Sublime

hardscrabble

He also told us that the formal five syllables, then seven, then five, often taught in Western schools, does not necessarily work in English. In Japanese each syllable counts. They don’t have the, an, that, those articles of speech, so he encouraged us not to worry about the count if we write or translate haiku.

ursine.

Whether on foot, on showshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could. JOHN HAINES, THE STARS, THE SNOW, THE FIRE: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE NORTHERN WILDERNESS

But we’ve known the power of the wild, the all-consuming demands of rain and snow and wind, the callousness of mountains and rivers. We’ve been cared for by strangers. We’ve felt part of something much

Like Raymond Carver, Jane Kenyon writes about her routines in her poem “Otherwise.” She gets out of bed, eats breakfast, has lunch, takes a nap, eats dinner, and sleeps. Nothing special, except that she might have been unable to get out of bed, unable to do all the routines.