And The Season Passes / Still Life With Raven

Nancy:   It can happen slowly, greens flowing to scarlet, to saltmarsh gold, to the brass and bronze of the last days of fall.  Ice forms at the edges of the bay.  The migrating birds finally fall silent, and every year the restlessness seizes me.  

And The Season Passes

Courting forgotten

the birds at the feeder

jostle and thrust.

Every late storm/early storm

their weavings come undone

nest bits litter the branches.

The slow, the weak

fed the sharp-shinned hawk.

The almost-sleek preen, and preen.

Bits of down lift and disperse.

This is our season of watching.

The saltmarsh flares and fades,

shorebirds shifting restlessly.

Line storms batter the marsh, the meadow

and the birds, all equals now,

judge their time.

Then they turn to the sky

summer strength lifting them

they turn to the star maps.

Quiet days, sharp nights.

Undecipherable maps

scratches on the moon

life pared to its bony core.

Alan: Fall – when whatever innocence that remains to us crumbles.  Raven, as usual, can’t resist a comment.

Still Life with Raven

The goldenrod is old and bleached.

Her bees have gone to ground or died.

This is the sight cruel Hopkins preached

to the child Margaret, who cried.

The fall of leaf and Man coeval –

bitter tonic for one so young!

Within the germ, the gnawing weevil;

malignance in the growing bone.

Beyond the goldenrod, the marsh.

Beyond the marsh, a tongue of sea

whispers a lesson just as harsh:

“I sunder all.  I sunder thee.”

Over rough fields, a raven, drifting,

calls out in laughter or disdain:

“The world like the wind is ever-shifting.

Weep if you will: you weep in vain.”

Not quite of earth, nor yet of heaven –

wise or just canny, who can say? –

the last word still belongs to Raven,

riding the wind on Judgment Day.

Dug In: The View From The Third Generation \ A Long Drive For Dinner

Nancy:  Maybe it’s good to learn that stress and ambiguities exist and that there are times to relax and times to step lightly, to learn it as a child.

Dug In: The View From The Third Generation

Winter was war.  When the poplar flung

its tiny white trembling flags of truce into April,

I sighed.  Truce was as good as peace.

I came out from under the table, uncovered my ears.

Yes, April meant the laying up of swords; I heard

the sliss, sliss, of steel in earth.

it soothed me.

Granny said, watch the trees,

watch the leaves,

wait until the leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear.

With seed in our hands,

we watched the fragile green-furred leaves;

when they had grown sharp, and round, and of a size

like a mouse’s ear, we bent, we planted.

Papa said, the ground must be neither too wet

nor too dry.  He took it in his hand, testing, and at last

a day came when it crumbled and fell away, a signal,

and he hoed a trench.

I followed him, dropping seed;

we covered it together.  With our brown fists,

we pounded, together, we pounded the soil.

Our gardens grew spears, flags, bright mouths.

I could listen; there were old songs, I learned how

the grandmothers had lived, I learned to whistle on grass,

on willow stems, to make dolls and arrows and slings.

I whittled sharp knives of wood, and hid them under the ferns

and in the rhubarb leaves.

Our gardens grew.  And when they were most beautiful, I overheard

Granny say, you never did . . .

Papa say, you never could . . .

Both say, you never will . . .

Sliss.  Sliss. The sound of the knives of war.

I hid in the tomatoes.

Harvest.

War.

Alan:  If, like me, you grew up when cars didn’t have radios – at least not the cars my family could afford – you learned to while away the long miles by singing, a habit that persists with me even now.  This poem, like the journey it describes, starts slowly but picks up speed as it goes.

A Long Drive For Dinner

                    Thanksgiving, 1996

Over the river

and through the woods

and through the woods

and through the woods

and through the woods

and over another river

and through more woods

and through more woods

and through more woods

and over some other rivers

with Indian names

like Narraguagus

Passagassawakeag,

Piscataqua

or prosaic whitebread names

like Pleasant, Union, Fore and Back,

and through the farm fields, bare and brown,

and dead-grass hayfields

and little villages

a bunch of towns

a few small cities

(Ellsworth Portland Worcester)

and on into other woods

between the cities-towns-villages-fields

driving all the short day

into dark and still driving

and over the last great river,

the Connecticut,

to grandmother’s house – no –

not grandmother’s, my aunt’s,

my aunt’s house, grandmother’s long sold

and grandmother’s creamed onions

that we ate beyond satiety

and still she demanded we have more

until sometimes we got sick

just a recollection in the tastebuds, fat

in the arteries

and grandmother too just a memory

of fat little soaps

scented and

shaped like seashells

and grandfather: his memory is

musty cellar stairs, oil-stained concrete

in a garage too neat, too tidy,

a disappointed man:

gone now both

over the river

the beautiful beautiful river

which I do not want to cross

today and not – dear god please not –

go over any rivers through white and drifting

snow blinding the traffic

filling the woods

silencing the slick white roads,

not drifting or wet-heavy-packed

snow not like sometimes,

especially I remember once

with my girlfriend (wife) (ex-wife)

and the Greyhound breaking down

30 miles out from Hartford

and we hitchhiking,

the snow stopping, temperature falling,

to arrive in the same wood-paneled

warmth the same house my aunt’s house

that I always arrive in

in my dreams

arriving back in a time

when my uncle too can turn to greet us,

little hand-lettered markers

marking our places

and the joy

of being there together, like the joy,

as a child, of finding my place

moved from the children’s table

to the grownup’s and my marker

marking this joy and also the

pain of not being ready, not being ready

to grow up, to look

back at childhood, at the small table

of children at the end of the big

table of grownups, to get old, to go

over that river

we all are thrust into

ready or not

the river of disappointments

river of Lethe of Styx

or even the beautiful

river of Jordan

and it hardly matters

with so many of us here,

together, swimming or splashing

or floating or maybe even

walking

over the river,

over the river

together.

“Dug In: The View From The Third Generation” first appeared in Poet Lore.

Frozen In Frames Of Light \ Late Weeding

Nancy:  Villages rise one after another out of the forest and pass away again to forest or shore.  Graveyards on the hillsides – history and memory caught in black and white light.

Frozen In Frames Of Light

Late afternoon.  Freeze.

A slant of light.  Freeze.

Hills, fixed in an angle of repose.  Replicate.

Mile one hundred nine.

Flick, flick, flick.  Three stones, white,

a family in their own fields.  Another.

Fenced.

And a town.  Long light flat, flash,

men, women, children, granite, some

pride in death.  Some stone from away.

Road.  Bridge.  Island.  Bridge.

Which town had the iron fence, the old stones

falling down, the light caught

in the robes Grief wore, a few new leaves

on the ivy?

On this road this is no one hill,

only hill beyond hill beyond hill, and

the dead, gathered together beyond time, and

their stones, under trees, by the bays,

frozen in frames of light.

Alan: There’s a point each year when gardening comes down to simple orneriness and habit.

Late Weeding

In the low corner of the garden,

the poorest drained, weediest place,

I put my back to the wind,

hunker down, start pulling.

Witch grass – mullein – dandelion – clover –

I scratch at the crust, tug,

thinking how hens must feel in the fall

and why they stop laying.

For this is the end of November,

the sun is caged in the empty trees

and only the lack of rain

keeps the ground from clapping tight.

Which is why I cannot resist

bending to scratch the surface of next spring’s chores,

stealing the green before winter does,

knowing how greedy I’ll be for the sign of even a weed, come March.

At Dawn \ Young America, Election Day

Nancy:  At times we may hear the groaner buoy in Grand Manan channel, a bell buoy off Liberty Point, the foghorn at Quoddy Head – perhaps the roar of the tides at Reversing Falls, even disembodied voices of men in the bay, clamming on a low tide:  the sounds of our environment, dependent on wind direction, temperature differences.

At Dawn         

Without boundaries,

fog of the Labrador

is filling the bay.

Fog of the headlands

threads the islands,

deep fog of the Gulf.

Untamed, undeterred,

fog of the buoys,

fog of the shipwreck shore.

At dawn, this is what I see:

that the tide of the sea is high,

that fog of the Labrador laps the shore.

My father sang of ships and men,

of bells, of voices singing

in the fog.  He sang of the deep.

Today, at dawn, the horn is blowing

at Quoddy Head  ___  ___        ___  ___

Our cabin floats on the sea of fog.

In the fog, my father is singing.

Alan:  I wrote this poem in 1988, the era of Reagan’s “Morning in America,” before cyber-commerce, when a letter cost 25¢ to mail, Kodak dominated photography, and Japan, not China, seemed like the coming thing.  Ah well – it wouldn’t take much to bring it up to date.

Young America, Election Day

I’ve never been to Young America –

Young America, MN –

which is where the rebate offers live,

the Kodak battery rebates, the Black and Decker rebates, the Bondo rebates,

the thousands of rebates that return to us

a dollar, minus postage,

on our purchase.

Young America!  I imagine a city of warehouses,

single-story metal-walled light-industrial hangers

with no people.

Young America hums with computers, with cash

and no people.

This is the town of the mail-order catalogue, the mail-in rebate,

the town that feels like morning, morning in America,

expansive, muscle-flexing, optimistic, Republican America

that lures us with offers, that jingles us alert

with capitalism’s wake-up call.

I hear America singing and it is a young, sturdy, vibrant voice.  Meanwhile,

the batteries in my flashlight

are whispering in Japanese.

October Larches \ If I Ruled The Air

Alan:  Hackmatack, tamarack, larch: after the maples, after the oaks and poplars and birches brown and fade, in the falling leaves of the hardwoods, the larches turn gold.

October Larches

Our native hackmatack, maligned and weak,

hides, as if shamed, amid the summer’s rout

of trees more honored, though it will peep out

and nod to those who, passing, stop and seek.

Larch makes a quick, hot stovewood, not much more,

unless you count those tough old bended knees

that stiffened many a hull, through many a breeze,

that hailed from town and village round these shores,

but that purpose is done, or nearly so:

today, the careless woodsman knocks it down

to offer light to trees with broader crowns

and straighter stems, or simply lets it go.

Still, I have seen it cup the waxwing’s nest,

and now, as Fall fades, it burns last, and best.

Nancy: If wishes were feathers, you'd find me riding the updrafts at the cliff at Mill Cove.

If I Ruled The Air

Like the black one,

Raven,

with his tilt and lift

with his parabolas

and pauses

with his running down

and his wheeling whirling

knifing back.

If I ruled the air

I would never say, now

Raven, sit and watch.  No.

I would call to the wind,

more!  more!

And I would call to Raven,

come!  come!

Now we can go together.

Ahhhh

if only I ruled the air.

Letting Go / X3

Alan:  Sometimes the land lies counter to our emotions.  In leaf-fall, joy; in the greening meadow, grief.

Letting Go

This same field

a few springs back

held small pools

in a cold wind

like blue eyes

full of tears.

It sparkles now, white,

or where the sun touches,

green, yellow-green,

yellow, yellow-brown,

brown. 

The alders

are dropping their leaves,

hoar-tipped,

in the still air,

with a faint chattering

that sounds

like celebration.

Who can discern

why sorrow then,

why happiness now?

Nancy:  Easier asked than answered:  where do these words come from?

X 3

Walmart

            There was my poem, pinned to the bulletin board

            at Walmart, between the bean supper and the car

            wash, an entirely appropriate juxtaposition

            for many of my poems, focused as they are on

            the weather and/or the scraggly epiphanies

            of survival in a hard place.

Wallace Stevens

            There are nights when I can’t connect with

            malicious greens and gilt umbrellas, nights

            after days when I’ve spent an entire pot of tea

            talking with neighbors about the costs of living

            simply; it’s a relief to turn Wallace Stevens

            face down on the table and step out to pee,

            splintery boards, sharply cold air, an orange

            rind of moon, nothing veiled.

Examining Room

            Weeks from now, when I’ve forgotten worry and wait

            and hurt, I’ll remember sitting on the clinic’s

            hard chair talking poetry with the nurses’ aide,

            who is shy and who keeps her voice low, but who needs

            reassurance; how can these words have such independent

            wills, she asks, where do these words come from,

            who am I, writing these words?

55 \ Uncorrected Visions

Alan: Everyone gets to write one poem for their own birthday.  Here’s mine.

55

Most awkward of numerals, these

inverted interrogatives;

their flat, displaced roofs

ripping loose in a gale.

The whole unsteady, no

foundation: the rounded base,

asymmetry threatening to tip

over, crumple,

fly apart.

Fifty-five, still alive.

Clickety-clack, no turning back.

Today I will jog

5.5 miles,

I will drive

not to exceed the speed limit.

I will count out and eat

fifty-five grains of white rice,

parceling starvation's mite.

I will examine what I own:

the double handful of years

dextrous and sinister,

elegant, stubby,

swollen, sore, denying,

affirming; those that accuse

and those that point the way.

I will consider my parents.

Once (for my sake?)

they set all questions aside,

became ecstatic

curves and lines,

symbols of an infinite,

Om and Amen: God.

Once, for me –

or the presumption of me,

it hardy matters.

Eight-five and eight-six,

You have taught me all your tricks.

Today I will not

perform handstands,

will refuse to gaze

ahead.

I will bless my mother and father,

throwing wide arms around them

from such a distance,

will make my bed in their honor,

eat some sticky rice,

fix the sink,

play with the dogs.

Nancy: Genius, or simply human frailty?

Uncorrected Visions

If, as I read, El Greco’s saints are not

elongating in holy passionate flame, but are merely

the product of defective vision, is it possible

that my lines will slowly grow short of breath,

punctuated emphysemically?  Will my reach shorten

and will the arthritic phrases venture less and less

far from the doorstep, and will I no longer write

of the bear licking its paws in the cedar swamp?

I wonder; it would be sad if the birds dropped

out of a deaf sky and anger went blunt as my

skin grew thick, and the cadence of poetry

took the creak creak of my chair into itself

until it was no more than a muted litany

of weakened failing flesh.

But wait: I like those landscapes

yearning toward the light, and I know now

how little will I have to write prosthetic poetry.

If memory cannot supply the shrill of the hawk

then let it fly silently, let it remain nameless, even,

let my infirmities speak for themselves

of what it is to be flawed.

Within these boundaries, there may be

burning saints and more strange beauties yet to see.