Poem: Bamboo in Winter

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Bamboo in Winter

Wind blurs the bamboo branches into 
     spinning ribbons of two-toned sage.
It is a singular being with root-stalks rattling
     out of the snowed and heavy ground.
Or is it the other bamboo sticks' chiming I hear?
     The ones the children tied with shells and twine
when Summer jumped the wind with lissome limbs?

Winter bones now rattle the wind, unfastened
     in tatters. Skeletal bells from porch hooks
keep flapping. What did we carry from Summer,
     in the hands of the children?
Keep on, keep on, call the bamboo chimes
     to their living kin across Winter’s yard.
Bend quietly, dear sons and daughters.
     Bend lithely, while you can. And the shells clap
their hands like cymbals, hearing
     Summer's tide in the sound of the wind.


February 2012

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Poem: Winter blur

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Winter blur

I
How strange suddenly
to read the word ermine
and think of a
woman’s neck,

warmed, blurred
with white fur, and not
to see the long stoat’s
winter skin—alive, bounding;

II
O marquise winter moon,
rustle of skirt on the balcony,
and the agony to fly;

when a man feels your whiteness,
he soars; toward what, I wonder:
the sun’s reflection, or some
other light, conquering within?


January 2012

Poetry should be heard.

Notes:
stoat: mustela ermenia, or ermine
marquise: this shape, a cut of a diamond 

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Poem: The intelligence of snow

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The intelligence of snow

To float

from the massive

cloud of unknowing

down

without hurry

or tension

into the amplitude open

above fields humped and blurry

and the gentle

geometry of roofs

falling

with no clear

apprehension

loose—adrift, or cast—

resting and feathering

across downy light,

or, becoming light

without edge

descending

and hovering

where buzzards meditate

a white spider

hanging and swinging

(without gossamer thread)

into the quietude

of outstretching spruces

tossed and bob-slipping

past treetops

beside

blue jays jerking

and nuthatches skipping

at last touching

into place

with soft pliancy

weightless wafer

on the bird feeder’s lip

onto one black seed

instantly scooped

The solitary

snow flake

dissolving

in the mitered beak

of the cardinal

in its ultimate

and particular

gesture of praise

December 2011

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Poem: Beating flames

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Beating flames

Rain falls
in the rhythm
of a bird’s heartbeat;

but when the crow cries,
his raucous call
does not pierce
this thrumming trance.

Rather,
like the cast iron
of the wood stove—black body,
rising up—he carries
the beating flame, hungry
and consuming, crackling
the language of the heart.

Illustration by Ива́н Я́ковлевич Били́бин, aka Ivan Bilibin (thanks, Montag!), for Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin's poem "Two Crow." Unrelated to my poem, but interesting anyway, from wiki on "Twa corbies" (or "The Three Ravens): " . . . a 1828 partial translation of the French translation of Sir Walter Scott's Border Poems. It includes the poem entitled 'Шотландская песня' (Scottish Song), which has become known to almost every literate Russian-speaking person. Pushkin's translation contains only the first half of the poem, ending with 'and the mistress awaits for her lover, not the killed one, but the alive one', thus making a dark hint the central point of the story. Many composers of the time wrote musical interpretations of the poem."

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Winter slideshow with the Esbjörn Svensson Trio

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It's been a busy and tiring week, but a good one. I have not been blogging today, but I will respond to comments and visit blogs soon. My mother-in-law is doing so well she won't need any more dialysis and may go home early next week!

This morning I felt the need to be quiet. So I spent some time gathering photos and making a slideshow. I've paired my winter photos with Esbjörn Svensson Trio's song "Winter in Venice." Wouldn't that be pretty, to walk in Venice in winter?

Starting at around minute 4:15 on, the photos are from today. I hope the images and music will help you feel peaceful. I am always drawn to solitary things in photographs, and while taking them.

Full screen with headphones is nice.

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Poem: Dark winter morning with the dogs

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Dark winter morning with the dogs

Dog stars Sirius and Aludra gnaw
the bones of the black locust trees;
a rout of coyotes behind the woods
barks and sings a round for the chickens,
gone these three years from their shallow roosts;
a meteor falls like a seed of fire
into that sleeping corner of the barn
and lights up its empty boxes; see
the straw mixed with chicken guano
that remains after three summer gardens, ablaze
and still abundant on the floor; my sleeping husband
dreams of the next planting, starting with the shovel
and the shit, the wheel barrow, the eternal stew;
Murzim howls, Muliphen listens, and Aludra,
a virgin, hungers with everlasting heat.

Poetry should be heard.

Quite literally the other morning, a shooting star fell behind the barn, right there, while coyotes clamored, either after, or in preparation, for their early morning hunt.


Hubble image of Canis Major's "evil eyes" found here.
For information about Canis Major and the stars that shine in the constellation, go here.

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Hot and Cold ruminations

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You’re getting warmer. Warmer. WARMER. You’re HOT! Oh you’re so HOT!

This was not the game of dating come-ons. It was the game of HOT and COLD, a hide-and-seek pastime. The person who is “it” goes out of the room while the others remain, and one person hides an object. When the It girl returns, she is coaxed along by clues of warm and cool, hot and cold, depending on her proximity to the hidden object. When she is across the room from it, she is cold. When she is close, she is warm. At times her fingers hover above the object, unbeknownst to her, and the others are screaming HOT HOT HOT—SO HOT YOU’RE BURNING UP HOT, incredulous that she could be missing the object, laughing in glee that she is!

Now I’m playing another game of hot and cold in my menopausal radiance. So hot in a flash that all the A/C in the car at fan speed FOUR does not cool enough. So hot that a walk in winter is the freshest and easiest to take: remove the moisture, let me swallow clear oxygen. I sit in the hot tub, half submerged in hot water (103°F, 39.5°C), half above water, exposed to the cold morning breeze. This is heavenly balance.

In legend, myth and poetry, winter is something to survive, with a sprinkling of Christmas in the middle to lighten its heavy load. I read Rumi and Rilke, and winter is the opposite of love; it is the time when the lover is absent; winter is longing without reward. Or in the Persephone myth, winter is Demeter’s time of grief, when she absents herself to seek her lost daughter in the Underworld.

I’ve always preferred cold to heat, putting a sweater on more than a bikini at the beach. I’d rather seek than find; stand in the corner removed, not in the center of the hot crowd. So what’s the matter with me, who loved winter long before I needed to plunge into ice to escape hot flashes? Maybe the matter is a binary, “fundamentalist” view. After writing these thoughts, I read this from Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul:

Often, when spirituality loses its soul it takes on the shadow-form of fundamentalism. I am not referring to any particular group or sects, but to a point of view that can seize any of us about anything. One way to describe the nature of fundamentalism is through a musical analogy. If you go to a piano and strike a low C rather hard, you will hear, whether you know it or not, a whole series of tones. You hear the “fundamental” note clearly, but it would sound very strange if it didn’t also include its overtones—C’s and G’s and E’s and even B-flat. I would define fundamentalism as a defense against the overtones of life, the richness and polytheism of imagination.

. . . The intellect wants a summary meaning . . . but the soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end, references and allusions and prefigurations.

(pp 235-6; my bold)

Maybe winter is not simply: cold. It is cold with overtones of cool, warm, and much that is not about temperature. I am a polytheistic lover of winter! And stay warm, because I'm going to keep writing about it.

Painting: Pablo Picasso's The Red Armchair
Photo: Bishop and me stepping through a winter nuance

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Poem: Woman and cloud

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Woman and cloud

From her propped hospital bed
the old woman who nearly died
a few days ago now talks and
talks, while a continental drift of cloud
passes over the hospital and suburbs.
They are each unaware of the other,
the sheeted woman and the gray cloud;
both snowcapped, and round at the edges;
both moving in the minimal float
that seems a physical impossibility
when gravid with so much fluid;
there is much winter to come, and harshly;
they hold it up like a woman’s flounces.

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A home in winter

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I am not much use with my hands. I have bent them to work in an office on computers. They are weak, sore, pitiful. I hold a needle to a quilt a short while, the fabric and batting gathered and bunched in my left hand, the needle a steel splinter of my once-magic wand arm in my right; then my hands collapse, in pain or icy numbness, in the calico on my lap. The most basic tools have no moneyback guarantee.

But once, after the supremacy of Sunday morning church and dinner, these hands of mine built a home. I was five. I had three construction assistants in the yard between the house and the church — ages nine, eleven and thirteen; male; also inexperienced builders. It had snowed; the snow was deep. Then it snowed some more. It was January, the snows piled like ancient stone-dust cities of the Holy Land pilgrimage our parents showed us in slides. Then it rained on our cotton and wool hooded snow suits and on the snow; the rain froze. The black metal clasps of my red rubber galoshes froze shut. If we were very delicate, we could walk atop the crusted snow. With straight-edge machete fingertips, from the large age thirteen size to the small five, we punched out big rectangular snow bricks. Deep, deep I still feel the way of precision, my fingertips in wool mittens slicing snow stones from the whole quarry yard for layering in the masonry of igloos. No one taught us this. When the walls were an inch higher than the thirteen-year-old, my brothers placed the plywood ceiling and finished the exterior with a roof of ice-and-snow slate. We packed white mortar in each gap; smoothed with pearl-iced mitten-index fingers: a ten by ten closet or a small bedroom where the four of us could lie side by side hidden in mystery in the expanse between our father's parsonage and the church. We slept quietly in our civilized and insulated imaginations. We could live there, and survive. So warm; so home. So temporary.

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Winter poem by Hayden Carruth: The Curtain

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Since I love exploring winter in all sorts of light, here is a tremendous winter poem by Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) to spread out in — to feel the contrast between the romance and beauty of winter, and the pain of existence. Carruth was an American poet from Woodbury, Connecticut. I don't know his work well, though I've known of him for years, but I mean to.

“A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.” ~ Hayden Carruth

The Curtain

by Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.
For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.
Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

*Note: This page says that Carruth's Selected Poetry was a finalist for the 1987 poetry Pulitzer, but I do not see evidence that he won for 1996, which the Poetry Foundation claims. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey in 1996, the volume this poem is from. NPR has this moving article upon his death in 2008. Read more about him at the Poetry Foundation.
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Poem (with apologies to Blake): Waiting for snow

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All of November nearly gone, and not a snowfall worth chatting about around the office water cooler. Cooled water, harumph! I want snow. We went to see the Nutcracker the other night. Lovely, you know. The dance of the snowflakes just beautiful, and the Snow King and Queen. But, harumph!

I wander around the meadow path, and all I can find is evergreen and brown. Where is the harsh winter that was promised, huh?

In my snowlust, I walked and could not get "The Tyger" out of my head, though that is about stars and tigers and the Creator and what is simultaneously terrifying and beautiful. I thought about my recovering mother-in-law and the proximity of terror and joy: almost gone, then in a day or two sprouting jokes and love. The air was cold, and I kept thinking about the tearful symmetry of snowflakes, and the dancing ones in Nutcracker, and the rhythm of my feet on the ground that was beating out rhyming, metered verse. Like this. (Seriously, my apologies to Wm. Blake for this.)

Waiting for snow

Snowflake, snowflake, come to me

down the spiral of this breeze;

where on mountains do you hide—

in Shambhala, or Telluride?

In what distant keeps or skies

swirl the centers of your eyes;

white unseen, at heights too high

for me to catch, or eat, or slide.

And your Winter, where is She,

poet Mistress of Tchaikovsky?

And when the Finns flop onto ice,

wouldn’t some for me be nice?

Where the crystals? where the drifts,

in what hollow blues my bliss?

And where does power click and fail

under avalanche and gale!

While the blizzard puffs the tree

in Anchorage and Nikiski,

Michigan wind just blows us bare:

the birds and I, we perch and stare.

Snowflakes, snowflakes on the stage,

bobbing tulle in a silver haze;

groove the dance, chill the Queen;

sift powdered sugar on these evergreens!

The Muse of Winter another year

If the ballet doesn't work,
there's always Ahmad Jamal

playing "Snowfall" at the Alhambra in London;
for something kind of cool, load the YouTube video,
turn the volume down a fair bit and listen to me read
my poem on podcast here with Jamal playing in the background.

:-)

William Blake's "The Tyger"

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"Lines for Winter" by Mark Strand

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No snow here yet, this is from a couple of years ago . . .

Mark Strand is one of my favorite poets. In my morning devotional when I read poems at the Poetry Foundation's site, I feel wet ink on my chin from the first lines in his poem "Eating Poetry":

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry. . . .

Strand's poems are often surreal, but always accessible. His craft in simple straightforward lines belies his depth of sight and spirituality. Because of my love of winter here in my white bowl meadow, I'd like to share this from him, as the season of subtle lights commences. Though it grows cold, you will go on . . . .

Lines for Winter

  
    by Mark Strand

     for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.



    ~ from New Selected Poems 

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What is faith?

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It's there, hiding, across the Red Cedar River,
under trees, behind the couple walking

Professor Ellison looked even older than he was. He was tall, like Ichabod Crane, lanky, bony, with disheveled gray hair, goatee, and always with enthusiastic drool at the corners of his mouth as he talked fast, but his spirit and enthusiasm were as youthful as any of the college students he taught freshman composition.

His office was next to mine all the way at the end of the long corridor in Wonders Hall. His department had moved him to our wing from his secluded corner of an old building, because they were afraid he might die and no one would find him for days.

But they couldn’t have known him as I came to know him. Seven years in the 1990s I worked as an administrative assistant (secretary) next door to Professor Ellison. His bountiful and energetic joy radiated to all of us who encountered him while he came in for his brief office hours twice a week. What a relief from the stony, dour insolence of some professors. Some students and colleagues found him merely laughable when he rode his old English bicycle with a makeshift basket to campus and to class from his office, wiry gray hair splayed from under his helmet, and even more so on the days he strapped on roller blades. Even I didn’t know whether to laugh in glee, weep in poignancy, or cheer Whoopeee! when I saw him teeter-walk like a toddler plodding, not gliding, on those roller blades down the carpeted hall after dousing his hair under the stream of water from the drinking fountain and mopping it from his head with his sleeves. “Hellooo, Ruuuth!” he crooned as he cautiously leaned on, felt and stepped his hands along the wall, supporting himself all the way to me at our end of the hall as if I were his female trapeze artist partner waiting for him, urging him on, while drool or drinking fountain water ran down his cheeks and chin. His eyes flickered and twinkled like blinking lights at the county fair on those wild and spider-leggy rides. His smile never disappeared, a foul word never dropped from his lips.

It just so happened that it was in those days that I began taking classes to finish my BA via the generous educational assistance offered at my university to secretaries and other union members. I got to take fourteen credits a year for free. I began with two American Lit classes, reading Hawthorne, Irving, Cooper. On I waded deep across the Atlantic into Brit Lit and Conrad, Joyce and Woolf. Finally I came to poetry writing and five classes with Diane Wakoski. I worked on poems on my lunch hour and off and on through the workday tweaking a word here and there, surrounded by inspirational poems from Bishop, Blake, Williams and Bukowski I’d printed and taped on the wall in front of my desk and on the file cabinet. It was a time in my life journey of great spiritual searching and angst, which got written into my poems, a time of losing faith, and hoping to find it again. The writing was the door I went through, the room where I could light altar candles in front of old statues of the past, and whisper chilled prayers for my nearly hollow soul.

Professor Ellison was ceaselessly interested in my class work. We were very fond of each other, plus I was a nontraditional (older) student, unlike his first year freshmen he taught writing, and he eagerly asked first thing every morning about the critical analysis papers I was writing for English classes. He taught me to stop writing I think . . . and just write my thoughts directly. What I write is obviously what I think! As I moved into poetry writing, he was my main reader besides Don, and what a help he was. He didn’t know my story as Don did, and so he was the objective reader every writer needs, to tell you if they “get it” just from your words on the page.

One day, I sat at my desk doing something or other, and Prof. Ellison poked his head in the door with his bright, moist cheer, “Ruth! Have you seen the aconite?!”

“The wha?”

“Aconite, winter aconite! It’s blooming over by the river!”

After his pleasant dismay that I had never heard of nor witnessed this precious secret, Professor Ellison educated me about the tiny yellow flower that grows on vines close to the ground under a tree over by the Red Cedar River, in the Beal garden created and named for the famous botanist Professor William J. Beal. It first pokes its yellow blooms up through snow in February. I promised him I would check it out.

This photo was taken

two years ago in February,

when rain had melted the snow

I did, and there it was, a yellow and green surprise alive in the snow, first sign of spring. It inspired a poem, a little haiku, which I turned in for class, and happily Professor Wakoski thought it was successful. For me, this haiku and its title “Faith,” symbolizes an important turning point in my life, from leaving the religious faith of my past that had darkened into a long winter of confining and frustrating emptiness. As I learned to write, with the generous contributions of three professors, something eternal began to sprout.

Yesterday I walked over from my office (in the English department where I graduated) to the river to find aconite again, and there it was, the same small answer, like my poem.

Faith

Faith is aconite

rising in February

warm in the snow bed.

These photos were taken yesterday.

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Woman in Pajamas Walks on Water

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These are the days of miracle and wonder . . .  ~ Paul Simon

It fell for days and days, the snow. In the colder cold, it was down feathers, or the powder in my mother’s plastic Coty bowl, from where she doused her puff and smoothed it onto the velvet petals of her cheeks, chin, nose and forehead. I feel the silk of her good-night kiss. And smell her: freesia.

This is the habitat of the deer.

We weigh the same, the young doe and I, when she is not with child. I will never be with child again, but in this moment, we walk the same path. Next year, a fawn will come to her, from her, out of her, under her, and quickly learn to walk around her! This is how we rise and fall.

But today, I am the one who walks on water. See, her hoof inserts itself into the glove of snow. But not mine.

With March come warmer days, still cold nights, and freezing rain. The footprints the deer and I had left become crusted in frozen traps of treachery, enough to twist an ankle. Today, the surface next to our tracks is solid, and my human feet in boots skip across it like white lightning on the horizon in summer. But not the doe’s. See how her hoof inserts itself into the glove of winter, and kisses the ground.

Which of us is not a miracle?

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don't cry baby, don't cry

Don't cry

    ~ from "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon

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Where a mind of winter resides

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The woods near Arcadia, Michigan; that blue haze at the horizon is Lake Michigan

I hope you can put up with winter a little longer.

I loved being with my raven sister on the weekend, up in our part of the world, the place we went as kids on vacation in the northwest finger of the mitt of Michigan. We took down Christmas ornaments and lights in the lodge. It’s her hobby to decorate, and I helped her de-decorate. I wound thousands of white lights into balls, for hours while she wrapped 1,500 glass ornaments into boxes. I don’t care about decorating any more, but I got to be with her and watch her in her glorious element. And we watched the Oscars in her cozy condo in the hundred-year-old lodge.

 The Anniversary Ball in November at the Inn

Beach Lodge, one of the buildings at Portage Point Inn

Outdoors I got to breathe, walk and listen to the "nothing" of winter in that great north country, among spruces, pines, and birches on the hills around frozen Portage Lake and up on the bluff at Arcadia looking out over Lake Michigan. In winter, these contoured hills, coned trees, and white and green clapboard buildings of the lodge are quiet, unlike in summer when tourists swarm to the aqua waters of northwest Michigan. Only a few lodgers spent the night under neighboring roofs. Hardly a vehicle passed as we parked on the shoulder of M-22 and crossed to climb the lookout over Lake Michigan. Snow quiets and slows everything, even up the road where skiers were shushing down the hills.

Across Lake Michigan, to the right, is Wisconsin, about 60 miles away;
elsewhere Lake Michigan gets to 118 miles across

I claim this quiet northern winter, though I have never lived there. I spent two weeks of summer vacation with my family at a cottage up the road for just a few years, half of which are prior to my memory. A few weeks’ making, and this terrain is mine. I don’t know if I will ever move to another state. (I have done so previously, even to another country.) I drove four and a half hours to be there Saturday and four and a half hours back again Monday. It was worth it, but how could I move even farther away?

Before winter is over, I have to post the winter poem: The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; . . .

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter . . .

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves, . . .

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place . . .

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Portage Point Inn

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S is for

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S is for


               soft      
  sapphire
snow     
  shadow 
     slide
        slow
       sinuous
 saxophone
     surrender           

Other S words to describe you, your day, jazz, or just anything you love?

Miles Davis & John Coltrane ~ Kind of Blue

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Stormy

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Snow clogs the air, ominously and thrillingly. It neutralizes time and blows into mind the Big Blizzard of ‘67 when I was smaller by a drift or two.

You were already a windswept woman in 1967, my raven sister, fruited in a peach twinset and slim wool pants, accentuating your hourglass. By the fire you styled my adolescent hair like Twiggy’s. You, a lover of storms. I could feel your excitement in the comb and clicking scissors as the skies emptied themselves, like feathers falling from seam-ripped pillows around the black oak trees outside our windows. My head was safe in your hands. You took such care with me.

You were wild. Like a restless, exotic bird, kept indoors. Not angry, though once in a while you cried out -– your energy misunderstood, sometimes dark, as complex and giving as thunderhead clouds -- sky-filling, gleaming, powerful and beautiful. But we of the minister’s clan must be quiet, controlled, stable. You were a little dangerous and unpredictable, with an immense, soft, roiling heart. Romantic, impassioned, with boundless vigor for design and fun that had to be somehow channeled through the church: Youth Group parties, bridal showers, champagneless-danceless weddings!

On that day in ‘67 it was as if you required a storm in your flesh, its turbulence a counterweight to restore and calm what bled in you like a red sky. You needed it. You greeted it, unafraid. When Mom said we were out of milk, it was your chance! You escaped the house-pocketed air for a staple from the grocery store, miles away, on foot. We barely understood, and you were gone! -- slogging with booted piston feet in knee-deep drifts, black hair flying like a crow leaning into the wind and stinging seeds of snow. You needed the storm’s blinding fury to temper and protect your wildness.

How could I know if you’d return? So many hours the blizzard howled on. I distracted myself with games of Sorry, Scrabble, Chinese Checkers. Lunch. Lying face first on the bamboo toboggan skimming down the hill between scores of oaks on the way to the iced lake. More games and staring into orange fireplace flames. On the snow fell. The light changed, the sky grew gray around black tree branches that bordered the deep, empty driveway.

Before nightfall, your stomping feet at the back door! Your crimson face as saturated as a morning sky -- Warning! The raven woman is back, and her black hair is shining blue! She carries milk in her brown paper bag -- triumphant! I wanted to dance a wild dance, like birds among the oak branches, the sky dumping confetti all around!

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Fit for the Kingdom

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Fit for the Kingdom

Just
when I am awestruck by diamonds
    on the upstanding collars of Queen Anne’s court
       each with her crown of snow

pausing
while my tinkering mind
   shuffles and sorts through word files
      for just the right writing currency

the dog
charges past on the meadow path
   rocking me like a semi on the Interstate
      and I stand, shaken, the writing spoor erased from my head

and again
farther on into the pines where she sniffs
   the pellets and wrinkled white beds of deer
      we scare up a wild turkey hidden in the boughs

above
and down upon us snow crystals
   spray like sparks from the explosion
      of her dusting thundering wings, and suddenly

awake
and empty of words, I walk on behind m'lady
    in our morning processional through the Queen’s chamber
      freshly and properly christened with a mantle of silence

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

 This is Ara, the dog companion of my son's girlfriend, my new sometimes walking buddy.

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Lake Michigan: lines and curves, with Beat poet William Everson

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I hope you enjoyed a beautiful Christmas and are resting warmly in the afterglow, as I am. Stay snug and comfortable while I share some scenes of winter here.

In our world that is filled with straight and rigid lines constructed by men, it is needful to find balance in the feminine, curving complement of Nature. In their rectangular New York apartment my daughter and her husband grow a pot of basil, its mouth-leaves open to the sun on a wide kitchen windowsill. Nearly all the concrete streets of our towns and cities are softened by trees, their round domes curling up and down curb-shores as if avenues are rivers. Trees grow straight, like roads and buildings, yet they are simultaneously round in girth and leaves.

Nowhere could the contrast between Man’s straight architecture and Nature’s roundness be more evident than at Lake Michigan a week ago. I walked the woods and beaches of Grand Haven and Hoffmaster, up and down hilly dunes that rise like a woman’s hips (and I felt the strain in mine). At Grand Haven (photos below), the yardstick-straight concrete pier with its iron catwalk reaches out into the teal water with a cherry red light tower in the middle and lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the end. The pier withstands violent storms, and sadly people have been swept away while walking there. (I posted photos of a more dramatic winter scene three years ago here.) Even on the man-made pier, Nature festoons circular knobs and curlicues on the steel. Waves curl around metal. Sand, water, wind and freezing temperatures wrinkle and pile circular sculptures on the beach.  I find man-made structures more intriguingly beautiful when Nature has weathered them with her own patina.

There is a poet of the Pacific Northwest who respected Nature and tried to live in its rhythms as much as a person can.  William Everson (1912-1994) spent three lifetimes writing about Nature's seasons and the tension between man and Nature -- three lifetimes because he dramatically changed his circumstances twice, leaving a secular life to become a Dominican monk – “Brother Antoninus” -- and then returning to secular life again. He was haunted by the violence we are susceptible to in the world of Nature, and in our own hearts; he was a conscientious objector in WWII. After becoming a monk and one of the original Renaissance Poets – which came to be known as the Beat poets (he was “the Beat friar”) -- he began the third part of his life when just after taking vows for the priesthood, he publicly read his love poem to a woman “Tendril in the Mesh,” threw off his monk’s robe, and chose Nature's dance with her as his spiritual practice. William Everson, aka Brother Antoninus, was a farmer, a fine-press printer, and the only monk among the Beat poets. Everson’s poems remained often erotic and mystical throughout the phases of his life, including the period in the Dominican order. (He famously and controversially wrote erotic poems about his soul's relationship with God, as shown in Dark god of Eros.) There is a very nice bio of him at the Poetry Foundation site here. A few of Everson's poems that can be found online are here.

I'll post one lovely poem of Everson's.

San Joaquin

by William Everson

This valley after the storms can be beautiful beyond the telling,

Though our city-folk scorn it, cursing heat in the summer and drabness in winter,

And flee it—Yosemite and the sea.

They seek splendor, who would touch them must stun them;

The nerve that is dying needs thunder to rouse it.

I in the vineyard, in green-time and dead-time, come to it dearly,

And take nature neither freaked nor amazing,

But the secret shining, the soft unutterable sundowns;

And love as the leaf does the bough.

Accompanying Lake Michigan photos from last week I'd like to share a further peek into Everson’s mind-heart, from a book transcription of his “meditations” presented in his year-long course on the poet’s call he taught at Kresge College (UCSC) in the 1970s. The book is titled Birth of a Poet, and these quote-meditations are from Chapter two: Identity. At the foundation of my writing life in the early 1990s, this book helped give shape to my own poet identity, as well as my perspective of Nature and its rhythms.

I would be remiss if I did not mention how very present George's images of beauty in unexpected places were in my mind this day at the beach. If you have not yet visited George's blog Transit Notes, I highly recommend it for more along these lines (and curves) of living in rhythm with Nature.

 

“Cyclical time is very jealous of itself. When you enter its world of myth and dream, of ritual and wonder, there is an innate revulsion from the processes of linear time.”

“Often, the most profound signature of cyclical time, the spoken voice, simply won’t communicate into linear pattern of print. . . . The page simply can’t register what the voice is saying.”

“When your whole life is structured around winning and losing as key to identity it becomes, literally, a crucifixion.”

“Emily Dickinson wasn’t mad, because she possessed her vocation. It enabled her to skate on the brink of insanity, yet retain her complete integrity. All the hell the Victorians were trying to deny through the accumulation of wealth, she lived out in her beautifully skeptical intelligence. She took nothing for granted, but possessed the sovereign right to see everything to its essential core.”

“Even after eighteen years in a monastery, I can’t claim to be an angelic man. I don’t have the particular kind of vision called the angelic intelligence. I am a sensual man, and my sensual needs become the law of my being. I live out the physical vibration as the impulse of my life, and through its exercise, rather than its denial, I fulfill what I am. That’s a terrible thing. And a terrible beauty.”

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“All great art is gauged on that dimension, and, setting aside the collective liturgies, and the detachment of contemplation, it is the most direct means we have of bringing us back into harmony. Art is the aperture through which we slip inside the threshold, momentarily at least, to gain a vision of the two points of view as they come together.”

"I am trembling a bit just going through all of this in my head. I'm like an escapee who trembles when he reapproaches the Iron Curtain, with all its barb wire, electrical charges, and hidden explosives. But the Iron Curtain is really only a symbol of that threshold. We must penetrate it in order to obtain our wholeness, our beatitude. You possess both worlds within you, they are each yours by right. You must not let that outside world, with its emphasis on the linear, deny you your deeper self, which is of the cyclical mode. Your course in life must always be to hold both realms in your being. Your vocation is the process by which you bring them together."

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