Sierra Foothill Garden

“An absolute

patience.

Trees stand

up to their knees in fog.

The fog

slowly flows

uphill.

White

cobwebs, the grass

leaning where deer

have looked for apples.

The woods

from brook to where

the top of the hill looks

over the fog, send up

not one bird.

So absolute, it is

no other than

happiness itself, a breathing

too quiet to hear.”

–  Denise Levertov, The Breathing

Ten days of rain coming…..S.L.

Notes: Denise Levertov (1923-97) was born in Essex, and educated at home by her father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who became an Anglican priest, and by her Welsh mother. In 1948, she emigrated to America, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as ‘the most subtly skilful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving,’ and during the following decades she became ‘a poet who may just be the finest writing in English today’