Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:10:02 -0800WeeblyMon, 19 Feb 2024 19:52:10 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/the-dalles-is-as-close-to-portland-as-eastern-oregon-dares-to-comeEven Hood River is too close, the twenty miles between morphing greener and more progressive-democrat every mile west. I like

the weather in T.D., the way the rain peters at Rowena. I like how the woman who cuts my hair has an unironic beehive and plainly

doesn't give a shit. She circles me in white New Balance, clipper-precise, bitching about the hipsters down the freeway and

how they wrecked a perfectly nice town, suspicious of folks without local lineage. And though she could likely kick my ass

in a bar fight, she eyes me like I'm a scary clown and passes the collective trauma: Those damn Rajneeshees took over at Antelope,

tried to kill us up here -- poisoned the salad bar. Go look it up. You'll see. I read opinions in the local paper: the editor loves God,

the 2nd Amendment and not me. Not my rainbow bumper sticker. Not my public displays. And after three years I'm still

as iffy as those redshirts when they first arrived with their Bhagwan smiles, flush and buying local. Nothing much

thrives in the Oregon desert without help or luck, so far removed from Portlandia small plates and all that yoga, so easy

to be swallowed in the expanse, the sky so catholic I had to relearn how to breathe, to pray. I'll never cede myself to local

norm, but I'll always take in the rimrock evening, absorb the benediction of dry air and red lenticular clouds, always turn to

the deep end of the sky. I've learned to see in the dark, now. I can see for eons in this rolling sage cosmos. I'm not sorry I came.

by David J.S. Pickering]]>Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:44:59 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/ode-to-dirtDear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters -- the plants
and animals and human animals.
It's as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine. Subtle, various,
sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain,
you're our democracy. When I understood
I had never honored you as a living
​equal, I was ashamed of myself,
as if I had not recognized
a character who looked so different from me,
but now I can see us all, made of the 
same basic materials --
cousins of that first exploding from nothing --
in our intricate equation together. O dirt,
help us find ways to serve your life,
you who have brought us forth, and fed us
and who at the end will take us in
and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit.

​
​By Sharon Olds
​]]>Mon, 10 Apr 2023 04:27:15 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/to-be-of-useThe people I love the best
​jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
​who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
​who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
​and work in a row and pass the bags along,
​who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.


By Marge Piercy

​From All We Can Save
Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
​& Katharine K. Wilkinson]]>Wed, 19 Oct 2022 04:48:27 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/anthropocene-pastoralIn the beginning, the ending was beautiful.
Early spring everywhere, the trees furred
pink and white, lawns the sharp green
that meant new. The sky so blue it looked
manufactured. Robins. We'd heard
the cherry blossoms wouldn't blossom
this year, but what was one epic blooming
when even the desert was an explosion
of verbena? When bobcats slinked through
primroses. When coyotes slept deep in orange
poppies. One New Year's Day we woke
to daffodils, wisteria, onion grass wafting
through the open windows. Near the end,
we were eyeletted. We were cottoned.
We were sundressed and barefoot. At least
it's starting gentle, we said. An absurd comfort,
we knew, a placebo. But we were built like that.
Built to say at least. Built to reach for the heat
of skin on skin even when we were already hot,
built to love the purpling desert in the twilight, 
​built to marvel over the pink bursting dogwoods,
to hold tight to every pleasure even as we
​rocked together toward the graying, even as
we held each other, warmth to warmth,
and say sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry while petals
sifted softly to the ground all around us.

By Catherine Pierce



]]>Sun, 23 Jan 2022 20:54:16 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/the-mask-of-evil
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving.
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe.
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.






​




by Bertolt Brecht
German Playwright
February 10, 1898 - August 14, 1956

]]>Sun, 12 Sep 2021 01:52:32 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers(To W.E.B DuBois)

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than
    the flow of human blood in human veins.

​My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above
    it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
    went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
    bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers.
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

(1920) 

by Langston Huges
​(1902 - 1967)]]>Sun, 13 Jun 2021 20:43:24 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/when-i-am-among-the-trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey
locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the
pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me,
and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, "It's simple," they
say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to
be filled
with light, and to shine."

by Mary Oliver
​]]>Sat, 20 Mar 2021 22:09:10 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/on-time"Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of  the mind by one second."



___From Orlando: A Biography
by Virginia Woolf]]>Thu, 17 Dec 2020 02:05:22 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/let-it-golet it go - the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
​wise -  let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
​and the boths and
neither - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love

ee cummings

​(1904-1962 - Complete Poems)



]]>Thu, 22 Oct 2020 02:56:16 GMThttps://www.artgoflow.com/blog/nothing-gold-can-stayNature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsidiaries to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

​Robert Frost
1874-1963

]]>