Breathing fast and slow

At night some understand what the grass says. The grass knows a word or two. It is not much. It repeats the same word Again and again, but not too loudly... from "Evening" by Charles Simic During my student years, which, really I must confess, persist after all this time, I made paper by collecting weeds from the sides of the roads. Although they did not look like weeds to me, but tall slender grasses toasted to a golden wheat color by the sun, delicately, and on all sides, like the way a good baker rotates her baking sheets when her wares are in the oven so that the golden coat is even. It was summer and hot and the grasses were sentries that stood between the highway gravel and that other world that begins with dirt and goes on beyond time.  I marveled at seeing these grasses transformed into paper. It bordered on magic and myth, like learning Rumpelstiltskin's trick without the bargain or the temper. Depending upon the grasses I collected, the paper w