I TOOK MY BIG CAMERA out beyond Point Loma and Ocean Beach to see if I could meet up with a red-tail hawk I know. After I left my car and walked along the bluffs below Point Loma Nazarene University, I came upon a patch of nude earth that made me stop and listen and half expect to hear breathing. Perhaps it was the lingering euphoria I had experienced as I listened the night before to Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Maybe it was just the way the morning light slanted into the rain and wind carved gullies and the softly rounded sandstone knolls or the gentle rise and fall of ocean swells below the cliffs, but I could have sworn I felt the earth alive beneath my feet.

One of E.E. Cummings' poems came to mind, and I wanted to speak it softly to the earth; but I could only remember parts of it. So I said out loud what I rememberedt. I thought I was alone with the earth; but when I looked up, I saw a man watching me from the top of one of the hills. He probably thought I was just a crazy old man mumbling to himself, a man who shouldn't be out wandering alone on bluffs above the sea.

When I got home, I went immediately to find the Cummings poem. It's even better and more apt than I had remembered.


Pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange,lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.

A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh.

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if--listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go

E.E. Cummings