Whether writing about a honeycomb or a massasauga rattlesnake or a Siberian elm, he celebrates all the individual parts that make up a whole life. He gives a rare view into a corner of the world where magic is still a way of life. This afternoon they plunge a trowel time and time again, into the earth to rip up the small rosettes of Bull Thistle that have surfaced quietly like melanoma. Her bare hands have no affection for bracts each leaf's tapered lance. As the light abandons the fields, the wheelbarrow fills.
Clouds begin to slip a glove over the day.
The wind is kind when it laughs at her aspiration. . . . In work her hands sign sermons for our impairments. Heaped by the wire fence, like butternut squash stones from the eroded hillside have surrendered dead weight for her approval. Watching, I am sure I have never done anything that amounts to anything. She holds hands with everything we've abandoned, makes love in a bed of memory, unconscious of judgment, our individual terrors.