Ducks in Autumn

Ducks feed today amid the fallen cottonwood leaves.

I love the blurring that captures the up and down motion of their heads.

Now it is raining and it is very late. I have been working on something else

and need to come back to blogland.

Here is the very end of Section 13 of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. 

Perhaps I have been neglecting Walt here, Walt, who first showed me 

how expansive and free poetry could be.

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and                                                                               day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.

I believe in those wing’d purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something                                                                                else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty                                                                                   well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

I love the looooong lines but they do not always fit the Blogger format. . .  Good night!