There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
— For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

~ Elizabeth Bishop, from Questions of Travel

A room whose tables and chairs are filled with books: with fiction that is truer than truth, and poetry the light inside of fiction. A hall of paintings by the masters, mastery of taking life in and returning it changed yet unchanged. Shrimp and noodles frying in a street-vendor's cart, beneath an equatorial moon, while in the rice paddies the frogs are deafening. The unexpected smile, on a train from here to there, with no shared words, a smile the common tongue. An aria by Mozart rings in the echo of the ear. The cool, cornflower paint on the finger's tip, paints a lash of blue. The sky above you.

I close my hand and in its warmth I feel a life contained. Mine: no other: but beating with the single pulse with which all living beats, I am, I am. Should we have stayed at home, and thought of here? No… what is given is returned, we are given and we are returned. Do we ask for the travel, or is it given, bestowed delivered christened nourished relished cherished bowing bowed diminished vanished.

For forty-eight months I lived as a strange son returned to a land he hadn't seen.

Cosmology of Ones

I will have travelled so much in my life
I'd rather miss that travel when I'm dead
and heaven, I think, is much too far
it's the station at the other end of town
and the time already well past midnight

no, I belong here; I remember too much
a flower opens: the scythe weighs my hand
how she whispered: dust blows on the road
which understood the passage of my heart
the loves I gathered like wind-fall fruit

they were the sweetest, and they were enough
if I have wandered, it was earth to earth.

São Sepé, Brasil, 1991

There is so much Light in the world, so many precious and generous voices, melodies, and embraces. To live, to flourish, to walk in good company, is only to open your eyes! Enough light to be blinded by it, enough that the heat runs through all the channels of your body, to find the heart.