What I admire about birds is that I can’t be sure of what they’re saying, though I know it’s some sort of truth. Fish belong to the community of silence, in apposition to birds; though birds eat fish fish know when to keep their mouths shut.

A poet is half bird and half fish. Which half is which, which half predominates, for one half always wins against the other, can be heard in the poets’ song and seen in the poets’ silence.

The poet who endeavors to write the smallest poem possible and the poet who endeavors to write an epic have ambitions that are commensurately large and small: neither ambition is greater or lesser than the other, though each is ambitious.

Both bird and fish, the real poet, were he or she a poet, takes the time necessary not to write, and instead sits completely still looking up at the sky and down through the water.

North fork, Shoshone River, Wyoming, Tuesday evening, July 17, 2018.