Two For Don \ The Dancing Grounds

Alan:  My youngest brother’s was another April death, sudden, appalling.  Even now, 13 years later, I want him back: there's so much to tell him, so much to learn.

Two For Don

I. Timber Cove Road

The Thursday after you died

I was driving home

through showers that burst

in gusts of sleet:

tall clouds broken

by clean hard sun.

A rainbow was building

as I entered the woods,

and then it was there

off my right fender

between me and the trees,

between me

and the endless dark trees.

II. Aurora

I went out

and the hair of the night

was standing on end

above the huge forehead

of pale shining.

In the still air

all the animal sounds and people

and place sounds mingled:

a distant truck, a foghorn,

the grumbling tides, a million

yips and yowls.

The night

stood up on its hind legs

and everything on earth

was looking and

speaking in tongues.

Nancy:  They aren't beautiful.  They aren't beloved of poets as larks and nightingales are.  And yet, we wait and we wait for the first magic night when the woodcock rise up, and we seek them out in the deepening dusk - "There, there," we say.  THIS is spring.

The Dancing Grounds

Buddy ate a woodcock once;

his son shot it, “no bigger than a robin,

and it tasted like worms”.

Buddy’s no sportsman.  He and his sons

hunt and fish for the pot.

The small bones I found in the baked beans

were pa’tridge, and I don’t ask whose

ribs and knuckles these are.  I don’t ask

because Buddy and the boys hunt at night some,

quiet and careful.  The woodcock, though,

was a legal shot, a boy’s quick prideful

reflex kill.  Solemnly, they ate it.

It tasted the way alder swamps smell in the Spring.

Little thing, no bigger than a robin,

eight ounces maybe.  An estimated one million

are killed each year by sportsmen, city hunters

like the ones who parked their car in my lane

without by your leave; arrogant, noisy

men who remind me that poachers make good neighbors.

What’s left come back to the dancing grounds;

it’s not the robin with his cheerup, cheerily

that says Spring, here, it’s the woodcock falling

at dusk out of Orion to the dancing grounds.

And we keep them open, the abandoned pastures

and haphazard slopes where the woodcock dance.

Here’s time and sweat we can ill afford

and yet we can’t see nature take its course here;

we burn and saw and scythe against some gentle

muddy dusk of falling song.

Buddy met me at the door, and we tipped our heads

back at the twittering.  The woodcock are back

on the dancing grounds.  It feels like Spring.

“The Dancing Grounds” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984).

Two Sunsets \ Spring Greens

Alan:  Many years ago, Nancy asked which of two small water colors of Joyce’s I most wanted, and of course I wanted them both.  They have hung side by side ever since, the same scene viewed twice, a few minutes apart.

Two Sunsets

                                     For Joyce Morrell

The fields rise up.  It is getting late, a few minutes to one side or the

other of sunset.  The sun behind clouds, the clouds spilling along the

horizon.

The fields rise up, the color of cranberry juice on slate, of spent summers

rising softly to swallow trees, sky,

and the trees (they are spruces) wait in patient black, spreading their

arms alone or in small, quiet clusters.

The fields rise up and the sky sinks, slipping away with the sun, back,

beyond, sliding behind clouds, the clouds riding the sun or where the

sun has until just now been,

and the sun sinks, is gone, or almost gone, hidden in cochineal velvet,

in folds of cobalt rimmed in gold and in straw.

The fields rise up, softly.  Soon there will be stars, already may be stars

behind us, but the spruces stand in front, and the spruces are the shadows

the fields cast on the night.

Nancy:  Dandelion greens.  Our family ate them wilted with hot vinegar.  I ate them only under duress and to this day the thought of them puckers my mouth.

Spring Greens

There are no greens in the woods, Granny –

which way is home?

My knife is dull, my basket full –

it must be time to go home, Granny.

Star light star bright, it’s dark in the woods –

at home they’re lighting the lamps –

Granny?

The air is chill and the birds are still

and we’ve walked too far –

do you know where we are?

Have you lost the track?

Can’t we go back?

Granny?    Granny?

There is no spring in the woods,

it’s time to go home.

Passing Over \ April, At The Edge Of The Labrador Current

Alan:  This one’s for my father, who died April 5, 2004.

Passing Over

                        

As you lay dying, I was passing over

from the coast to Bangor and the interstate.

Fresh snow sugared the wooded hills

and a west wind gusted.

It had taken an hour, that morning,

to clear home, the car caught slantwise

across the spring-soft lane, the town

unwilling to tear its skin by plowing.

But now the road lay clean

and I was passing over, as you were,

and heading south, a weak sun

hurrying itself between dark squalls.

Nancy:  April, neither here nor there, no longer winter and not quite spring.

April, At The Edge Of The Labrador Current

2 days of T shirts

and then a night comes down

so black cold

in the sky

an insubstantial

thin fall of light

washes the north

just below

the aurora

tide grumbles on stone

cold

your skin goes taut

while you watch

The Opening \ Elephant

Nancy:  Remnants of ice flows (blocks sometimes several feet thick) may still be there in April, buried in the greening marsh grass.

The Opening

The ice is barely breaking free

on the bay, floes stacking themselves

on ledges at low tide, volumes

of winter piled haphazardly, as children

might have left them, untidied

and abandoned,

as I say, this has just happened

but already my mind has chosen

to superimpose the flash of light, of

open water on the marsh, on the

bay, the gabble of oldsquaws in the dark,

sorting out, pairing up,

yes, already I am leaping (as I did

once from ice to ice across the flood tide)

leaping to the first pea tendril

the heavy green massy tomato plants

starred with flowers, a chair

in the shade,

perfume of hay and nicotiana,

all this because it is coming

because piece by piece

the ice is tumbling free, floating

free and the sharp cold air is rich

with open marsh and mud.

Alan:  Akshobhya, the Buddha of the East, whose emblem is the elephant...  I’d like to thank Margaret Brooks and family for the story that seeded this poem.

Elephant

                      om vajra akshobhya hum

Ponderous, plantigrade,

the elephant sways and shuffles

in the dawn processional:

polished, gold-tipped, inevitable

amid the crowds and chanting.

Just in front, a small child

walks, proud and singular;

then trips, sprawling, arms

delicate as lily stems

flung out, helpless.

The beast, unable

to change stride,

cups an immense foot

and touches the earth

in two places, bridging

her fragile bones,

walks on, imperturbable.

She springs up, laughing

and crying, the tiny glass

bangle flashing on her wrist,

a mirror of blue water,

a circle unmarred.

Almanac Straight Bay March \ Misspoken

Nancy:  March storms come with this consolation:  March snows disappear faster than those of January and the days are coming when we don't have to backpack the groceries in.

Almanac            Straight Bay            March

Sun slides down the north slope of Stone Man Hill;

early risers find live coals in the stove.

If a man’s willing to stumble through drifted snow

he has the right to hoe the flats for clams.

What do you want to eat?  What are you willing to carry

on your back?

Wind slicks all white.  The dogs never ran their

investigations; I come home never having left.

The calendar and the woodpile disagree.

The dogs believe in omnipotence.  They ask to

roll in the grass.

Clouds open and let us see the face of the moon,

23,000 miles brighter.

The moon pulls the sea over the road and out of the bays.

Some almanacs ignore this; some make a brief reference:

Moon, full, perigee.

Riddle: how can a woman of moderate height reach

into treetops and stroll over the garden fence?

Answer: the woman goes where her snowshoes take her.

Looking in my backpack for food, newspapers, daffodils.

As for buds, I defer to grouse.  When they gather in the

birches I believe in change.

Winter storm warning.  What am I willing to carry

on my back?

Alan: Age was cruel to my mother, and so it may be to me.  Perhaps all we can do, in the immortal words of the Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, is “Stay calm. Be brave. Wait for the signs.”

Misspoken

Fumbling in half-light, I tell you

I’m going to take the mail up the road

and you laugh.  It’s “trash,” not “mail”;

today’s Friday, the day I take the trash up the road.

This happens when I’m tired or distracted.

My mind shuffles the deck and pulls some random noun,

or what I see bumps what I’m thinking, as in

“How’s that new clock you’re reading.”

Maybe some day I’ll be like my mother,

for whom language is a sea of flotsam she swims through,

desperately fending off or grabbing whatever strikes her.

Maybe some day I’ll say, “I think I’ll scrub the kitchen floor,”

when what I mean is, “I love you.”

Maybe I’ll say that today.

Storm \ Kestrel

Nancy:  In March, when we're getting eager for spring, we may, instead, have the worst of the winter storms.

Storm

Say:       storm

Say:       the wind reminded us of gray wolves

               these wolves came out of the north

               running

               on long legs

Say:       storm

Say:       wind, snow, cold, and the chief of these,

               wind

               running out of the north

From this follows the house shaken

the rafters shaken

the cedar sills shaken

the teacups shaken from the shelves on the north wall

broken

From this it follows that the shingles

let in the snow

the windows let it in

the door let it in

on the floor, snow, and a drift on the bed

From this follows cold.

The smoke will not face a wind running out of the north;

fire will not throw itself in the face of the wolves.

Thirty hours.

Say:        quiet

                you dream the quietest thing you know

                in the unaccustomed silence

“Thrushes”, you say when you wake,

“I heard thrushes singing, far,

far away.”

    

Alan:  An unexpected view of a common enough bird – one that begs to become abstracted, but remains its own surprising self.

Kestrel

Not

                        over the fields

    hovering

                        stooping

          hovering

                                    stooping

not

          in your Air Element

a symbol of grace

                        or God,

    you

sit,

folded, stiff

and still

as sticks

on the low branch

of forsythia

in leafless

frozen

March,

only your head

making tiny movements

as if reading a newspaper

of dead grass,

scanning

for word of a vole

or oblivious junco

within your

quick grasp;

your small beak

and sideburns

crisp as a gigolo’s moustache,

your russet

breast-feathers

fluffed and showy

as a dowager’s stole,

you

                         not seeing

           this single

chickadee

                                     behind you

                        popping

          with excitement

                                      from twig to twig

Storm Warning \ Climbing March Hill #2

Nancy:  The color of the sky, the flight of birds, air smelling of salt or spruce or mudflats:  quirky weather guides for quirky coastal weather.

Storm Warning

And in the falling snow

in the blowing snow

the crows rose up

whirled

disappeared

for no reason

for good reason

the crows shook the trees

shook the snow

shook the branches

white green black branches

gathered

circled

disappeared

and the warning was

not the snow falling

not the wind turning

the warning was there

in the rising

the going

the empty tree 

Alan: Moving through the seasons is like riding the waves: whatever forward motion we seem to make, it is they that roll away under us and pass into the haze behind.

Climbing March Hill #2

Every year we move

without moving: nomads

in this one place.

And soon again we will be

climbing March Hill,

up the muddy slope of days

watching the sun lift

and settle

a little farther north,

believing that once more

over the frozen crest

will be some sort of water,

some sort of green.