Like snow, I was born in the distant belly of a mother I never knew as well as when, point by lovely point, I was forming myself inside her. I came from nowhere, fell softly on new air. I did not know where the drift of weather or the iron tide of chance would carry me. I fell far beyond my own control, giddy with release. I was most myself in this my only falling onto our earth.

Snow's depth is the instant shape it gives a thing: what snow touches shifts, just slightly, bringing the sweet pleasure of merest change, the way a human will touch a human lightly on the wrist and that day is different, slightly and forever:

I am one among many, our lives linked, as drifting snow is linked, in mutual need and fallen beauty.

In the democracy of daisies every blossom has one vote. The question on the ballot is Does he love me?

If the answer's wrong I try another, a little sorry about the petals piling up around my shoes.

Bees are loose in the fields where daisies wait and hope, dreaming of the kiss of a proboscis. We can't possibly understand

what makes us such fools. I blame the June heat and everything about him.

        
        Lay down these words
        Before your mind like rocks.
                  placed solid, by hands
        In choice of place, set
        Before the body of the mind
                  in space and time:
        Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
                  riprap of things:
        Cobble of milky way,
                  straying planets,
        These poems, people,
                  lost ponies with
        Dragging saddles --
                  and rocky sure-foot trails.
        The worlds like an endless 
                  four-dimensional
        Game of Go.
                  ants and pebbles
        In the thin loam, each rock a word
                  a creek-washed stone
        Granite: ingrained
                  with torment of fire and weight
        Crystal and sediment linked hot
                  all change, in thoughts,
        As well as things.