,
    heavy cone, bitter berry, tiny blossom,
    and the grand, rank smell of cat-spray,
    since nothing else grows here.
    Citizens of a hard and somewhat toxic land,
    unsociable, undocile, willful,
    they share nothing, yet they clothe
    a naked indigent soil with life,
    growing where nothing else grows, here.
The Canada Lynx
    We know how to know and how to think,
    how to exhibit what is known
    to heaven’s bright ignorant eye,
    how to be busy and to multiply.
    He knows how to walk
    into the trees alone not looking back,
    so light on his soft feet he does not sink
    into the snow. How to leave no track,
    no sound, no shadow. How to be gone.
The One Thing Missing
    Finally the fireflies came across the Rockies, drifting
    on damp, soft breezes blowing westward
    that lifted them over the salt and poisoned deserts
    and the terrible white-toothed Sierra
    to the quietness of California valleys
    where I saw them in a dream from the verandah
    of Kishamish, all the little airy fires
    coming and going in the summer dusk nearby
    and farther in the forests toward the mountain
    glimmering in the darkness ever finer, fainter,
    meadows of innumerable motes of silver.

CONTEMPLATIONS
In Ashland
    Across the creek stood a tall complex screen
    of walnut and honey-locust branch and leaf.
    In a soft autumn sunrise without wind
    my daughter in meditation on the deck
    above the quietly loquacious creek
    observed a multitude of small
    yellow birds among the many leaves
    coming and going quick as quick
    into sight and out of sight again.
    She said to me, they were
    like thoughts moving in a mind,
    the little birds among the many leaves.
My House
    I have built a house in Time,
    my home province. Up in the hills
    not far from the city, it looks west
    over fields, vineyards, wild lands
    to the shore of the Eternal. Many years
    went to building it as I wanted it to be,
    the sleeping porches, the shady rooms,
    the inner gardens with their fountains.
    Above the front door, a word in a language
    as yet unknown may perhaps mean Praise.
    Windows are open to the summer air.
    In winter rain patters in the courtyards
    and in the basins of the fountains
    and gathers to drip from the deep eaves.
Contemplation at McCoy Creek
    Seeking the sense within the word, I guessed:
    To be there in the sacred place,
    the temple. To witness fully, and be thus
    the altar of the thing witnessed.
    In shade beside the creek I contemplate
    how the great waters coming from the heights
    early this summer changed the watercourse.
    The four big midstream boulders stayed in place.
    The willows are some thriving and some dead,
    rooted in, uprooted by the flood.
    Over the valley in the radiant light
    a raven takes its way from east to west;
    shadow wings across the rimrock pass
    as silent as the raven. Contemplation
    shows me nothing discontinuous.
    When I looked in the book I found:
    Time is the temple—Time itself and Space—
    observed, marked out, to make the sacred place
    on the four-quartered sky, the inwalled ground.
    To join in continuity, the mind
    follows the water, shadows the birds,
    observes the unmoved rock, the subtle flight.
    Slowly, in silence, without words,
    the altar of the place and hour is raised.
    Self is lost, a sacrifice to praise,
    and praise itself sinks into quietness.
Constellating
    Mind draws the lines between the stars
    that let the Eagle and the Swan
    fly vast and bright and far
    above the dark before the dawn.
    Between two solitary minds
    as far as Deneb from Altair,
    love flings the unimaginable line
    that marries fire to fire.
Hymn to Time
    Time says “Let there be”
    every moment and instantly
    there