Robin is looking in through the glass door on our back porch. On the table by the planter box her small red dish is flooded. But the table's metal slats allow rain to drain through. It's a good place for scattering seeds.

Yes, the drought is ended. And in its place a river of rain blown in from Hawaii – The Pineapple Express. We have flooding in the bay area, heavy snow in the Sierras. Ski resorts are closed. Yosemite evacuated. And right across the entire country there is heavy snow, freezing rain.

Climate change? In the arctic, a huge ice shelf is within 10 kilometers of breaking off into the sea.

Lights are on at our place. But not everywhere. What keeps them on? A few steps are left out of this but . . . money won't buy normal weather. In fact, just the opposite.

Susan recalls last year's volunteer sunflower. It was out in the nasturtiums under the hackberry tree. Wild Bird Seed, I say, and why not go the birds one better, we can throw a few handfuls out there when Spring comes.



The depth of winter is hardly a good time for recruiting anything. Maybe whiskey. Oh, for a story to warm the imagination! It must begin with a promise, have a plot good enough to suspend disbelief, then we fly. Then it ends. Whoever wants can say goodbye.

But I'm not on anyone's payroll. So now practically no one wants to go along.

Well then, poetry. We fly higher, risking severe deceleration. A song. Dances. Mystic River across its images and vistas. Which fade, notes meeting their obvious destiny.

Then what was that? What faint humming string, its resonance. A word traversing might have been a seed. Something already within. But words are tricky.

Play a harp, catch a string, write a word. Something flows. Water does not flow a glass at a time or for a moment's thirst.

The scattered seeds are awash with sound, perhaps a low flying jet. Climate changes in waves. In place of a story or The Pineapple Express there is a homeless observation, or poetry for anyone who has not said goodbye, no place to lay it.

Self-inflicted wounds will heal by their Self. If allowed. And this is no door-to-door solicitation. Decide for your Self --

Do you need a nuclear weapon? The earth? Food and shelter? Clean water and air? Space to live and be human? Your fellow creatures? You get the drift. Would it be too difficult to grow a civilization that's really civilized? Where profits and progress need not entail limitless growth, a fiction at best. And at worst, the present devastation. Do we need profits for profits' sake?

On that sunny day just before this downpour, suddenly as I opened the front door out flew robin from just beneath the eve. Does robin sleep on our front porch? But no nest is there. I think she came to visit. It was a moment at least 3 billion years in the making. Why quibble?