Restless Night, Cold Morning \ Three Nights Before Christmas

Nancy: The sound of calling birds – willets in the spring, geese in the fall – exerts a pull even on my sleeping brain.

Restless Night, Cold Morning

The geese hit the bay in a spray

of sound and water, rippling

the last shaft of rose madder light.

Then all subsides in dusk and murmur.

                       the geese circle the bay and land,

                       calling impatiently while I hurry

                       to gather my feathers, I almost forgot

                       but now I remember, hurry, call and fly

                       but wait, the geese lift up against the moon,

                       dark paper cutouts in the sky

                       even in sleep I hear, my blood answers,

                       but late, too late to fly

Days dawn so cold and clear now, listen,

you can hear the crackle of rim ice

when the wind catches an edge.

Down the bay, nothing murmurs, nothing stirs.

                       only dreaming the calling, the greeting,

                       the whirl and circle, the water, the sound,

                       the cries triumphant, one and another

                       and another and another

At dusk the bay is quiet, and again in the morning,

except for the wind, nothing stirs,

nothing calls to me across the water.  No reason,

and yet, for a moment I linger, listening.

Alan: Skeeter – 3 pounds of high-octane joy – ruled my life for all eight years of his.   I offer the following in his memory and in blushing homage to Clement Moore, Dr. Seuss, and Mad Magazine, which introduced me as a child to the perverse pleasures of parody.

Three Nights Before Christmas

'Twas three nights before Christmas, and up in my bed

I was sleeping the sleep of the not-yet-quite-dead,

Dreaming such dreams as I know are too common,

Of towns made of Swiss cheese and seas made of ramen,

Serial sagas both pointless and plotless,

Behaviors that dawn would reveal to be thoughtless,

Scenes by DiNiro, DeMille, Peter Jackson

(Silent, except for piano and claxon),

Teaming with characters straight out of Dickens

With bit parts galore (there was one for Slim Pickens),

Creatures who ranged from the pure to despicable

With motives transparent… obscure… inexplicable.

Let me tell you each detail (giant pink quinces!).

Oh.  Is that a yawn?  And are those tics winces?

Well, these were my dreams, so I found them engaging,

And slept, though outside a light drizzle was raging;

Slept in the bliss that tomorrow was Saturday

A sleep saints would envy, both former- and Latter-day.

Ah, joy!  No shrilling alarm in the darkness!

No jolt!  No "Where am I?  In Skegness?  In Harkness?"

And so, to sum up, I was napping the nap

Of a middle-aged, twenty-first-century chap.

Fretful and over-worked Monday through Friday,

But Saturday, ah Saturday!  It was my day!

When, what to my protesting ears should intrude

But the voice of the Skeeter.  So early!  So rude!

He whimpered.  He simpered.  He barked.  He insisted.

I covered my head with a pillow!  Resisted!

Downstairs in his crate he was growlin' and squeakin'.

I: clam.  He: the starfish.  I felt myself weaken;

Until, in despair, off the covers I threw

And peered at the clock.  It was five twenty-two!

The sky was pitch black!  It would still be for hours!

But who in the world can resist Skeeter's powers?

And so from the long winter's night I'm ejected.

I stagger downstairs, feeling beaten, dejected.

I light the gas lamps.  I put on the kettle.

I haul on my coat.  What a test of one's mettle!

I give good old Tycho a quick belly-rub.

Good boy!  You've been quiet.  Not so Beelzebub,

Who's watching, quite brisk, as I unlatch the gate;

Jeez, Skeeter, you devil!  Step forth from your crate.

So I leash them, and walk them, and build up the fire;

It dances and flickers: my dreams' funeral pyre.

I give them their biscuits.  Old Tycho's soon snoozing,

While Skeeter considers a toy of his choosing.

"Breakfast?  You're kidding!" he seems to be saying.

"It's time to be frapping!  It's time to be playing!"

So I toss him his ball, and I shake "Mr. Dino."

He fetches and tugs, while I feel like a wino

Who's just coming to from a capital binge

To stare at the visions that cause him to cringe:

A turtle, a ferret, and yet stranger creatures

That squeak when you press their abnormal, plush features,

'Til finally he flops on the cozy hearth rug,

Where he lolls and he sprawls, and he lounges, quite smug.

When at last the frail dawn creeps out, timid and gray,

The scenery's bleak, and it's sleeting.  Oy vey!

The driveway looks gelid, the yard bleached and slick,

And I think about Christmas, and poor old Saint Nick,

How he schleps all those toys.  What a schlump!  The schlemiel,

Why not just UPS them?  What's the big deal?

All that squeezing down chimneys (the soot can't be healthy),

An entrance like that, why it's hardly stealthy!

The cookies, the milk — oh, give me a break!

He must have a bladder the size of Salt Lake.

And out on the lawn, don't those reindeer get tangled?

"Yo! Rudolph!  Back off before Blitzen gets strangled!"

And that laying of finger aside his red nose -

Does he feel a sneeze coming?  It's here!  Thar she blows!

Ah, Nicholas, laddie, are you just a carrier

Spreading the flu?  Hoo boy, what could be merrier?

Then, labors done, whether dead drunk or sober,

You're gone from our thoughts until next mid-October.

But I glance at the pupsters — they're both deep in slumber —

And think, "C. familiaris sure has our number.

We're trained; we supply them treats, comfort and hugs.

I'll bet, way down deep, that they take us for mugs.

To amuse them, it seems, we consider full recompense

For all their bad breath and occasional flatulence."

So, feeling these sentiments slowly imbue me,

I exclaim: "HAPPY CHRISTMAS!  IT'S EARLY?  SO SUE ME!"

“Frapping,” from “frap,” frantic random activity period.

December Redrawn As A Landscape \ So We Shine

Nancy: Our landscape, in the snow, is black and white as if drawn with ink on rice paper.

December Redrawn As A Landscape

A low roof, a path,

boulder slopes, a pine-dark mountain

            empty until you see the tiny figure;

now you see that this is a journey,

            black and white, ink and dream,

a landscape waiting, a traveler, a goal.

That old lady has gone to get the sun.

Tomorrow she will draw this landscape

            again, in color, in light.

Alan: When I came across this old poem, I was struck by its non-gender-neutral language.  Feel free to substitute “her” and “herself” for “his” and “himself” throughout.

So We Shine

                              “ Exposed on the mountains of the heart” – Rilke

So we shine the brighter, each in his own way

So the feathered tree clutches and is nourished by the snow

So we shine like snowfields as each comes into light

So we blink out blindly across the gulf

So the tree breaks loose and soars alone

So an eagle rides from each and tilts and claws the air

So the air holds us all and nourishes our wings

So we rise and circle, circle, rise again

So we vanish together and altogether

So the snows remain, so the mountains, so the gulf

So light is equality as each shines in his own way

So at night the seeds lie waiting in the snow

So each wraps his wings in himself

So each keeps himself until light has come from each

So each unfolds and rises in his way

Weather Notebook, 12/97 \ Night Watch

Nancy: Variable weather, winds and tides, bottles and boats, flotsam and jetsam, mostly lost, sometimes found.

Weather Notebook, 12/97

Ice, fog, snow squalls, rough water.

Little enough sun, with the days pinched

short.  No one was tending the dinghy;

it must have heaved in a gust and slipped

its mooring.  One morning it was gone.

Ice, fog, snow squalls, rough water.

As the days shorten, the cold sets in hard.

First, ice covers the marsh, then it fills

the small coves.  Yesterday, just at sunset,

the air thinned enough to see a flock of

buffleheads, riding it out in the bay.

Ice, fog, snow squalls.  Wind.

Winter begins at 3:07 p.m.  When the wind

lets up, trees, surprised, fall into the

pause.  Out on the bay, the dinghy has been

blown back and fetched up on a ledge.

In the coves, the ice thickens.

Winter begins.

Alan: When nothing can be done, the heart opens.  Call it prayer, or supplication, or just a crying out in darkness.

Night Watch

You’re so sick

and I’m helpless –

all my ministering a fraud.

Through night to a cold dawn

I listen to your shallow breaths

and the unceasing whir-whoosh

of the oxygen concentrator:

          whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-whoosh!

          whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-whoosh!

driving thought out of mind

in fragments,

                          atomized,

                                             gone.

            Only

the White Tara mantra remains

where I tenderly offer up your name:

          om tare tuttare ture Nancy ayuh-punya-jnana-pushtim kuru svaha!

White Tara,

                       Green Tara,

                                              Kuan Yin,

female embodiments of active compassion –

help us now!

Wrap her in your arms

for, though my heart yearns as a mother’s,

I am of male form and helpless.

I would hold her now as a mother

her suffering child –

as Mother Ocean holds her continents,

as Mother Galaxy holds her Earth,

as Mother Emptiness holds us all –

do this now

As For Him So For Me \ Teishen Tries To Write About Cherry Blossoms

Nancy: That first step away from his hut, that last quick look back – a start on the path toward an unexpected gift.

As For Him So For Me

Late fruit so sweet

     old bones warm in the sun

Ryokan drowses

Years in a mountain hut

     giving what he had

poems, dharma stories

Now, wrapped in a warm shawl

     he sips tea

love, he ponders love

So late, this teaching

     she hands him an apple

so late, so sweet

Alan: Late in life, Ryokan fell in love with the beautiful nun Teishen, who was with him when he died.

Teishen Tries To Write About Cherry Blossoms

I found him

out in the rain

looking up

at still-bare branches.

How withered he seemed!

leaning on his gnarled stick –

an old crow in his last molt,

water dripping from his beak –

so shabby his cloak!

I wanted to help him in

to warmth, green tea

but didn’t know where

his mind was –

left him, saying nothing,

rain trickling down his cheeks,

or tears.

The Picture Of The Moose From The Air Surrounded By Wolves \ Jay's Moose

Alan: The moose-wolf interactions on Isle Royale in Lake Superior have been studied for over  50 years, but what sticks in my mind is a black-and-white photo taken in the 1960s, all stark shadows and a story reaching its climax.

The Picture Of The Moose From The Air Surrounded By Wolves

bears no resemblance to the cage

where zoo-wolves pad down on us

or lie like movie stills slabbed on the gravel

or display wolfish affection or disgruntlement

for the student ethologists or disappear

into their concrete wolf den for pack meetings.

Nor does it much resemble

Wilt Chamberlain’s 500-wolf-muzzle king-size bed cover

or the legends of wolves waylaying shepherd girls

or the whistles of dog-cock hardhats

from up in the air, the position of advantage.

Nor does it capture the fear of the moose

standing and bleeding numbly in the snow

turning this way and that, but always slower,

always too late,

or the movement of the wolves, which is ballet,

themselves the audience.

It says: deficient moose.

Efficient wolves.  Efficient camera.

Efficient camera man.

Nancy: So much is wrapped in the white butcher paper – for the giver and for the recipient.

Jay’s Moose

sooner or later

we must eat Jay’s moose

the tang of the stalk

antlers blocking the sun

taste the anticipation

moose grows taller

richer

time slows

salt of sweat

jolt of sound

hot in the mouth

and the blood, hot

and here eat

the flavor of dew

frost

can you taste dawn

smell steel

crushed branch of fir

here on your plate

Jay’s moose

Late November: Lamoine, Maine \ The Old Woman Draws A Map Of Her World

Alan: This one could be subtitled, “Monochrome with blue dot.”

Late November: Lamoine, Maine

The yards of Lamoine

are no-yards:

planes of mown space

no longer quite grass.

November’s no-flowers

smile no smile on these gardens –

rectangles, squares tucked in,

readied for winter.

Perhaps a boat

trailered and blocked, tight

in blue tarp.  Otherwise

not even rows of split firewood

to part the close gray;

homes set just so, wan,

silent in half-light, prudent

beside modest drives.

An almost no-sun tiptoes

meekly into this no-drama,

pauses, whispering

snow... snow... 

and makes its way into clouds.

Nancy: Difficult to explain why I’ve been writing on my shirt...

The Old Woman Draws A Map Of Her World

Stone and green.

All the shores, so different.

Canyon wren and hermit thrush.

She ponders Palestrina and mariachi

and decides on the octopus

flashing colors on a coral shore.

Rivers and fish, fossils in the cliffs

or weathered out on the beaches.

As she has always done, she labels

the trees with their names, and the

flowers.  Here and there she leaves empty

spaces; her world is still growing.

Growing, elephant tree, manzanita

hackmatack,

Amanita, growing old, growing tired

pipsissewa.  Tired.  Niagara Falls

Bridal Veil falls, she shakes herself

awake.

Empty space, footprints, mink and bear

room to grow

the pen

the pen

          a blue-black pool

where it rests

          so tired

On Finishing "The 20th Century In Poetry" \ The Poetry Reading

Alan: I actually loved this anthology (Michael Hulse and Simon Rae, eds., Pegasus Books, 2011), which tells the story of the century through the works of its (English-language) poets.  But by the end both I and the poems (the last section titled, tellingly, “Endgames”) felt exhausted, limited, even jaded, and I wondered, is it possible still for poets to speak the language of magic and transformation?  To shake, if not shape, the culture?

On Finishing The 20th Century In Poetry

She is now, to be frank, a kept woman,

subject to pouts, occasional rages,

wheedling, whimsical, but on the whole

exquisite and, as we desire,

refined.  Visited by a few,

we could call her “prostitute”

or, more charitably, mistress of several.

She longs to be freed from these

brocaded rooms, beyond comfortable,

touched with opulence even –

longs not to be forever waiting

on those who provide this

almost luxury,

remembers how, when young,

she went howling through the winter woods

and could bring hail to the crops

and cause the rivers to flood,

and made all the people follow,

hoping, hoping to be chosen...

Nancy: Culture shock?  The “American Savage” sits in on a poetry reading in London, 1978.

The Poetry Reading

I sat  very still.

I sat still as a comet’s tail, a conscious contagion.

I sat still as an axe seething to bite wood.

I sat still as a glacier giving birth.

I was quiet.

I was quiet as water at the lip of the stone.

I was quiet as a stooping hawk.

I was quiet as a tooth on flesh.

I said nothing, and for the first time

I heard my own sounds,

my voice, guttural as a bear, how it grew from roots

of stone and made its way through the night shadows.

I heard my words crashing against ledges,

falling thunderstruck like pines,

splintering the room and smoldering in the corners.

One by one the poets read their own truths

into the dim room, while I sat very still.

They unrolled their worn land in my mind,

drifted with the ashes of dead fires.  It was quiet.

Quiet.

Quiet.  I wanted to seize their poems in my teeth

and shake them alive;

I wanted to open a window.

I wanted to go home with my wild words,

home to my own wide wild land.

At The Center \ The Old Woman Says "Then!"

Alan: Sometimes, all one can do is witness...

At The Center

Night of no moon, thick clouds,

and so much rain!

Dark as a bear’s den.  Dawn

shambles out at last, pauses, and sits

heavily, as if to say, “no farther.”

November.

You move to the sofa, trying to find

sleep and the easing of pain.

Songs of Kuan Yin on the iPod,

gentle breathing from a higher realm:

in the kitchen, where I tidy the dishes,

almost subliminal between sudden

paroxysms of rain hammering the roof,

wind chimes all clanging at once,

leaves smacking the windows:

so many musics vibrating together

and at their center,

surrounded by so much

caring surrounded by so much uncaring,

so much pain.

Nancy: Have you ever preferred your Then to your Now?

The Old Woman Says "Then!"

Last week the northeaster blew

color out of the saltmarsh and left

bladder wrack on the lane.  Today

the snow whitens the garden and

leaves the late flowers drained.

The old woman says "no, not yet,

too soon."     She will not say "Now."

She growls.  Bearlike, the old woman

snuffles her way.  She sweeps away snow

with her paws.  She rolls away stones.

She feels criss cross with the world.

"No, not yet, too soon.  No, not yet,

too soon."

The poor old woman goes this way

and that, this way and that   .   .   .

growling,

searching for the path to Then.

Morning Song \ In The Late Garden

Nancy: What a sound of contentment and peace – the thump of the dog’s tail on the kitchen floor.

Morning Song

A soundless high scud shreds the milky sky

just before dawn, southwest to northeast,

raggedy precursor of rain, or the ground so cold,

ice.  My dog has led me around the dry cornstalks,

past the heavy knots of calendulas in seed,

past the deer-bitten apple tree and turned –

all is well, says his tail, all is safe.

Now the day is mine, to feed the coals in the stove,

to break the silence grinding coffee beans,

to watch the sky bury the dawn in clouds.

The dog opens one eye and says with his tail,

again, all is well, all is safe, and I say yes yes,

as I stack wood on the fire and go about my chores

humming.

Alan: Once my garden was an assertion of order as I measured out the space between seeds, between rows.  The years taught me that nothing comes up or comes out quite as we expect.  And perhaps that’s better.

In The Late Garden

In the clearing

surrounded by spruce trees –

woods that were field and pasture

within our memories –

in the clearing growing back

to goldenrod, aster, hardhack,

field roses, and the shrubs we planted –

hydrangeas, ninebarks, azaleas, overgrown

or choked –

in the wildering space

I still dig over

a few square feet

within this leaning fence.

Within this fenced garden

ramshackle now and weedy

with witch grass, chickweed,

mulleins, self-seeded hollyhocks,

a few calendulas,

I still dig,

turning over the soil for garlic,

preparing the soil

for next year’s beans.

A few square feet

is all we need now

or can manage.

I am in this garden

with my whole body, digging

and pulling weeds, and listening,

seeing the soil come up in clots

at my feet, shaking it from the roots,

my skin alert to the air,

its motions of Fall mixing warm and chill.

Raven sits on the highest spruce

just out of sight behind the wood’s edge

and comments.

“Garock-garock.  Garock-garock”

says Raven.  “Raven,” I say,

“is this a greeting?”  “Garock-garock.”

“Do you keep watch over this place

even when we’re gone?”

I surmise this but can’t know.

I think of Raven as beneficent,

never my father’s “dark, malevolent shapes”

(the ignorance of fear).

As wise, even, and far-seeing.

But I can’t know, really.

“Garock-garock.”

                                    Oh, Raven,

today or some day years off,

may I feel death come over me in this garden

and, falling, turn to face Sky.

Fly down then from your hidden perch.

Walk around me three or four times, inspecting.

Cock your head, attending.

Pry out the blue grapes from my face

before Crow or Vulture, Coyote or Fox

can find me.

Carry them back and swallow,

so that I may see, through you, in death

what in life I could not discern,

even to the azure limits;

so you will know what love grew,

and what questions, what suppositions

and what longing,

in this narrow, earth-bound skull.