You Came In \ Homecoming

Nancy:  What a small thing, the bright blue of delphinium on a day of wind and snow.  What a promise of change.

You Came In

Winter always yields to spring.

                                               I know

                                               but

The snow falls heavy

dawn never arrives

twilight comes early

the wind comes up

                                               trees

                                               shattering

Where the alders give cover

                                               some respite

                                               small birds shelter

                                               just as the ducks

                                               huddle

                                               at the clotted edge

                                               of the marsh.

Just as I

stir up the woodstove

And I was sitting there

so far from spring

when you came home

                                              when you walked in

                                              with two stems of delphinium

You came in

with two stems of blue delphinium

reminding me

that winter always yields

                                              to May.

Alan:  There are always questions, coming back, aren’t there?  Who are we... who are we returning to... has anything changed... is anything the same?  The trip only ends when we have the answers.

Homecoming

Seven hours of slow driving –

spitting snow, road grit blasting the windshield –

down the long lane to the house

shockingly dark.  Then, rounding the circle,

I see one light in the kitchen:

go in to find you baking

biscuits for my return.

Unpacking the car, I feel the storm

coming on harder, a deep sighing in the woods,

wet tightening my face,

suddenly realize how glad I am to be here

and, after all this time, how much I still love you.

Ice-bound On The Way To The Morning Star \ Hardhack And Hackmatack

Nancy:  January’s short dark days and long nights leave the door open to memories of places long unseen, memories rich in detail building on one another.

Ice-bound On The Way To The Morning Star

No one ever said, pack everything, but I did:

bluegills and hollyhocks and the jackknife I carried

in fourth grade, an eagle feather and a month’s worth

of old hymns and the soft sound of turtles leaving

a log for pale water,

And so, when the sun drifts south and the color

seeps out of the marsh and the ice tightens,

this is what I do: I unpack what I need,

sometimes singing in the dark, sometimes unwrapping

a day of sweet mud and woodsmoke, always

Needing what I find: it could be

grits, axe handles, the white stars

of puccoon, or it could be

the page that says favorable winds

bright sky to the east

red cliffs and the precious water

of Santa Elena canyon

(in boxes still to be opened: fossils,

old valentines, the page that says sunrise:

headed home.)

Alan:  What we do will be erased soon enough, if not quite completely.  Like those who came before, we too will leave faint signs that others may some day try to read.

     Hardhack is a common name for Spirea; very descriptive if you're trying to clear it by hand.  Hackmatack is what people in this area call tamarack or American larch.

Hardhack And Hackmatack

Hardhack and hackmatack, spruce and fir;

chokeberry, chokecherry, bramble, thorn;

water where you don’t want it, ledge where you do.

Thirty years mowing and thirty years growing:

the trees watch their children hidden in the grass.

Where cows puddled the clay soil, alders followed.

Where sheep wandered the cleared land, wire lies down.

Hundred-year-old fence wire, found by the feet

at the head of a gulley or above the bay –

running now under the roots of the spruces.

On the hill slope there must have been a woodlot.

After the fire of ’57, it all came back birches.

Dead snags still hugged the skyline in the ‘80s –

we watched an osprey perch there, tearing a fish.

Last time I climbed: snags fallen; young softwoods.

Rectangles of field stones show under the turf.

Bricks – an old chimney – under the spade.

Liniment bottles, bits of rusted stove.

Our house needs work.  There’s no foundation.

Just an  old cellar hole, slumped in and muddy.

Thirty years mowing and thirty years growing:

once we’re gone, the trees will own the fields.

The Snow Never Tires Of Falling \ Winter Night

Nancy:  There are days when the snow falls so quietly that it becomes hypnotic.  There’s nothing to do but give up, lie down, fall asleep.

The Snow Never Tires Of Falling

the sky is white and

the trees where the sky has fallen

are white and the roses are white stems

wound through a white fence

and the quilt I pull over myself

is white with blue flowers

I am so sleepy

somewhere in the white trees

the birds are sleeping, the bear

in her white mound is sleeping

and the dogs too, lying at my feet

and by my side, are drowsy, drowsy

we are breathing slowly

the sky has forgotten every color

but white, we are letting it fall

winter is so long

my quilt has blue flowers

I am so sleepy

Alan:  Here's something  I’ve seen many times on the coldest, crispest, brightest nights of mid-winter.  It’s when I want to walk into the woods and rise up, myself, like the trees.

Winter Night

The trees stand up from themselves in light.

No doubt someone will explain this –

but the trees stand up from themselves in cold fire.

No doubt science can tell me the hows and whys,

but I know these sharp-tipped spruces,

and what they put up with,

waiting for nights like this – snow and moonlight –

to stand ghostly above themselves,

a second forest risen from the first.

Year To Year \ New Year

Nancy:  Every year, the catalogues come earlier and earlier.  Already the mailbox is filled with catalogues: luscious vegetables, unbelievable flowers.  I’m a sucker: I fall for it every time.  And every time, the garden is so glorious, it’s so easy to do it again.

Year To Year

Winter’s barely begun when the catalogs

deliver their dreams of perfect leaves,

their fantasies of round red ripeness.

Ha, I scoff, where are the hares,

the hares and the slugs and the cabbage worms?

But why not?  Why not check the EZ Pick

beans, and the Bull’s Blood Beets?

What’s August for, if not the silky ears

of corn, the tomatoes, the zucchini

crying eat me, eat me?

How mean of me, to think that

I’ll begrudge the hare a taste of beans.

Check beans check peas check broccoli,

sing hey for tendril, twine and ramble.

And yes, it does come to pass.

The hares eat the beans, but

there are still too many.  Tomatoes escape

their cages, peas hide and we seek,

and we eat and we eat and we eat.

Hidden from us, garlic swells, carrots fatten.

We pick the last corn.  Roll the pumpkins

into heaps.  Shell out beans.

Take the spading fork and tumble potatoes,

large, small, laughable, miraculous,

what jewels, what wealth, what a year.

Soon, too soon, comes cold, comes snow,

comes catalogs.  Where are the hares,

I grumble.    Oh . . .  Oh, look . . .

An earlier corn?  A more perfect tomato?

And it comes to pass: I do it all over again.

Yes.

Alan:  I search along the edge of the bay for clues as to what the new year might bring.  Every time I return empty-handed.  The answer is out there, unreadable.

New Year

The tide today

does not flow in

so much as lift,

barely perceptible,

like a cloudy table

rising slowly

on silent, hydraulic legs,

filling each nuance

of the scooped,

impassive shore,

filling the marsh,

filling the mouths

of the small, still streams.

More solid, it seems,

than liquid: ice patches

scabbing the surface,

a substance one could fall into

or fly over, with one's eyes,

as if over Arctic seas

in a small plane, endlessly,

hypnotically,

just above the surface.

Rain falls

almost as ice

with a sound like someone

shuffling crisp cards

in a nearby, hidden dimension,

shuffling

and preparing to deal

the hands we will soon

be required to pick up,

study, and, with our careful faces,

play.