Christmas Gifts \ Waiting It Out

Alan: Here’s what happens when you mash an old carol through the sieve of incident.

Christmas Gifts

The fleur-de-lis

tracks of the grouse

betray a certain nobility

and superciliousness that,

here in the USA,

we associate, I have to say,

with the French.

Yet this bird that the locals

call "partridge," or more accurately

"pah-tridge" (though it has never

to my knowledge appeared

in our pear tree but rather

frequents the ornamental crab

in the turn-around

(in the snow at the base of which

I notice its footprints

just before dusk

this short afternoon)

where, the time I flushed it,

not knowing it was there

(the time I told you about

when it shot off and

flew straight and at full

speed into our gazebo

screen, bulging it, tearing it

from the molding, and then,

like a wounded plane,

banked and came in

low and wobbling

on a last strafing run

right at me,

so I dropped

as if in sudden prayer

to my knees)

it scattered the calling birds),

looks nothing at all

like a French hen.

Nancy: The long isolation of storm.  Whatever you need, you must find here.

Waiting It Out

In the night, or just before dawn,

fog blew in, heavy.

Heavy hoarfrost on the trees.

At ten it began to snow.

Somewhere, the goshawk waits it out,

but the raven sings.

Garok!  Garok!  across the field

and into the spruce.

We wait.  Day.  Night.

Another day.

The tide may be in, or out,

under the ice, who can tell?

There may be a lane

        fence scratches the snow

        a barn roof.

It’s so easy, after a mile of this,

to be surprised by color,

by rose hips and a squirrel,

or three alder leaves.

After a mile, and no mail,

it’s already dusk.

The alder twig, in a brass pot,

looks Japanese,

and the leaves match the pot,

but your drawing is black and white.

You put away your pencil, and light the lamps.

Another night.

Snow, still.

Closing the cabin door,

I can hear the lighthouse out on the head:

gaaarok

(pause)

gaaarok

just waiting it out.

Solstice \ December Gifts

Alan:  Sometimes, in the season of shortest days, the weather can seem animate, refractory, even predatory.

Solstice

The year backs up:

dog refuses

collar horse

resists halter –

welter of contrary

winds, weird

weathers.

Geese explode

from the bay:

water kicks

like bullets.

In the alders,

a white rock

jumps: hare,

exposed by snow-melt,

caught naked.

Earth’s axis

teeters,

uncertain.

The wind

makes a sound

like a beast

in a cave

moving closer,

closer.

Nancy: Long dark nights and gray days – we want the early dawns and long twilights of summer.

December Gifts

The tide in the high marsh,

the low sun, slow to stand over the ridge,

the sea smoke .  .  .

I went out wanting the year to turn,

and turned myself instead, turned back

to today, glad to have received

water, light, frost blooming on dry stems.

Gray \ The Bay Between The Islands

Alan: Winter hones things to a sharp edge, or dulls them to a blur, sometimes both at once.  Adrift in a drifting landscape, we anchor ourselves with words.

Gray

Gray – the snow sees to that.

A bay and some woods linger darkly

in a space of sky, fields, blurred with snow

fallen and falling, falling and fallen.

Faint gray warmth under white, as of pale paper

or pale, thinned-out ink.

A figure stands somewhere in a space called “field,”

bootprints a doubled line of shadow filling with white.

Two shapes emerge from trees to one side.

They could be dogs running,

blurs of larger and smaller, darker and lighter gray.

Looking downslope toward water or gray mud:

bands or belts of trees leading the eye out

into indefinite gray space.

Beyond, hints of pale wooded horizons

stacked, one behind another, showing

gray filtered through gray filtered through white.

The figure stands in a space called “field”

while gray shapes detach themselves from gray woods

behind and to one side.

Someone perhaps is waiting for two dogs to join him,

or for the snow to lighten, to erase his tracks,

or is just waiting.

It is unclear when he will move.

He is gray, and small,

and he is standing very still

in a space called “now.”

Nancy: Brash ice rustles on the shores, a lace edging on a bay transformed knife sharp and steel hard.

The Bay Between The Islands

Not wine and not water,

not silver, not glass,

not a mirror of the sky,

no, this morning

the bay is shardy, slivery,

edgy, as sharp as aa,

Hawaiian lava, as disorderly

as earthquake rubble, cold fire

in the sun, splintered obsidian,

and it is processing with

cymbals and drums, brash.

Shhhhh, say the islands, old

grandmother islands,

shhhhh, say their shawls

and their dark skirts,

shu shu shhhhh.

To My Father's Ghost \ December Rain

Alan: My father’s poems sit in files, folders, binders, a few issues of small magazines, several self-published books.  But the source of his poems remained a mystery to him; I think he would have given up the poems to know their source.

To My Father’s Ghost

Where do the poems come from in the night?

Like tiny fish, nibbling our dreams with soft lips.

Like something found in the bottom of the basket

that we unfold, and are changed forever.

Like sudden anger at the madness of street signs

and dead birds.

Even in full light, they come cowled in a little midnight

of rain and buffeting wind.

As meaningless as the shape breath takes, 

this cold morning. As essential.

If I had known the answer sooner.

Even in the perfect faux daylight.

Nancy:  Rains like this are rare, and take us by surprise.  We may hear “heavy rain” or “coastal flooding” but until we see road washouts, flooded villages, the winter woodpiles and summer cabins floating down to the sea, they’re just words.

December Rain

One inch raises the smelt brook.

Two inches floods the meadow.

Four inches tears at the beaver dam.

Five and the stones shudder

at Bad Little Falls.

And yet it comes, six, seven,

down the Piscataquis, the Penobscot,

from Meddybemps to the Cathance.

Spruce tumbles, loosed from the forest,

over the falls; it rides the Machias.

Eight, nine.

What it wants it takes.

It makes us islands, makes us tiny,

our works fragile, our bays rough and roiling,

clear Cobscook, blue Passamaquoddy.

The falls make their own thunder today,

their own tower of cloud.

Beaver gnawed, a log, end over end

falling

tossing in the wild Machias toward the sea.