The closest inspection

Oct. 22, 1838  Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain. Henry David Thoreau from The Heart of Thoreau's Journals, Dover, 1961, page 9.

And this is this afternoon's rosebud, and the weekend's blown rose. We don't remember the name of this one. The roses seem to be quite happy this year. They are quite like soul food. And I am feeding myself with a small Ted Kooser poem again tonight.

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful, 
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.


Ted Kooser, from Flying at Night, 
Univ. of Pittsburgh Press,1985, page 3.