Riding The Mastodon \ Equinocturne

Nancy: The sad inevitability of things coming to an end, the slow irreversible fall.  In the end we want it to fall, slipping on our own icy tears.

Riding The Mastodon

The mastodon, dying, walks on

will not fall

bleeds icicles

weeps dust

walks on inertia

puts its feet down in the desert,

headed north.

I want it to fall.

I’m afraid, riding the mastodon,

it’s dead, I know it’s dead;

the sun is setting far to the south

and the cold aches in my bones

and the tears I weep for the mastodon

ring on the hard ground.

But the mastodon, dying, walks on.

Unheeding

it puts its feet down on the thin ice.

Alan: Disturbed sleep, equinoctial gales – the world turns once again towards the dark.

Equinocturne

This night,

a wind comes up and whistles in the rigging of our dreams.

This night,

a storm rises and scatters the fishing fleet of our dreams –

so many small boats lost, and such drownings!

There are calms, too, this night, and momentary lulls,

when we know that the moon, hiding its swollen belly,

rides away free.

This night is endless as the sea.

There are times when all we can do is cling.

At last, light – and we discover ourselves grounded

at the feet of tossing spruces, gesticulating pines.

Crows surround us.  Ravens eye our eyes.

All unbalanced.  All overturned.

The sun hides his grin in an ashamed mouth

and casts milk across the face of the sky.

Hauling ourselves free from the wreckage of this night,

we collapse into the goldenrods

and sleep.

Raven \ At Ingonish

Nancy: And still Raven goes down the bay, sun or storm, our constant companion.

Raven

Raven flew in one side of my head,

black in the white silence.  Raven

flew into the landscape behind my eyes,

and shook his electric feathers.

He flew in one side of my head

and he flew out again, on his own business.

Nothing to him that his wings write black weather,

and that the silence closes behind him

with the sound of thunder.

Nothing to Raven, gone down the bay,

that the thunder flies on, bearing his name.

Alan: From a long-ago trip to Nova Scotia.  Its exuberant language owes a debt to David Kresh, a wonderful poet who died too soon.

At Ingonish

At Ingonish the sea

fingers a fiddler’s choice on the cliffs

and the lake

frets a banjo breakdown on the longnecked barrachois.

Some law here keeps the salt stone from the fresh.

The cormorant and kingfisher wheel, ungeared, unmeshed,

round the hubs of bream and brash,

their world’s end at these rocks,

the jack pine, dune grass sharper than a fence.

Edge Of Night \ Homage To Stanley Kunitz

Nancy: There and gone.  The bats slipped into the spaces behind the shingles and lived invisible days.  Our lives crossed here, at dusk and dawn.

Edge Of Night

a bat slices the air

slivers the pale light into

smaller and smaller pieces

dusty with scales

     bat

plays the blade of itself

in calligraphy

mantras of flight

ribbons of air, shards of mystery

     nearer and nearer

arcs away and back and suddenly

no match for dawn

slides the soft steel of itself

silently, just here, invisible

     above my head

Alan: I loved reading The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects On A Century In The Garden (Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine, W.W. Norton & Co, 2007).  It’s a beautiful little book: a final flower from a marvelous poet and gardener.

Homage To Stanley Kunitz

1.     gardening:

        guarding

          our

          earth

                dharma

2.     writing:

            righting

      our

     world

              dharma

3.     a poem:

        an

   open

           named

             om

For Those Passing \ To The Kansas Board Of Education

Nancy: How cold and refreshing the water was, how special the flavor of well water – as though the tin cup added its own zest.  A cup still has a place in the back of our kitchen drawer and another is tied to our pump handle.  When I was still one of those “folks from away,” this homely thought was a bond between me and the old-timers.

For Those Passing

We always kept a tin cup

by the well, or a dipper;

and stopped too

and pumped and rinsed and drank

at other’s wells.

Sometimes the water ran,

clear, from a pipe at the roadside,

a scythed bank, a cup tied with a string.

Horses drank at the overflow.

Even today,

I like the sweet taste of natural courtesy,

the cup, hung on a fence staple

by the well,

water enough for all.

Alan: In 1999, Kansas deleted the teaching of evolution from the state’s science curriculum.  Despite that, life proceeds according to the reality-based principle, as it always has.

To The Kansas Board Of Education

                                                            on its Consideration of the Future of the Teaching of the Theory of Evolution

Our kind arose, we’re told,

from voles and shrews

or more primitive scurriers yet,

ascending, get by get,

through lemurs, monkeys, apes

(or some such hairy jakes)

until a light flicked on

behind the brow of brawn.

Ergo: Mozart.  The Bomb.

An older story line

insists that every kind

dropped fully formed

from God’s all-pregnant Brain,

which makes us each the same

except that some have heard

of Jesus and the Word

while others nibble grain.

Observing shrews and voles,

I think they’re unamused

and will simply carry on

despite the recent polls

which derogate their long

and lustrous line

to lower rungs.

Nor do they care a whisker

if God or God’s big sister

thought of them first.

As long as seed-heads burst

and meal-mates throng

they’ll do what must be done

long after we’re gone

to dust and dung.