Enjoying Spring

Bright and sunny, the water sparkling, a few people on the beach, a couple of them even walking barefoot.  Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people: those who know how to enjoy natural beauty and those who think it's an effort to go for a walk on a beautiful day.  I met a man as I walked who said, "How's it feel to be in paradise!" "Fabulous," I answered. 

Here is a prose poem by Jim Harison, who I mostly know as a most interesting novelist. He is a person--as I think most  poets are--who knows how to enjoy a nature.

Late Spring

Because of the late, cold wet spring the fruit of greenness is suddenly upon us so that in Montana you can throw yourself down just about anywhere on a green grassy bed, snooze on the riverbank and wake up to a yellow-rumped warbler flittering close to your head then sipping a little standing water from a moose track. Of course pitching yourself downward you first look for hidden rocks. Nothing in nature is exactly suited to us. Meanwhile everywhere cows are napping from overeating, and their frolicsome calves don’t remember anything except this bounty. And tonight the calves will stare at the full moon glistening off the mountain snow, both snow and moon white as their mother’s milk. This year the moisture has made the peonies outside my studio so heavy that they droopo to the ground and I think of my early love, Emily Bronte. The cruelty of our different ages kept us apart.  I tie and prop up the peonies to prolong their lives, just as I would have nursed Emily so she could see another spring.