Florida, For Wallace Stevens \ Ajar In Tennessee

Nancy:  No longer remote and exotic, the Florida Keys have very little left of the imagined romance of the '20s and '30s.  Crocodiles are replaced by earthmovers and natural vegetation by souvenir (made in Taiwan) stands.  (Not that that stopped optimistic biologists from asking me to help look for crocodile nests.)

Florida, For Wallace Stevens

Nothing here to burn the men of Hartford,

men of Dubuque,

Terre Haute; the streets are as safe as nunneries,

even the back streets,

even the small streets,

even the smaller streets,

that die in palmettos,

or if not in palmettos

in rusted bedsprings and maimed chairs.

Nothing not like Hartford;

the women are not papaya eaters,

no, on the side streets they are planting geraniums

cool as Connecticut.  They are sweeping their floors.

And I am too late.  There is nothing here

to test my fear,

no smoldering flower of temptation.

Wait for me, Mr. Stevens,

hold your ship, I am forty years too late, and

I am without an answer for the woman in the trailer

who asked me, “Why don’t the crocodiles

go back where they came from?”

Alan: With apologies to the master’s “Anecdote Of The Jar.”

Ajar In Tennessee

He came ajar in Tennessee

or Kentucky — one of those broad, squashed states.

He sat himself upon a hill

and, as the poet predicted, green

came nosing round.

He aligned his axis with the state’s,

east-west, then turning, west-east,

feeling the lingo tug him south,

mountains and hollers spin him north,

until feet and head pulled counties,

continents apart.

Green came round, snuffling and licking, not ordered,

and he was not a port in air, not round,

he was ajar, the air a ladder that crumpled in his hands,

the green a wilderness, a pack of blue-ticks baying,

driving their fox to ground, somewhere

here in Tennessee or maybe ol’ Kentuck.

A Prowler's Spring \ Too Long Cold

Nancy: Sometimes conversations lead to memories that surface as poems.  I once wrote a thank you to friends who "put their cat's paws against the dominoes of my mind.”

A Prowler's Spring

Be a prowler, be a hunter.

My father took my hand and we set out.

Be a searcher, be a learner.

We put on our boots and went hunting for spring.

The snow was deep.

There was ice on the water.

Papa?  I asked.

He smiled and said "there . . . and there".

Deep in the snow

Green leaves unfolding, green leaves and strange flowers.

Later I learned to find

Liverleaf under the oak leaves,

Anemone in the fencerow,

Mayflower hidden on the hillside

But best of all

Was when my father took my hand

When we went prowling together

Hunting for spring.

Alan: There’s a point every winter when we all begin to say, “enough,” and winter just smiles and bears down harder.

Too Long Cold

How many gaps have opened, this winter.

How many barns gone, their roofs stove in by snow

or flattened like card houses by that last big wind.

Homes burned: chimney fires, “fires of suspicious origin.”

Little gaps in the landscape: scorched trees

forlornly trying to cover their shame.

People are drummed unmercifully.

“The domestic violence project has been cancelled due to snow”

(we can see by the split lips who’s been practicing at home).

Men too young to have heart failure, do;

the old folks “just kind of run out of life,”

their patience gone, and we all (who can’t dream of death, ourselves)

read the obituaries first, then buy the papers for kindling.

People fall in on themselves like the barns,

worn out with adjusting to the gaps on the land, in their hearts,

hurting from not enough green, not enough smiles.

A Room Of My Own \ Flurries

Nancy: "Where has she gone now?"  I heard them asking one another as I made myself small and invisible in one of my hidey-holes.

A Room Of My Own

Bone.

It comes to that.

Bone.

A skull.

So many failed:

    nests of fern

    hollow trunks

    wickiups, like

    inverted baskets

    thickets

    corners of rooms

    notebooks

    frostbitten

    collapsed

    invaded

But bone –

bone holds

now that it comes to that.

A cave of bone.

Paintings on the walls.

Words like handprints.

Painted songs, painted stories.

I close my eyes

    locked inside

    invisible

    I close my eyes

close the doors of my room

    my room

    roll boulders against the doors

    my room

    my bone, my skull

    my own

Alan:  The forecast called for a day of flurries.  They kept coming, on and on, all week long – one continuous, slow, messy, inexorably accumulating drift.

Flurries

Cars in the                                                                                ditch. 

    

Cars

waddling down

the center of the

road,

                                                                                           everything

white                                                                                    (Flurries

          

they said.)                                                                                    The

double yellow

line

you can hardly                                                                         (see)

a huge

shape approaching,

spitting salt and

dirt.

“Flurries” first appeared in County Wide newspaper.

After You'd Gone \ Contra, Contra

Alan: We no longer haul our water from the shallow dug well down the hill from the house:  too many dry autumns; too much work.  The pitcher pump of our new drilled well squeaks and creaks and generally makes a fuss over its own importance.  But we still use buckets to get the water to the house.

After You’d Gone

I went to get water.

The wind was southwest,

the snow slick underfoot,

a little melting,

the buckets splashed and the light

swam in the well tile.

I made three trips,

and in the end

I drew up silence.

Nancy: Two worlds, the hot, sweaty immediate life of music and flying bodies, and the nagging wonder, the constant question of a child, "Papa, what's out beyond there?” (the horizon) and the frustrating answer that, "It just goes on and on."  (And after that???   "It just goes on and on.")

Contra, Contra

When the dance is over we face one another again,

and I want to say, “listen”

        this is not the way it is –

        listen – the sun is a variable star,

        and a cold song plays in the black of space,

        there is no silence anywhere

We face one another, panting,

this tune always catches its own tail

and brings us home again.  Everyone laughs,

sweating, impatient for the music to begin again,

and it does.  The music starts

and the couples turn, certain, whirling through space.

        the stars were born – it makes me shiver –

        they are dancing away from one another –

        I must leave, I must watch the mountains melt

        and run down to the frozen sea

Tomorrow, you say, tomorrow we will stand with you

as you press your ear against the black sky, tomorrow

we will listen for the cold star songs, but tonight –

dance.

        I want to say “listen”,

        I want to ask if anyone knows where we are going,

        if the stars will ever turn and face one another again

as we do.  You laugh, and I shiver, but I turn to the music

and take your hand, and pound my feet on the floor.

        Over our heads, the stars fly farther

                                                                                   and farther

                                                                                                            away.

Three Water-Element Poems \ Fog

Alan:  After weeks of cold clarity, a midwinter thaw, when everything softens, shape-shifts, tries on strange clothes.

Three Water-Element Poems

I.

Mists of ablating snow.

Eagle flaps low

above the road,

chooses a snag,

settles,

becomes Raven.

Mists muddle vision.

Objects stretch,

unsettle,

flow.

Look again: Raven

turns Crow.

II.

Once, hiking The Lakes,

we rose to valleys

sodden under tight slate lids;

climbed through downpours

into cloud so dense

it was like blind

burrowing in

dark, soft stone;

then! broke abruptly

free, as if newly, partly

formed (still un-

born from the

waist down)

to cheerful island-

peaks swimming

in endless white

under simple, perfect

blue.

If that day

we were True Awakening’s

analog, still

we descended

exhausted into

saturating gloom,

went separately,

never met again,

would not know each other

now if we

did.

III.

Buddha taught: “World

is a conjuration

and a dream,

made so by our ignorance,

wanting,

fear.”

Also: “Nothing exists alone.”

Viz.: Crow is a phantasm

of Mist; Mist the same

of Crow, of Snow.

Also: “All ways of saying

are amiss.”

Nancy: There's our landscape, familiar, and our world in the fog, unfamiliar.  Watching my world dissolve and re-form makes me understand how easy it must have been for fishermen to become lost in their home waters.

Fog

amplifies and conceals

denies and resembles

becomes the waterfall

and the mountain

            from which it falls

fog indiscriminate

envelopes rose/fishing boat/

grass/spruce

here or there

it doesn’t matter

here or there

so different so same

When the fog lifts

I think, how strange

I dreamt I was a fish

I dreamt the world was

upside down, that it

smelled of roses, and old stones

or so I dreamt.

Big West Wind \ Coyotes

Alan:  Until we added on, our house would rock in the storm winds from the east, from the west.  It made for some long nights, awake, listening.

Big West Wind

I can feel the wind

running like a swollen river

under the cabin –

a river with ice in it

under the cabin perched on two old cedars

straddling the cellar hole,

the river of fast ice –

and me in the dark, wondering

if this is the time

I’m going to dive in.

Nancy: Nights in the high desert in December are cold.  Boulders heated in the noon sun contract in the cold, and the small crystals break loose and are free to ride with the wind.  The sense of the free flow of stone, and the howls of unseen animals makes nights a wilder world than prosaic life after sunrise.

Coyotes

My brothers howled.

I felt how the ground shivered

under their haunches.

It was a night of transition.

The rocks crumbled –

I heard them, outside my tent,

participating in time.

Riding the wind, they rustled and scraped

past my ear, past my thin wall.

Brother called brother,

and there were soft noises at the water hole.

All night,

the rocks hurried down the washes.

I wanted to howl to my brothers,

sit on my haunches and howl.

Under me, the ground shivered,

my tent breathed with the wind,

stones made a sound like rain.

I wanted to howl,

and all the stillness of earth

was caught in my throat.

Cold as a dead thing

I waited for light, and crept from my tent.

The stones were done with their trickling,

the wind slid off down the side of the world.

I tried to warm my hands on the ground

where my brothers had been.

And howled.

Whiting, Early February \ Boundaries

Alan:  After 31 years in our little house by the bay, the past two winters we’ve had to spend in whole or in part in another town, in a place with easier accommodations.  April marks the season of return, for the woodcock and for us.

Whiting, Early February

How

        could the sound

of water dripping

   through filter

paper

         into your morning

   coffee

reel me

         for an instant

   home,

                  to April

a woodcock

                   whickering

                            like a winged seed

         downward

into dusk?

Nancy: Days recalled at night, where sharp edges disappear.

Boundaries

Where the atoms are free in their movement –

gray, white, invisible –

we call it air.

I breathe it in; it becomes my boundary,

inside, outside.

I breathe it out,

and it becomes the edge of the goshawk;

it becomes that which fills the snow,

the footprints of the vole, the place where

air wing edge bird

becomes air wing edge snow.

The fur is dark, the blood red,

a few spots on the snow;

the gray white bird has flown

and the air, invisible, becomes

my boundary, inside, outside.