bleaching in the light

strange plant skeleton, looking a bit like shriveled pasta... in the river valley, edmonton, april 19/09
butterfly in profile, river valley, edmonton, april 19/09

There are poems in gutters and drains, under the rails laid for trains, pages of novels on the pavements, in the supermarkets, stuck to people's feet or the wheels of their bikes or cars; there are poems in the desert. Somewhere where there are no houses, no people, only sky, wind, a wide-open world, a poem about a dormant grass-covered volcano lies held down half-buried in sand, bleaching in the light and heat like the small skull of a bird.

-- Ali Smith, in the story 'Text for the day', in Free Love

(This is just my favourite bit in that whole book. I love it for what it says about the omnipresence of poems. I love how she writes, such brevity, such potent imagery, such simple honest goodness truth.)