The Swallow's Hour

Our new U. S. Poet Laureate's book The Zone Journals is an appealing model for me. The book consists of meditative poems in varying lengths, some of them marked with the day they were written.
I've written about this in a recent post.

Here is tonight's poem.

6:30, summer evening, the swallow's hour
Over the vine rows:
                              arrowing down the valley, banking back
And sliding against the wind, they feint
and rise, invisible sustenance disappearing
Out of the air:
                      to the long dark beams of the farmhouse,
The termites and rhinocerous beetles bore in their slow lines
Under another sky:
                             everything eats or is eaten.

from The Zone Journals by Charles Wright, 
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988, page 57.

Keeping a journal of things that my mind is roving over is so appealing to me that I have never actually done it. It seems that one would need a level of mental quietude that I think I have, but maybe not. There are so many wonderful journals, those of Thoreau, for instance which would take a lifetime to read, if one could afford the printed set.