Tracking Buddha \ Raven In Winter Feels Free

Alan:  Nancy put this one on the refrigerator – her highest honor.

Tracking Buddha

This morning was perfect

for tracking Buddha:

a little fresh fluff

on crust you could run on:

snow’s formlessness

holding the perfect forms

of the prints.

I found plenty of

squirrel tracks –

tracks of whitefooted mice –

voles – the lick of their tails –

a shrew’s starved scribble –

coyotes, hares –

fox’s purposeful meander –

but no Buddha.

Searching the field edge,

crossing the wide glare

to peer under apples,

spruces, I read the news

of porcupines – deer –

raccoons – even, by the marsh,

some geese.  No Buddha.

Then, on my neighbor’s land,

near the vanished farmhouse

and ramshackle barn,

I found where a grouse

had stepped out

from the woods,

stitched its careful, straight seam –

put its wings down, once –

and flew, what, five yards?, six?,

surely just a single beat,

to land in a sliding skid

of two long parallel

furrows.

I imagine that bird

waking after a bitter night

to peer from cover into sun –

step forth – look around

cautiously and, 

knowing it is alone,

execute a moment

of perfect impromptu

silliness

before walking on,

wings at sides

as if in silent

meditation

into the far trees.

Nancy:  The raven’s a bird of infinite fascination, acrobatic, versatile and clever.

Raven In Winter Feels Free

Listen to that high flown rhetoric!

Raven’s preaching, running for election,

riding his invisible bike on an invisible wire,

punning, coining aphorisms, assuming

a supervisory position,

and delivering himself of various pithy

(and unsolicited) bits of advice.

In the winter, Raven’s positively garrulous.

We’re astonished.  Wouldn’t you be astonished

to see your quiet neighbor take his calloused hands

out of his pocket and launch into The Devil’s Trill

on a harmonica?  Why, it’s like watching the parson

do the hula on a beach in Hawaii –

still in his three piece suit.

No doubt about it, winter can be long

and hard, but summer folks miss a lot:

winter’s a good time

to get to know the neighbors.

“Raven In Winter Feels Free” first appeared in Blueline magazine.

Beautiful \ Nightcoach

Alan:  My French was always exécrable.  I’m happy enough to muddle along in English, knowing it has a way of sopping up other languages’ gravy.

Beautiful

The most beautiful words in English,

my father declared, one supper,

to his family whose minds opened

like the mouths of baby birds,

were – according to a Frenchman

he said he’d met through work

(oh, exotic arbiter!) – “cellar door.”

So under-appreciated an object

to roll so golden off the tongue!

Handcuffed by first-year French, still

I could hear the resonance, for one

whose “that, of gold” was “cela, d’or.”

Later, I found the record label l’Oiseau-Lyre,

the lyrebird, and judged

the stranger had the better of us there.

Still later, meeting in school Yeats’

jeweled automaton, Stevens’ gold-feathered bird,

I felt the music we all seek

comes not from cages or ideal palms

but from the quibble of rusty hinges

and the half-felt must of air

reaching from cool and freshly opened ground.

Nancy:  I loved trains.  I loved the motion, the sound, the world passing, the imaginary lives I lived vicariously, the history and stories I played out as the landscape flowed past, my imaginary other selves.

Nightcoach

Kettaklak, kettaklak

thousands of miles asleep with my head on the rough upholstery

and awake

kettaklak

writing my name in the coaldust on the windowsills

a railroad man’s daughter

in the backyards of a thousand small towns

watching their milkmen

their empty night streets

kettaklak, click, kettaklak

beating them to their own dawns, and

sleeping again

to the roll, the long whistle

kettaklak, lullaby, kettaklak

it gets in the blood

of a railroad man’s child

“Night Coach” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.

To One Dying In Hospital \ Mortalities And Entanglements

Alan:  We were told he had fallen on the ice and wouldn’t recover.  All that his family asked was that our makeshift Sangha ease his passage from this life with well wishing and loving kindness.

To One Dying In Hospital

The trees

draw their light

from the top,

as if a blind

withdraws slowly,

upside down.

Geese

huddle in the thread

of the stream

that winds across the low-tide

marsh; grow nervous

but do not lift.

I have been asked

to hold you in my thoughts,

though we have never met,

so I do.

The sun,

just visible beyond the ridge

makes brightest

the single small cloud,

not moving

in an otherwise

blue sky.

Nancy:  At a conference on whale populations, I overheard this remark: “Death is the least known aspect of the life of whales.”  Except for those washed ashore or impaled on a ship’s prow, what do we know?

Mortalities And Entanglements

Black.

Rising out of the black,

the whales slowly take on form; they become

distinct and whole, finely shaped, various,

individuated; they come to meet us at

blue.

Wide.  Blue is wide.

We come to know one another in a wide

blue way.

Musicians play Villa-Lobos,

and the whales show their appreciation of cellos and flutes

with slow rolls.

Poets write and recite poems.  Scientists

fill their family albums with snapshots of whales.

Word goes out: the whales have come back

from Patagonia with a new song.

We all get copies.

We stand in the water,

hip deep, watching them die.

Death is over the edge of blue.

Is this all we have to show for it?

Bones?  From bones we learn about bones,

but we want to be taught requiems.

I want to ask the whales,

how can I know, when a poem sounds,

whether it has gone to feed

or die?  We want to know more,

we want to know why.

When the whales go, they take the answers

with them, over the edge,

sinking blue,

deep blue, indigo,

indistinct,

black.

“Mortalities And Entanglements” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984).

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.