A Guide To The Trees Of New England \ Lines Written In Illness

Nancy: In the shattered aftermath of an ice storm, the hackmatack assumes an elegance all unexpected.

A Guide To The Trees Of New England

The Elm:    chosen by patriots, a rallying point,

          also favored by poets, who use words like o’erarching.

The Oak:    another patriot tree, singled out no doubt

          for its connotations of sinewy strength.

The Maple:    valued for goodly shade, sweet sap,

          roadside glory.

The Sycamore:    so fine the roads went ‘round it.

Apples, Horse-chestnuts, also Catalpas:    domesticated

          to swings and backyard castles.

The Old Pines:    named patriarchs, groves of historic

          holiness.

The Spruce and Hemlock:    dark dignity, our formal guardians,

          required in suburbs.

The Junipers:    a regimental touch, often seen

          standing at attention.

The Balsam Fir:    for garlands, for wreaths, for green,

          for celebration.

The Birch:    once a naiad, now known to many

          as a lawn ornament.

What’s left for the Hackmatack but to be queen of adversity?

At dawn, in the eye of a winter hurricane, it wears all

the jewels of Opar.  The hackmatack accepts ice as its destiny

and wears it gracefully.  Hackmatack, Queen of Diamonds.

Alan:  Sick in bed, mind smaller than the skull, senses muffled but for the rush of blood in the ears, waiting, waiting...

Lines Written in Illness

Fevered, the mind drifts, helpless, in its shell

Like a dismasted boat within its round

Of blank and ever-shifting fog.  No sound

But the pulse and fizz of each passing swell;

No motion but the motion of the waves

Heavily rocking the water-heavy

Hull, and the inexorable levy

Of half-felt currents binding us, their slaves.

Will we hear at last the comforting bell

Clang at harbor mouth?  Or the terrifying

Groaner warning of the impending shoal?

Will we hear, will we hear its moaning tell

Our years as we sink, broken, cold, and dying?

It speaks not yet.  Endless, gray oceans roll.

Forcing The Thicket \ Pilgrimage

Nancy: The old trees, mine and those I can see from the roadside, marking long forgotten house sites, are succumbing to time and shade. Perhaps, here and there, a stump sprout or a seedling from some wild forgotten meal, still bears witness to the comings and goings of settlement, still reminds us we aren't the first.

Forcing The Thicket

The apples –

not wildlings – three, no, four –

the apples are leafless;

most of the fruit has fallen

(as it has for years),

uneaten.

What were they, Sheepnose,

Summer Rambo, Famuse?

Does it matter?

These trees have lost their names.

Now they belong to porcupine,

to deer,

to anyone who’ll force the thicket.

Their flesh is sharp, green;

it starts the saliva.

But to be shared as a sacrament,

they’ll do (remembering that they had,

once, names –

and were planted in hope).

Alan:  Many years ago, in London, I picked up a little paperback copy of Burton Watson’s translations  of  100 poems by the T’ang poet Han-shan.  I have been searching, in one way or another, for Cold Mountain ever since.

Pilgrimage

for Han-shan

I.

It is not a state of mind,

these mud flats, scabbed worn woods –

nothing as jagged and cliff-like as your poems:

nothing to lead the imagination skyward through mist;

only the outward-flowing fog, sea-smoke

obscuring the ledges, islands:

a singular, ordinary coast.

Yet it is the mind that starts, here,

seeking Cold Mountain’s paths

along the shore, among the winter-fallen leaves

that trail further and further inland

away from this actual place, this actual sea.

II.

Within a scrolled landscape

of inked strokes and washed space

I struggle, bent, the loaded basket

weighting my back, brim of my straw cone hat

almost brushing the steep ascending track.

Far above, unseen gibbons in unseen pines

ululate sorrowfully; below

the stream flashes in its rocky gorge.

Somewhere a heron fishes by smooth water

or flaps up ponderously over waves

of bambooed ridge.  Somewhere

the cataract spills, sojourners rest at an inn.

I am so small here: lost in another’s world.

If I should meet anyone, I will ask:

is this the way?  is this the way?  but already I know

it is not.

III.

The Black Monahka lived at the foot of my road many years ago –

many years ago the Black Monahka’s shack fell down.

The people who knew this, the people who told me, are dead.

The Black Monahka lived alone and died alone, long ago.

Today the garbage truck turned in my road.

A bag of garbage fell off the truck as it turned –

the black plastic split open, spilling its garbage.

All the papery trash blew into the woods, into

the place where the Black Monahka lived all those years ago.

IV.

Laughing, he ran from the temple kitchen

with his friend Shih-te, shouting and pointing

at the scholar-official

who came to pay them homage.

Pursued into the hills

they disappeared in a cavern

that closed behind them forever,

leaving only the three hundred poems

on bark, rocks, the village walls

to be quickly gathered

like wild mushrooms after rain.

With me, it is the poems that swallow me up,

and here is your windy cave, shallow and empty,

except for a few old toadstools at the mouth.

V.

I walk out under a blurred egg-moon

haloed in ice,

the sky striated,

the wind edging toward snow.

The lane is hard under my feet;

there is no give anywhere.

This is a hard place: a land,

not a landscape.

Even Han-shan might think twice

about staying here,

as you and I have now, foolishly, enduring

these twenty years.

VI.

For forty generations you have lived –

if you ever lived at all – in this verse:

these eights, these fives; parallels, allusions;

character by character the hidden, the revealed.

Even in my own thick tongue with its slack rhythms,

paltry tones, you speak, offering

the same world as ever of poignancy, delight.

Somewhere among green fissured crags you yet dwell.

Reading these lines, I think,

what of my own fine teachers

a thousand years hence?

VII.

When we first came here

I imagined some day

an old man and old woman

living harmlessly and quietly

apart from the world.

Little could I know

how surely the world would find us.

Our house had to grow legs

like Baba Yaga’s hut

to chicken-dance away from danger;

the garden can be rug-rolled

and hidden at a moment’s notice.

So it is that folks 

arrive to find only an owl and a crow

looking down very solemn

from a nearby tree.

In this manner we honor

through our various stratagems

the ways and teachings of the ancients.

VIII.

I have tried for decades

to reach Cold Mountain

by every means I know

even though you say

truthfully

I can never find it.

The closest I have come

is when, waking from a dark dream

to listen to the wind

I lie for a long time, eyes open

unsure of who I am

or where.

IX.

Ice fills the ditches, mottled, lumpy

under the coldest month of the year:

ditches that flow for a time and then stand parched

while we long for summer rain.

Ice rises on the bay in plates with a noise like animals

surfacing to breathe.

Ice forms, melts, reforms, holds the color

of evening, sloshes

at the edge of white or black water,

skins the low tide flats, marbles a line

on the shore at high.  Ice is everything now.

If Han-shan wants, he can find me here,

choosing a hot afternoon some August,

sky intense, tide flowing in.  We will plunge

our pale bodies in the sea and then

warm ourselves on the broad smooth rocks.

We will scoop up mud and shells,

scribble our nonsense on the stones,

watch it dry awhile and then be washed away.

“Forcing The Thicket” first appeared in Living On Salt And Stone (Stone Man Press, 1984)

On A White Day \ Corvids

Nancy: When "color" is defined as white and black and shades of gray, a cleft in the rock sheltering a streak of moss is astonishing in its brilliance.

On A White Day

With a brush and black ink

I might sketch the stepped ledge,

the frozen bay, even the spruce

that takes all the light into its dark hunger,

but could I ever risk that slash

of moss, the broken lip of rock

green green greenest green?

Alan: Sometimes poems write themselves in reaction.  This one did, to the lines quoted.

Corvids

    for DLB

          “two flapping, hoarse malevolent shapes – ravens for sure –”

Crow wakes me, early.

Raven soars, stately, mocking the eagle.

Jay mimics the hawk, crashes invisible gates in the trees.

Raven inspects my work-in-progress, spring and fall.

Crow guards me, warning of owls.

Jay chides me for keeping cats; jay chivvies the dog.

Raven sings to me, secretly,

singing the Dharma

in the season when everyone sleeps.

Bare Bones \ Wild Geese Crying All Night

Nancy: Winter's here, and yet memory provides the colors of summer. Instant replay on the pages of my mind.

Bare Bones

Remember the lilies?  Over there?

Warm sunrise, gold, dusk?

And on the fence to the west – there –

remember the roses?

Never mind that the bay

is more nearly blued steel than blue sky,

that the sky is as sharp as knives.

Someday these bones will rise,

and dress themselves, and dance.

Yes, they have.

Someday they will.

Alan: In winter, on calm nights, we know the Canada geese are out there on the water in their scores and hundreds.  Not seen, no, but heard.

Wild Geese Crying All Night

I.

All night, the music of wild geese

rises from spraddled, indeterminate bays,

casting the riddles of chill, woven, unseen tides:

antiphonal, convivial, conversational –

below the silent house, out over the back ridge,

through the comb of black trees –

ensembles, solos, choruses:

shawms and sackbuts in unhuman, ancient keys.

II.

When Shantideva offers to the Buddhas

“the endlessly fascinating cry of wild geese,”

I see them on nights calm as this,

flying swiftly above the high peaks,

their voices quavering from 30,000 feet,

remembering in hollow bones the new grass.

I see them falling like late snow on milk-white glacial lakes.

I see them settling their wings, becoming ovoid,

floating, their heads tucked in, at rest.

I see them waiting to be born again.

I see them home.

III.

It is so bright, we should all be outside on the snow,

looking up, straining to hear the miraculous, distant foghorn,

the hard, mute stars overhead,

feeling our bodies gathered, then lifted by the geese,

lifted and borne away on moonlight –

if only we knew the songs and the water’s songs –

towards Orion, his wavering sword,

and the farther attending spheres.

Enter Winter \ Walking In

Nancy: Suddenly, if not surprisingly, it arrives,  like the parade that you know is just up the road.  Some drama, some beauty, exciting until it wears out its welcome and we begin to count the minutes of returning light.

Enter Winter

with a sun turning, saying no

no, I’ll never leave you, tiptoeing

back up the hill

with a moon hanging sweet, yellow

as a plum in bare branches

with a tide flooding its sprills

and riffles through the poplar grove

with a proclamation: here

a small bird

black and white, is singing

a song of himself, here

in the scarlet brambles

Alan: For 12 years our road was impassible in winter.  From mid-December sometimes until the end of April, we’d walk, snowshoe, ski – whatever it took – dragging our groceries or clean laundry behind us on a sled.  No lights, no sound of traffic, just the land and water and the prayer of a small house at the end.

Walking In

Snow in our faces,

foghorn in our ears,

you a stiff child-shape

against the blank where the bay must be.

Fenceline, crazy leaners,

this is a long way in

for the bloodhounds of the snow.

The packed edge sliding away underfoot.

A tuft, here and there, dried spoor of autumn.

A rise, a slowing,

drift of spent wood smoke

from that hole in the sky

that must be home.