It’s nice when beauty rises to swallow your circuitry, blowing out the ever-crazed realities of the mind. Here we have fierce river willows that rattle amongst themselves like women at a church social. A visible fire that denotes water in the landscape. I sit and watch them, river flowing beneath like a dark, liquid scar. They are ascetically thick, camouflage for wintering moose. They are resilient, serving mostly unnoticed, a texture upon the landscape. In their most poetic moments they can be seen as a spreading, molten mass, something born from the center of the earth. With surface air in their lungs, they clutch and gape, exposing the pulsing core of this world.