Things I Am Grateful For

 Thanksgiving Day—oh day of thanks!

Pierre Bonnard, always, and this particular table of lovely desserts—

Sencha Quince Green Tea—Beautiful to look at with its "spear-like distinguished grass green leaves combined with exquisite violet, malve and cornflower blossoms."  (Quince, native to the island of Crete, is a fruit that has been loved for centuries for its intoxicating flavor and mythological associations.)  Once available from Tealuxe in Boston, like heaven after tramping the Commons in snow.

The chance to sit in an afternoon patch of late November sun and eat duck dumplings!

Billy Collins, always too.  This is perhaps my favorite of his poems of gratitude—

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.