That Fierce Energy \ Woodpile, Thanksgiving Day

Nancy:  Trees fall, pastures fill in with young forest, but the landscape grows full and complex with stores, names, memories.

That Fierce Energy

The thickets were almost pasture

          when time ran out.

He spared nothing, tractor, tree,

          live rock; he fought alders, weather;

          he chainsawed his neighbors with a rough tongue;

          he bit off more than he could chew; he

          helped; bitched; preached.

Right from the beginning I believe he did see

          pasture, thick with sheep; smoke

          rising from stone chimneys;

          all his kingdom sound and green; painted;

          mended; whole and harmonious.

We saw more, and less:

The house unfinished; the jumble of bulldozed stumps

          and man-high weeds; the causes and crusades;

          a raw and chafed look on land and friend.

No one ever really goes, in a small town.

          Ten rough acres full of popple and spruce

          and rotting stumps will be “Buck’s sheep pasture”

          forever.  I watched him sweat wife and kids and stone

          all one summer: those chimneys are his.

Marriages dissolve, but the neighborhood is history,

          indissoluble.  We all own a piece, now, of

          that fierce energy.  No matter how the land goes,

          we’re the owners of record of Buck’s dream.

Alan: Our first winter here, we ordered our firewood late, in tree lengths.  The logger misunderstood our directions and dropped it off a half mile up the lane, where we sweated to get a cord or two chain-sawed and brought down to the house by the pickup load.  Before we could split it, an ice storm encased it all in a half inch of glass.  We spend winter days mopping up the meltwater from wood brought in green to thaw beside the stove for tomorrow, and mornings mopping up creosote that dripped out of the stovepipe through the cold night past.

Now we measure wealth in wood cut, split and piled a couple of years ahead, ready to go in the shed when seasoned.

Woodpile, Thanksgiving Day

Tunk...

              tunk...

piling the firewood.

                            tik-tak

     tunk

the white-hearted maple pink-hearted birch.

                                         tik,

tak,

throwing the cold junks higher than my reach:

             tumulus    cumulous

promising warmth.

                            Tik... 

                                                      tik...

not for this winter, no –    not for next winter, no –

               too pink too white too green!

Tik, 

                             tunkety

               tunkit

two winters from now.

Will you still be here?     Will I still be here?

                Tak

                               tunk

                                             tik

“yes” says the firewood whatever the future holds.

“Junk”: a piece of indeterminate size; also a verb, as in “Got your firewood junked up yet?”

“That Fierce Energy” first appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Orange \ Deer Season

Nancy: It only took one woman, dead in her own backyard because her white mittens triggered carelessness, to make trips to the well or the woodpile feel less casual, more tense.

Orange

Not the maple, not the sumac,

not the old gold faded hackmatack,

no, orange men, at the field edge, the roadside,

drifting between the trees,

garishly, fluorescently, aggressively orange.

Taking the dog for a walk,

I put on my coat, my hat, reach for the orange –

flimsy plastic vest – think “no”,

think of the woman in the white mittens,

think “yes”.

The dog, so small, couldn’t look like a deer?

Couldn’t, but I take an orange bandana

and fasten it around his neck.

He doesn’t care, he goes out, happy,

white flag of a tail flying.

Not a deer, I think, not a deer,

again, over and over, not a deer.

Alan: The four-legged hunters are out there, watching the deer, watching the two-legged hunters too.

Deer Season

All night, the coyotes howl, shredding our sleep.

The dog barks back, ten pounds of courage

behind an eighth inch of glass.

We rise to hard white frost

and talk of strangers at the head of the driveway,

itchy for deer.

  I walk out

to truck tracks, the slots of a doe and lamb,

to scat with fur and bone in it,

the dog silent at the end of his lead, dancing

warily, warily.

These Gifts Of Moose \ Monk In A Vat

Nancy: Alive they surprise us, arouse the dogs, astonish with their size and otherness.  Packaged they may mean winter meat, a badge of prowess, even a lucky roadkill – or generosity.  I understand and yet feel puzzled.

These Gifts Of Moose

The smell in the thicket

barnlike

oddly domestic

Loose limbed

long strides

unhurried

between the cabin and the grass

We measure with our hands

prints

down to the edge of the tide;

across the bay

the alders shake and close

But this, too

a knock a gift a thankyou

a quick shy handshake

Moose? this, these packages?

Moose?

Alan: And who would the monk be, if he could choose?  

Monk In A Vat

Mornings like this,

I would be a monk

abiding in an old whiskey vat

settled deep in the redwoods

of northern California,

spending days heavy with moisture

muffling all sound of people, machines

in samadhi, attending to mist

dripping from shingled eaves,

watching through the half-round doorway

the small local animals,

their careful routines.

(Warmed by a wrapped ember,

he sits in full lotus, or rises stiffly

to stroll among the immense furred boles,

face impassive as bark, robes mottled as lichens,

recollecting the day’s visitors, a writer and photographer

who will make of his life and his dwelling

something so wished-for, so acute

in the pages of some glossy

it will seem like the tree of heaven itself

to at least one being

gulping coffee, a bite before work

on a morning like this.)

Village 04652 \ Buffleheads

Nancy:  Like so many other coastal villages it rises uphill above the bay.  Only the water sets it apart.  The Narrows, a race of tidal change, always in motion as Cobscook Bay fills and empties.

Village 04652

The tides surge through the narrows.

Hill shingled with buildings, canneries

smokehouse, shops

salt scoured, storm gapped

– steeple

Every six hours the tides turn.

Hill crowned with steeple

pickets and green

rising through, rising past

driftwood and fog

Seals follow the water, the fish.

Lunch on the landing

draggers swing on their moorings

fog shreds and re-forms

conquers shingle and steeple and gull

One seal pauses, stares at me, dives.

The tides surge through the narrows.

Alan:  Some days the northwest wind churns the bay and the ducks huddle along the lea shore or, on our side, in the calm backwaters at the saltmarsh edge.

Buffleheads

Ducks lift

from gray water

spooked

by my approach

except one, near,

turned, facing the

oncoming chop.

Wounded?,  I think.

It is the season.

Swimming here,

blown almost on shore,

watching the flock

disappear against

the distant trees,

watching me.

I turn to go,

embarrassed

to add stress

to her stress,

then see

fluttering this way

the black and white

of the male

above the waves.

He drops beside her,

settles, turns

upwind: two now

moving as one,

maintaining

a discrete distance

from each other,

from the shore,

from me.

Wounded?

or just tame

with the aplomb

of her kind?

And what brought him,

anyway?  Would we

call it, in ourselves,

"concern," even "worry,”

even "love"?

Apple Tree \ The Demise Of The Halloween Pumpkins

Nancy:  Hard to say how old it was, its heart so hollowed out, but a cloud of pink/white in May.  One night a ground burst (mini-tornado) twisted and tore the heavy trunk.

Apple Tree

Trees fall.  Uncounted trees fall,

but they are like men not in my sight or lineage,

and this tree was my friend.  This tree was the link

that promised me continuity beyond fire and abandonment,

and domesticated my dooryard; a friend, this tree.

The wind has taken it.  This wind would remake

the wilderness; it seems to blow foe, foe, always foe,

never friend, testing me.  Now the wind says that my house

will not stand, forever, by this tree.

But the grouse have not heard the slow word of death.

They come at dusk, fill the branches, and I watch

a miracle; they are fed; apple blossoms become grouse

and fly into the night, transformed and transforming,

bearing away into the air, against the wind,

everywhere, this tree.

Alan:  This is the time of year when the coyotes howl closest and a mere porcupine grunting out of sight in the woods seems a portent.

The Demise Of The Halloween Pumpkins

After a decent interval of days

when we’re sure the ghouls have crawled back in their holes,

hauling their sacks of trouble out of the night,

we take the Halloween pumpkins

and cut off their faces.

(Disembodied, staring from the garbage,

these surrogate expressions of ourselves,

our little jokes about mystery and fear.)

We quarter and slice the skulls, pare the mold away

and whittle the rind down to the veined and glowing flesh.

Meaty chunks in the pan,

steamed up for soup or pie or bread,

pumpkins make sturdy meals to fend off the bully cold.

Good food, hearty, these autumn sacrifices,

heads that were trying to say something

we did not wish to hear.

“Apple Tree” first appeared in Cafe Review.