Grass for instance which shines with the wet light of morning
and lines the bottoms of small baskets and valleys costing
all the way from the center of the sun, photons
pin-balling their way to the unfurling corona and then

smack into the sheen on the face of the grass. And kissing
which costs approximately a fortune in stirred up chemistry
and repercussions, betrayals and strollers and sonnetry
and then all those shopping days until remorse is done.

And snowfall which is the bread of heaven though broken
by the time it gets here, but lovely when wind carved
and shattered into spectral bits by low angles of light.
And then training the pine branches to balance the snow.

All expensive. And music which took a million years of birds
and wolves and longing to learn. And true love which costs
an arm and a leg in imagination alone, not to mention the sexual
appliances like cars and shoes and well appointed lairs.

And words that well up and want to be but nerve is missing
and must be hunted up and down the corridors of the spine,
separated out from the more plentiful cut-rate words
that shine a little, but soon wreck or stick or cease to console.

So expensive, hardly less than unaffordable are the best things--
time and memory and forgetting, water wearing over rocks
that took half the life of the planet to form, and wishing
you could hear it more deeply and longer and also silence.

Max Garland is former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin and recently was appointed by the city council Eau Claire’s first “Writer in Residence.” (The Best Things in Life Are the Most Expensive is published here with the permission of the author.)  More about Max.