The Poem About Eels \ Indra's Net

Nancy:  The fyke nets are out in the rivers and the young eels will be shipped away to become gourmet dinners.  Meanwhile our eel populations are declining rapidly, a sad end for such an amazing fish.

The Poem About Eels

The poem about eels knotted itself

in words like catadromous and

Sargasso, and it wandered up

obscure streams, and it grew thicker

and longer until finally I let it go.

It left with an eelish quickness.

Nothing, I used to say,

propping my pole against the porch,

nothing but eels.

Then I saw them: elvers: glassy,

transparent, almost invisible.  They

were the poem I had wanted to write.

Just so – eye, spine, quicksilver.

If only I could write in light.

If only I could write on bright high cold water.

Alan:  Indra, king of the gods, is said to have a net of infinite extent, every node of the net holding a perfectly polished jewel, each jewel reflecting every other jewel and in turn being reflected by them.

Indra’s Net

Indra cast his net upon the dark.

Fishing for suns, he was; many he caught.

Fishing for stars, fishing for moons, he was;

many on many he caught.

Indra cast his net upon the dark.

Fishing for days, he was; many he caught.

Fishing for seasons, fishing for years, he was;

many on many he caught.

Indra cast his net upon the dark.

Fishing for lives, he was; many he caught.

Fishing for minds, fishing for souls, he was;

many on many he caught.

Indra trawled the darkness long upon long,

hauling up galaxies, eons, oceans, peoples,

past and present, never and future,

nowhere and somewhere, right here and all around.

He was done.  Darkness was empty.

The things in the net were light, all light and shining.

They were strong, they swam, they were fast

and they were afraid.

They saw themselves!  They saw each other!

They reflected and held each other.

They shone forth and burned deep in each other.

It was lovely.  But they were afraid.

Indra grew sad.  His sadness went into everything

just as it came from the fear in everything.

Perhaps he had wronged, where he only meant

to gather the light so it could shine together.

Indra grew sorry.  He cut the net open.

With a rush, the light flowed out and was gone,

taking its fear and sadness with it.  It was free.

Only a little fear, a little sadness, still clung,

and a little, little light, like fishscales stuck to the net.

Indra saw this, and seeing this, hoped.

Hoping, he mended his net.  With it mended,

hope grew large.

Indra cast his net upon the dark.

“Indra’s Net” first appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Shadbush In May \ Full May Moon

Nancy:  Shadbush – shadblow – sugar pear – rarely on lists of “must have” ornamentals.  But we who live with it love it.

Shadbush In May

Because every road

every hillside

every streambank

every shoreline

every dooryard

every woods’ edge

froths and foams

we talk to strangers

at the gas pumps

at the postoffice

at the cash register

at the lunch counter

did you

have you

isn’t it

up my way

out by East Stream

for a whole week

no wind

no rain

the flowers last

no one remembers anything like it

oh, we say, oh

we talk to strangers

Alan:  Every Spring it seems, for one magical night, the shadbush have the world, and the lovesick moon, all to themselves.   

Full May Moon

This night

in the old fields

in the rough fields

in the lost fields

every sugarpear tree

stands up

spreads its arms wide

like a child wearing a sheet,

tilts its head back,

mouths, “Oooooo...”

Tomorrow, they’ll hold baskets

of tiny pink shells, cages

demure with pale butterflies:

tomorrow – for a week.

Then they’ll green; then,

for a moment, crimson;

then, when children

in towns and villages and suburbs

roam house to house begging for sweets,

they’ll take off their clothes, slowly,

under another open-mouthed moon,

whispering, “Oooooo...”

“Shadbush In May” first appeared in Fencing Wildness (Slow Dancer Press, 1999)

If I Were Ancient And A Sage \ Game

Nancy:  Waking at night with a poem only to find in the morning that the rock has dried, the wind has blown, the poem flown.

If I Were Ancient And A Sage

I might write poems on stones

and walk away.

I might tie poems to branches

as if they were leaves.

I might write poems on paper

for children to fly like kites.

I might write poems with water

on my doorstep.

I might write poems

in wine dregs, and forget them.

The tide would swallow them.

The frost would trick them into falling.

The children would break the strings.

Wind would dry the doorstep.

Two empty cups by the fireside,

wine spilled, sages dreaming.

Or I might write a poem and give it to you.

It might be a live coal,

or paper for wrapping fish, would you know?

If it turned to a bird in your hand,

would you let it fly?

Alan:  There are those who buy a hunting license every year, whether or not they get their deer (or bear, or what-have-you).  And there are those who take what they can, when they can, fair game or not.

Game

It’s Sunday, and nothing’s in season.

Sunday, when state law still declares a day of rest

for game.

It’s the time of year bears stagger, blinking and starving,

from their dens with cubs,

when foxes, bobcats, coyotes are nursing young

and deer are desperate for green.

Two quick shots, squeezed off in the puckerbrush back over the ridge.

Two quick shots, out of sight in the woods.

Maybe that’s what the baying of dogs was, earlier.

No one’s sighting in their gun, pinging a few bottles

with two quick shots.

It’s Sunday, a good day

to kill something, and

everything’s in season.

The Rainbow \ Out Of Memory, A Dove

Alan: A vision of a place known so intimately that even now I can see every fold in the skyline, every tree on the shore.  But there was only one rainbow like this.

The Rainbow

I have never felt closer to the Perfection of Wisdom

than when I saw, not that perfect double rainbow

perfectly framing the long hill rising above the glass-blue lake,

perfectly reflected in the lake, so that the whole

formed a perfect twinned circle of breathlessly inverted color and light,

but in the memory or whatever it was that came to me just now,

seeing it again, as clean and still,

though I am hundreds of miles from any rainbow

and a million years from that particular hill and lake.

Nancy:  April's a month of firsts, of birdsongs and strawberries, of mornings at dawn in the mist, of the first fish.

Out Of Memory, A Dove

And so, April,

with her showers

more sharp than sweet

and a dove, calling

              becomes a pond,

              sunrise, fish rising

              my father cleans a fish

              I wipe the knife on the grass

And the dove calling

              drifts into woodsmoke

              a bright moment as twigs flare

              my father oils the pan

              and the doves are calling

              around the pond, at

              sunrise, April, in the rain

And so too this morning,

nearby in the rain

a dove is calling.

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