Coyote - Encounter \ Frap

Nancy: Fourth and fifth graders: “Nothing ever happens to me,” “I have nothing to write about.”  The first lesson?  How to be quiet, watch, listen, care.

Coyote – Encounter

When he came out of the alders

I was invisible, because he had not dreamed me

yet; I was not waiting in his eye

or his mind’s eye, and the windless noon

gave him no news of me.  I was invisible;

I will come no closer to being pure mind

than I was then, standing between the fence and the field,

and I let him go as he went,

quickstep, his tail bold.

Just as he reached the thicket, I called,

“Hai, Brother – dream of me tonight,”

and he went quickstep, surprised,

carrying me into the spruces while I walked home.

Alan: Skeeter was so tiny he was never expected to survive his first weeks.  I wrote this a few months before his sudden death from tainted dog food at age eight.  During his life, he owned me.

Frap

Did the Buddha ever experience,

the way my little dog does –

even now in his full maturity –

frantic random activity periods?

(Waking exuberant to a new dawn,

he dashes from one squeaky toy to the next,

chases his tail, jumps

on and off furniture,

careers madly through the house.)

Did he, sitting composed in meditation,

silent, unmoving, ever

find himself tearing through the multiverse,

shaking one world system and another

with his lion's roar, spinning

the roulette wheel of the Dharma

in pure, unrestrainable joy,

finally to collapse,

panting and grinning,

in the lap of some minor,

delighted god?

“Coyote – Encounter” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press and Slow Dancer Press, 1984)

Those Streams \ Northern Lights

Nancy: When I became an easterner, what I had left of Indiana was a sensory landscape of the soft luscious texture of pawpaws, the black walnut stains, heat and sound, odor and taste.

Those Streams

I think the streams were green

green, they were

I remember that they were green

and the roads were dust, and the trumpet creeper

I remember as orange

and so the afternoons are orange, an orange heat

that stayed in Indiana.

I never carried it to this place.

The water, itself, was green

I remember that it was green

that it smelled green

water/green

roads/dust

the walk to the stream

smelled and tasted of blackberries and dust

and later, in the dark, only of dust.

I remember it that way

that the sun smelled of hay

and the cabin of quilts

and the dusk of fish and woodsmoke and green water.

Who would ever have guessed

that I might carry those green streams

such a way, even to this place,

that man, that woman, that child, those streams?

Alan:  My childhood memories mostly revolve around “the summer place,” where life felt simple and every day full.  I bless my parents for many things, not least for the experience described in this poem.

Northern Lights

for my parents

Which of you thought to nudge us from sleep so late

and lead us, stumbling and blinking,

from the spidery, dream-ripe cabin down to the water,

load us into canoes, push off, paddle a few soft strokes

and float, out into the basket of cove, drifting,

feeling the metal ribs, tiny slaps on the hull,

smelling the aluminum, faint fish-odor of summer lake,

hearing the crickets, a bull frog, far-off loon,

and looking up, watching the bedclothes and curtains

and gauzy nightgowns of the night

waving and billowing red and white and green,

horizon to horizon, an astonishment of laundry

so clean and slowly perfect that we leaned back,

staring, utterly awake now, not saying a word, rubbing our eyes?

“Those Streams” first appeared in Blackberries and Dust (Stone Man Press, 1984)

Herring Cove, Half-past High Tide, Sunday \ At Herring Cove, Following Work by the National Guard

Nancy: The mysteries of the fog, the castles in the air, fantasies of looming – more often than not what you see is what might be – or, might not.

Herring Cove, Half-past High Tide, Sunday

Dark, erect, three cormorants,

from a distance their ledge could be

a dory, a punt, a tender, a dinghy,

from a distance with the fog behind them,

with the fog slipping over the surface

of the water, they could be three friends

out for a Sunday afternoon of fishing, they have

the still patience of handliners, the men

who, after a week on the water,

are drawn in friendship back to the small

boats, the deep invisible fish.

Even after the men come down from Sunday

dinners and loose their boats from the

moorings and stir the air with the clapper

of oars and engines, even after they turn

out to pass the weir, headed toward the

light drift of fog, the cormorants sit their

ledge just as they were, three fishermen,

three among many, on a falling tide.

Alan: Returning to a favorite place to discover it transformed by a “training exercise.”  Some things can only be explained by sheer stupidity.

At Herring Cove, Following Work by the National Guard

The storm-cut bank is gone,

and in its place a broad ramp of packed stone,

as if we are to drive forward into the water –

and the huge scoop of a sandpit,

licked smooth by heavy machinery

has been graded and seeded to a fare-thee-well.

The old patched dory’s vanished,

weir poles and brush removed;

the eye, deprived of sweat and history,

runs foolishly toward the horizon and founders.

And the swallows have fled,

their city bulldozed,

the air scraped clean of that astonishing chatter and swirl,

leaving a broken shell of ground

deceptively perfect, aimlessly

tilting toward the waves,

and a pained emptiness where purple grass once grew

wiry and waving above the sea.

“Herring Cove, Half-past High Tide, Sunday” first appeared  in the Friends of Acadia Journal.

Full Moon, Perigee Moon \ Mother's Day Plowing

Nancy: Our moon goddess would have less to do with romance and more with the tides, with the lives of fishermen and shellfish harvesters adjusting their lives to the timetables set by highs and lows.

Full Moon,  Perigee Moon

Imagine the moon

   rising out of the sea

Imagine the moon

   placid as a mola mola

  in the sky/sea

Imagine the moon

   veiled in branches

   a beautiful woman knowing the power of lace

Imagine the moon

   rolling up her sleeves

  by the side of the fisherman

   lifting the boat off the shore

Imagine the moon

   hunting the meadow

   beside the bobcat

Now see the old woman

   patient

   waiting

And the moon

   drawn to her mirror image

  drawn to the bay

  where the woman waits for her

Two moons

   then one

   then none

   just the woman

   and the sea

Alan: Until I lived here, I never felt truly rooted.  Working the land through a year’s full cycle changed that. 

Mother’s Day Plowing

The same dark, shabby horses, their careful plodding,

creak of the whippletree, simple commands,

ripple of eight legs churning up shadows.

Happy mother’s day, earth.

The same sheer yellow-leaved poplars shivering against stiff spruce.

The sod turning a gleaming brown,

thick snakes uncoiling under the team.

Happy birthday, earth.

The tide is out, not in.  The wind’s from the south,

the clouds forgetting themselves in a moister blue.

The same scene painted from memory, the hues restrained.

Happy mother’s day, earth.

The boy’s on his own, he’s grown a beard.

The plow cuts cleaner, the clay is easing some.

We’re two weeks early on the year.

Happy birthday, earth.

The months turn: seeing that first field,

rose-root rough; a father checking has half-trained son at the gear.

We’ve worked this land for a year, and harvested food,

harvested more than food.

Happy mother’s day, happy birthday, earth.

“Mother’s Day Plowing” first appeared in Living On Salt and Stone (Stone Man Press, 1984)