When I was a kid, I used to sometimes make lunch for myself according to what I thought went with the book I was reading at the time. I suppose it was a way to steep even more in a world I was enjoying. If I’m honest, I still do that sometimes. That aspect of steeping has gone beyond food, though, as time has gone on and the pleasures of the pen have grown. Now and then, I can clearly realize the influence of an author or certainly of music, in the cadences and structures of my own expression.

This morning, as I was coming home from an errand, I cut through the Public Gardens to walk the diagonal and make my way back through its beauty. As I walked, I was reading one of my favourite poems–Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey because it felt like the thing to read as I crunched my way along, seeing into the life of things. These lines that follow came between the Weeping European Beech where a barred owl was recently sighted and meeting a neighbour and her dog just before the steps leading to the front door. The picture is one I took of the same patch of geography that I traversed, but in a different year. It was too fitting and beautiful to not use it.

After Reading Wordsworth on a Walk in the Public Gardens

Autumn, in its drawing down journey into otherness,
lays beneath my winding path
tesserae of brilliant shading, 
wind borne comets burning
for their earth returning rest.

My inner eye then sees the dancers with branches all uplifted
offering to the blue of distance in vulnerable relief 
the praise that comes from freedom’s sighing, from
the sap-stored memory of greening,
that comes before the slowing and the stilling time.

Kimberly M. King