Outdoor Furniture

Each year, in late spring or early summer, I look for a cushion for the wooden glider on the back patio, and each year I fail to find one and continue to glide on the weathered wood. Yesterday I dragged a plastic chair around to patches of sun in the yard, to read and write in warmth, after a spell of clearing out the gardens and trimming back the volunteer tulip poplar branches so the late season daisies can continue to bloom and thrive.

Here, today, I offer chairs stacked up in water or arched into a tree, a river of books, and lamps lighting their way through the woods, all by Rune Guneriussen, an artist featured at Escape Into Life and also accompanying today's poetry feature, Maria Terrone. I love stuff like this, ordinary things found in unexpected places, resulting in the extraordinary.

Terrone's poems dovetail with my recent language obsession. She ponders Italian, Russian, and French, as well as the "blue text" of cellphones read from a distance in an audience, her poems on the page a series of "scrolled messages" to anyone looking, caring to receive them. Happy scrolling and gliding!