. . . and disappears too quickly into the thrum of the city streets. Where have the past two weeks gone? Why have I not posted anything here? Am I dead? Dying? Sick? Confused? Captured? Stuffed under the kitchen sink, all trussed up with dental floss?

None of the above.  I have no excuse. I've just been wandering,  in and out of rain, re-imagining spring.

And spring has been happening.
Flowers bursting from concrete.
Seas lifting past usual borders, leaving behind wisps of ocean hair.

So winter leaves, summer comes sneaking in, and I am making my own decisions about my own teeny-weeny house of  a size suitable for dreams.

What am I in the eyes of most people  - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.  

. . . So Vincent Van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo.

Now, I'm going to go and make some tapioca. I love tapioca -- fish eyes and glue, we used say as kids, our spoons clanking against the metal sides of the pan, polishing it clean before the pudding cooled.

Fish eyes and glue.

On those days when I just feel like walking briskly non-stop without indulging in the distractions of sea winds and ducks slip-slap-slapping their feet against waves as they attempt water take off without traction, I go to Emeryville where the sidewalks are long, very nearly always empty, and reach all the way to infinity. There's nobody talking and nobody walks along the sturdy nearly 1/2 mile-long fence separating the magical kingdom of Pixar from the rather more mundane outside world of concrete and gravel. Nobody but me, that is, me and Mr. Earnest, the wonder dog.

At this time of year, it is still possible to peer through the  black iron bars into the inner sanctum,  and I do. Those bars are too wide for my hands to grasp without stretching uncomfortably,  but I can lean against their immobility and almost taste the lush green lawns within, imagine being barefoot in all that grass, walking next to  star creatures and six-foot caterpillars. A lovely dream, a distant impossibility, close but as far from my world as  are  translucent glaciers under an arctic sun.

Soon, however,  the thorny canes bound to those massive bars  will be in full green growth, budding and stretching and concealing. The secret Kingdom of Pixar will once again disappear. New canes thick with buds will swell through the bars and burst into pink bloom. The street will be flushed with roses, the air perfumed  . . . and that blue sky,  resting now so sensibly on that sturdy triangle of black steel, will suddenly and inexplicably be propped up by a most outrageous froth of hot pink.

I can't wait.

Different types who wear a day
coat pants with stripes and cutaway

 . . . putting on the Ritz.

Just the other day, I was out trimming my all impetuous passion flower vine and came upon a butterfly, a butterfly in January. A real butterfly -- a California Painted Lady, sitting quietly on the redwood post beneath the green waterfall of leaves. It didn't fly away.

Then, today, cleaning my refrigerator, I came upon a head of Romaine lettuce that I bought perhaps a week before Thanksgiving, in mid-November. Now before you scold about my housekeeping, imagine this. That head of lettuce, still in its original bag, was as fresh as green as the day I bought it -- no greying outer leaves to peel away, no browning stalks -- just Romaine looking for all the world like Romaine. Why have I keep it for so long? Now you can tut-tut-tut about my housekeeping.

But my housekeeping is not the story here. I held that lettuce in my hand, looked closely at its still perfect leaves, and then carefully laid it back in the crisper. I have no intention of eating it, but I'll keep it. I'll just watch it -- see how many more months it stays fresh and crisp and green. It startles me to see  lettuce so old and so green. Makes me wonder . . . what are we eating these days? Why -- how -- does lettuce stay fresh for two and a half months?? Is that even possible? The bag reads 'organic' 'no preservatives.' Say wha? No preservatives and this ancient head of lettuce looks like it was just cut from the field? Why? Was it watered with liquid plastic?

Cabbages can last that long naturally -- just peel off the limp outer leaves and the center is still sweet, but lettuce? Lettuce was the treat of the spring, fresh greens, new greens, tender greens that might soon wilt. Romaine  lasted just a little linger. Pick it in the morning; it might still be fresh for the evening meal, but who ever heard of 2 1/2 month old Romaine still fresh. . .

Our world has gone strange. Butterflies birthing in January. Eternal lettuce that will never wilt.

I'm not much interested in eating ever-crisp-always-green lettuce grown sometime in 2010. My liver might be suddenly as crisp and green. I rather prefer the real and the ephemeral -- baby lettuce that settles flat onto the plate (eat it quickly!), fog that disappears by noon, sun that skips gold on water, children's chalk drawings on sidewalks that will wash away with the rain. 

The imagined and the dreamed -- as real as real can be.

Boats and flowers: what a child sees
and butterflies, what a child dreams
. . . or sees, could be, beneath
a waterfall of green January leaves.

_The last day. 2011 is whittling away, hour by hour. Last night, there were fog horns. This morning, sirens and sun, more sun than has been around in the last few weeks, so much sun that I can smell spring, feel summer rising before the New Year even arrives.

This is that time of year when we all resolve to live joyously and peaceably, and I so resolve. I list my resolutions, noting well the first that pop to mind. I shall do no harm to myself or others. I will walk daily to discover beauty, taste grace. I will write daily, read daily. I vow to eliminate sugar from my diet (is that even possible?), eat vegetables locally grown, rice and millet, only eat soy if it has been fermented. I will laugh more.

I leave my house before 9am, hoping to find flowers happy in the new sun, and I am not disappointed. I expect to find only tiny flowers, nestled in strong waxy green leaves, thus protected  from cold winds and icy night fogs, and I do. Small cheerful laurel flowers make me smile, but it's the flush of thousands of pink white bloom blanketing the ordinarily sedate jade plants that makes me laugh out loud. There is perhaps nothing more delicate, more hopeful, more joyful and ironically perhaps more robust than a jade plant blooming wildly in the dead of winter. It's a plant ready to dance.

I can imagine this great rounded bush, tossing its red-edged skirts of leaves, smoothing out the lace frock of flowers and calling out to seabirds Dance, dance dance! The great egrets I think would oblige.

Arriving home, I see that my Iceland poppy, stalled in bud stage for weeks, has sprung suddenly into spectacular bloom. I sit for a while on the steps, basking in the sun, thinking of nothing in particular, enjoying the flicker of sun as it settles into crumpled paper-like petals of the poppy, so exuberant, so brilliantly almost-fire-red. I hope the second bud unfolds tomorrow before noon; it's wonderful to have the sun so early and so close to the ground.

I think again how magnificent it is to live in a place where winter is so fragile that one morning of glorious sunshine can banish winter's sober mood, distill a damp grey morning to a fine aromatic liquor so lustrous that even the sharpest wind smiles and breathes. I am grateful for that.

If I glance to my right, I see my struggling rose, still damp with yesterday's rain and last night's fog, has also decided to bloom. A pale and perfect New Year bloom. If the poppy is the sun, this rose is my moon.

How pleasant to have day and night at my elbows.

How joyous to watch as seasons refuse the crisp divisions we humans have afforded them, instead join hands like cautious lovers, glancing shyly at one another. Spring poppies, summer roses, bare winter branches, happily at home with one another. There are even still the red leaves of autumn, made even more brilliant by empty spaces left between. Where once was green, now bare branches scratch up against blue sky. Winter cannot overcome the fall; spring is always pushing through and summer is never far behind. Our California seasons are a symphony.

_Happy New Year.

May the coming year be alive with marvels, wonder, joy, and peace.

This entry was written some time ago (about a week has passed) but never posted. Sorry.
*****
For the past week, we have been experiencing an atmospheric inversion over the Bay that settles smoke and grunge close to the earth, obscuring the horizon and making breathing more difficult.

And so, I watch the birds, grateful for their resilience. If we humans complain about the increasingly foul air, the birds seem completely unconcerned. I love to watch them, and more than watch, I love to listen to their honks and trills. While geese honk overhead, hundreds of Least Sandpipers run in great drifting  c0mmas up and down the shore, tinseling the air with their chorus of tiny peepings and pipings, sounding more like baby chicks than the full-grown birds they are. And then there are the great flocks of coots, grazing on the grassy stretches near Crab Cove, relatively silent and so uninterested in flight or water, they seem more like herds of placid fairy cows than birds.

They race about on their strange coral like feet, drifting this way and that, unconcerned with the more vociferous and ever present gulls that come sliding down to land on rocks, on sand but rarely on the great lawns so preferred by the American Coots.

Many of the shorebirds seem compacted as they float about on these colder darker oh-so-grey days of mid-winter. Wings clasped closely, necks tucked low, they bob on cold waters with an enviable patience that I feel as strongly as I do the escaping sun, and I value that patience, breathe it, taste it, hold it deeply inside my lungs. I am ever grateful toe the birds for buoying my spirit, reminding me of the coming of the light, the coming soon of spring.

The great egrets are no longer as common along the shore as they were some weeks ago. I think they have perhaps flown further south, down the coast to zones where nights are warmer, days just a tad longer than here where the dark thins by 7:30am and returns before 6.

There are times when mallards, flying in groups of three, land on the water simultaneously. The water rattles, sounding almost like a stuttering bell, and laced silver trails open behind the birds as they slice into water. I love both the sound and the sight.

Watching ducks, herons, egrets, gulls, sandpipers,lifting from the ground, resting on air, bobbing on waves, I am happy, once again connected to my beloved sea, stretching out beyond the mouth of the Bay, miles away but the birds can take me there.

The violence of city streets disappears. The dark of winter is washed with the light of wings. I cannot fly; I am not a bird, but I am inside the wind. I can taste it.

 After the high hot winds steal the fog, I wake again with a bloody nose, this time more robust. When a nose bleeds, it bleeds fury. Every Angel is terrifying.  

Rilke wrote his Duino elegies so that he might illuminate the space between humans and angels, understand their differences. He believed, as I do, that human beings are alive so that they might experience the beauty of ordinary things, something Neruda also knew as truth, something I feel in my bones. I don’t think we humans are meant to be fierce warriors, engaging in the violent exercise of power. I believe in the strength of peace rather than the power of war. I don’t think we should act like dragons, roaring fire and dragging the glittering jewels we can find into our separate caves so we can sit atop them, hoping, I suppose, that all that glitter will hatch more gleam.

But what to do? Those who refuse to engage with the brutality so celebrated in our warrior society, who prefer to walk in nature, breathing gardens and dreamings, are cast aside as weaklings, described as unwilling to confront the evil, unveil the ugliness, but there is so much ugliness in our world that if we spend our time describing it, we only shore it up, make it more visible, even more acceptable. I can’t believe we should make art that focuses primarily on ugliness. I don't want to go on and on, bristling about remorseless pain and convulsive activities meant to display power or ensure control. Perhaps the only real power or control we can ever have comes to us through an awareness and assimilation of beauty.

A brush of sunlight on an otherwise drab industrial wall, a bit of trash hovering about filthy streets on the updraft of a gusty winter wind. Beauty. A blue crease in aging flesh, almost a memory of infancy. Beauty. A bird chirping on a street awash in traffic noise. Beauty. A poppy unfolding is often more beautiful than one with all petals smoothed to the sun. A bare winter twig with a single dried leaf is as beautiful as one with swelling buds. A lone rock on a green field. Beauty. A child asleep with open hands. Beauty. A hubcap tacked next to an open door, its center painted red. Beauty.

_ If we understand beauty as that invisible yet shimmering border between the expected and the unexpected, we know that border is fragile, easily missed or broken and if the awareness of those edges, the space between, is 'power,' it is the the power of grace, the letting go, knowing that seeing is not having; feeling has nothing to do with possession. Grace is grace precisely because it evaporates. The spark caused by any sudden unexpected clash of difference burns brightly, illuminating the life, and then is absorbed into the void.

I went out this morning in search of December trees. Autumn is an extended season here in the bay area. By early December trees are still fully garbed in red and gold. I found some bright red trees just beginning to lose their leaves, but what I didn't expect to find and did were angels.

Angels guarding graves. Stone angels. Marble angels. Angels with one arm up, the other down. Angels holding roses, books, garlands of flowers and fruit. Angels with aprons overflowing with stone flowers or trailing grape vines. Angels dressed in free-flowing robes, and angels with bare chests and muscled legs. Angels looking downward while gesturing  toward blue skies. Angels stepping out.

On our way from the Post Office, somehow Mr. E and I ended up walking across the lush lawns and rolling hills of St.Mary's cemetery off Pleasant Valley Road just north of Piedmont. This is an older cemetery -- many buried here were born in the 19th century, some here in CA, many in Ireland -- and quiet. We were alone, my little dog and I, wandering about the graves. Mr. E sniffed about hoping to find a ball or a stick; I walked carefully, offering respect to those who lie beneath the grass, protected by these carefully carved angels, barefoot on stone, too heavy to fly but  lifted above the grass and mud below.

I'm a creature of the sea -- more a fan of mermaids than angels -- but I love that humans imagine otherworldly creatures looking much like themselves but with great wings that can carry them above clouds, past  stars and out into the deep vastness of space past asteroids and cold dead planets so unlike our verdant breathing laughing paradise.

What do these angels have to say to the universe? Do they whisper color, breathe out butterflies and hummingbirds, scatter autumn leaves across the Milky Way? Or when they fly do they leave trails of memories, great piles of jumbled words in their wake?

I like to imagine all those years of void between the earth and Jupiter as not gaspingly empty after all but delicately constructed of zillions of small memories snipped from billions of lives that are no longer remembered here on earth. Stretched between this moon and that asteroid would be the smooth feel of an apple picked green from a tree long gone wild attached to the surprise of grapes squeezed from their skin and then spot glued to the bright green of new grass on  a raw patch of land in some 19th century industrial zone, which might in turn  link tenuously to a baby's first cry or a hand waving good-by diffused in the scent of baking bread  or the aroma of burning plastic. No one would think such attachments strange. After all, every little bit, every scrap, every dust bunny  is necessary when constructing an infinite void of muchness.

If these angels were to leave their perches and fly from earth into the void, it is lovely to imagine them pushing memory before them with every beat of their wings and dragging behind them long diaphanous trails of scents and sounds, all that has been felt or heard or seen in a lifetime, expanding and even creating the universe as they fly.

Why not imagine our universe as a 'muchness' rather than a 'nothingness', the vastness of space thick with the language of life . . . all of life, its agonies, its simple boredom, and its beauties.

Maybe I'm just recalling the end of Tony Kushner's Angels in America when Harper, the straight wife of a gay man, leans her head against a plane window, and speaking as much to herself as to anyone, says:

When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

The net of Indra, the flight of angels, the Rapture. All imagined events designed to organize the chaos of the human world, describe as real the painful progress of a building expanding universe, dreaming ahead and leaving nothing behind. The trees switch from green to red to black; the sky bleeds through, and those of us below keep walking, endlessly walking.

On the morning following the sudden and senseless gun battle in West Oakland that left eight people, including three children, wounded by bullets, a thick grey fog rolled in, obliterating any horizon line and settling all edges. As I walked through that morning fog, all the sea disappeared into sky. I did not despair its leaving. I was grateful for  the gentle grey erasing all distance and providing an evenness that returned small things, like rocks and tiny shorebirds, to a distinct and welcomed clarity. I needed the specificity and I also wanted world to wrap me, hold me, and hoped for the sky to descend, offer new breath welcoming and close. The fog did just that.

As I walked, I looked into the strange completeness of the fog and thought about the woman and baby not yet two years old lying in critical condition in separate hospitals; the baby with a gunshot wound to his head. He may not recover, but we are all hoping he will. The helplessness of that left me breathless, gasping in great draughts of fog and sea air.  I thought about the young men acting badly, firing guns repeatedly and thoughtlessly at a peaceful crowd of men, women, and children, and the wrongness of that forced me to exhale, rapidly. I leaned down, picked up a small stone, and hurled it as far as I could into the bay. I heard it splash but I never saw it fall.

The fog ate it.

We so frequently say of those who are lost, those who have strayed to violence, that their brains are foggy, they  are lost in a fog, but I think it might be more accurate to say that their hearts and minds are polluted by decay and misery, made heavy by hate. They are overwhelmed by smog rather than fog. Fog heals; fog nurtures flowers, feeds moss and grass. Smog eats metal, soils glass, corrodes plastics, causes cancers in hearts and minds.

When seabirds swim in oily seas, their wings grow heavy and they can no longer fly. When young men live congested lives, surrounded by violence and decay, that pollution sticks to their skin as readily as crude oil clings to feathers.  That's the oily smog that collapses their hearts and steals their breath, keeps them attached to hard metal violence, loving guns rather than flesh.

I wonder, longingly and stupidly perhaps, if those gun-toting maniacs were to walk instead in blue morning fog,  feel its breath, hear the splintered cries of seabirds, could they  feel the weight and grace of innocence?  Could they give up their guns?

The earth heals in ways beyond analysis. I know this not only because I walk daily near salt water, passing under great trees and skies alive with birds, but because I have memories of other years spent in other inner cities almost as violent as Oakland.

When my sons were small, we lived in South Brooklyn, where there were many suffering from smoggy brains and collapsed hearts, where streets were littered with trash, crack vials and discarded needles, and  nights were bursting with gunfire.

Sometimes, when the surrounding violence and decay became too sharp to bear, we would leave town for a day, drive north to still wild woods of High Tor, park our car behind some bush and walk along the narrow  and overgrown path that zigged and zagged under trees to the bald granite mountaintop. Then, we could stand tall, look up to clouds, down to  freight trains, the size of toys, chugging along the riverbank below as  equally small sailboats flew across the wide belly of the Hudson river, imagine the trains with steam engines pulling carloads of pioneers and the sailboats as ocean going schooners tacking across a current, pulling them out to sea. Standing there in the wind, staring across miles, we remembered how to dream, and when we returned to the inner city, we carried with us bits of the forest -- colored leaves, flowers, rocks -- and gathered bits of our imagined dreams.

If we could imagine sailboats as schooners, turn diesel train engines into black-throated beauties billowing steam, we could  certainly  imagine worlds without war, days without guns, mornings rich with laughter, night warm with love. Those days on the mountain gave us  back our hearts, revived our faith in our own ability to imagine better worlds.

A healthy society is one that celebrates and encourages imagination, and when winter arrives, we need our imagination more than ever. When light disappears into foggy dawns and dusky afternoons, we may be left with leafless trees and shadowless shores, but if we close our eyes and dream, that dreaming can pin leaves on branches, refill the skies with light. It may sound corny but when the season is at its darkest, when life seems dismal, when unhappiness overwhelms, we can imagine  the return of the light, replace shadow with sparkle, encourage joy. If we are what we think, if we imagine our future, I want to think peace, imagine a world without guns.

BANISH  HANDGUNS.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, as have days of rain, which fortunately coincided with those times when we were all inside feasting, dreaming, and thinking. At first, I was so busy cooking and scribbling lists of all that makes me thankful (electricity and hot water are high on that list but below friends and family) that I never noticed that the rain would keep me from walking for hours in the park. Then, we were all so busy tasting and enjoying slow roasted turkey, baked yams, and four kinds of pie, I found couldn't walk after all. I just had to lie back and breathe, digest my food and my happiness.

This morning with my house empty once again and the day dripping with fog, I returned at last to the park. Even before setting foot on the path, I came upon these overnight mushroom blooms in the small strip of green just off the parking lot. I have no idea what kind of mushrooms they are, and if you do, write me. They might be edible Honey mushrooms, Armillaria spp., but they might also be Pholiota mutabilis, looking like a honey mushroom but with a rather nasty taste. Then again, they might be overgrown and very large  Flammulina velutipes or Collybia or some form of Gymnopilus.

The point is, I guess, I don't really know, and as I have already walked with Death after an experience with wild mushrooms, I didn't pick them. I just stopped and admired the sudden beauty of this exuberant display.
To pinch even one mushroom from the cluster seemed wrong. To see the cluster as yet untouched and untroubled seemed a gift, Such unexpected beauty is rare. Already nearby were clusters that had been trampled and kicked.

Below is a close up of the larger, and I think, older cluster. These mushrooms are sprouting on soil resulting from the breakdown of years of redwood chips, layered lovingly beneath the grasses and the shrubs. I suppose the chips suppress the weeds but feed the mushroom spores.

I looked for fairies, but saw none.

If these mushrooms were too congested, too fast-growing to provide shelter for green-winged fairies intent on magical transformation, the recent rain encouraged other more robust communities of mushrooms that grew as large and as fast but did provide shelter -- not for the winged forest folk but for more determined city folk intent on creating change, not with magical spells or herbal concoctions but with sober words, carefully painted in large letters on canvas facing Martin Luther King, Jr Way at the Occupy site in Berkeley.

Defend Public Education. No Student Fee Increases. Disclose the Budget. No Layoffs. No Furloughs. Democratize the Regents. No Paycuts for Salaries less than 40, 000.

Words that make a great deal of sense and are as specific and as fertile as any mushroom spore can be.

Another shooting yesterday. This one at the Haas school of Business on the UC-Berkeley campus. And then at the other end of the day, a friend who was involved in a serious car accident learns from a cop in a passing patrol car that stops only briefly that neither he nor any other policeman has the time to make a report. Not now. Too much else going on to pay attention to traffic accidents. Exchange information, call the station tomorrow or file a report online. He has to shout to be heard over the barking  of a very large Alsatian shepherd who leaps against the mesh-covered open window of the back seat. No assistance from the police but the tow-truck driver who arrives shortly thereafter is kind. Despite the violence, despite the tensions, always there is kindness.

I go for a long walk in the park and watch the autumn leaves falling and think about the nearly 200 emergency calls that have gone unanswered in recent days. I think of my friend sitting alone, shaking, her car totaled.

More than leaves are turning rusty red, falling, and blowing into dusty piles. All those neat little hinges holding society together, keeping things flexible, are freezing or flaking, and the doors are falling off their jambs.

But still there is beauty, and beauty lets me breathe.  I walk and snap pictures of rosy leaves, but when I see the photos, I think of Wim Wenders' 1974  film Alice in the Cities, a moving film about human kindness, the kindness of strangers. A journalist suffering from writing block stops jotting notes and starts to snap Polaroid photos. As he watches a photo develop, he says that the picture can't show what he sees. I feel the same when I look at my photos. I can't capture the wide sweep of the sky, the inexplicable brilliance of the leaves gone suddenly red or orange, the pungent aroma of oak leaves already on the ground.

I can, however, step outside into gold sun and walk past the curtains of ruby red grape leaves, through piles of drying leaves. I can get lost in all that -- for a while anyway. The sound of crunching leaves underfoot erases memories of sudden gunfire. The smells of damp earth and new decay recall other autumns elsewhere when whole mountains went overnight from placid green to fancy dress, looking suddenly  like harlequins patched red and gold.

As children, we would rake up huge piles of leaves, great masses of color, and then fall on those piles, always thinking that the leaves would catch us, support us as a pillow might but always we were surprised when the hard ground caught us first. But no matter. We  came up laughing, bright leaves in our hair and sprouting from sweaters, jackets, jeans and then danced about like living breathing laughing trees. Such happiness is necessary as days grow shorter and winds colder.

As winter arrives and cities grow ever more explosive, as confrontations increase, as folks cover their faces with bandanas and scream at strangers, I want to know why, of course. I want to think of potential solutions, of course, but I also want to see the beauties of the world and know the grace of human kindness. I don't necessarily want to depend on the kindness of strangers, but I want to know of its existence, to feel it as beauty. To hear the music of beauty of the natural world, beauty in human life, is to feel kindness, to taste grace. If the world as we know it is to end, I want  to be sitting at the edge of the sea, my arms open to sun and sky, welcoming beauty into my heart.

 From Wordsworth  Tintern Abbey:

            These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.