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.

A Guide To The Trees Of New England \ Lines Written In Illness

Nancy: In the shattered aftermath of an ice storm, the hackmatack assumes an elegance all unexpected.

A Guide To The Trees Of New England

The Elm:    chosen by patriots, a rallying point,

          also favored by poets, who use words like o’erarching.

The Oak:    another patriot tree, singled out no doubt

          for its connotations of sinewy strength.

The Maple:    valued for goodly shade, sweet sap,

          roadside glory.

The Sycamore:    so fine the roads went ‘round it.

Apples, Horse-chestnuts, also Catalpas:    domesticated

          to swings and backyard castles.

The Old Pines:    named patriarchs, groves of historic

          holiness.

The Spruce and Hemlock:    dark dignity, our formal guardians,

          required in suburbs.

The Junipers:    a regimental touch, often seen

          standing at attention.

The Balsam Fir:    for garlands, for wreaths, for green,

          for celebration.

The Birch:    once a naiad, now known to many

          as a lawn ornament.

What’s left for the Hackmatack but to be queen of adversity?

At dawn, in the eye of a winter hurricane, it wears all

the jewels of Opar.  The hackmatack accepts ice as its destiny

and wears it gracefully.  Hackmatack, Queen of Diamonds.

Alan:  Sick in bed, mind smaller than the skull, senses muffled but for the rush of blood in the ears, waiting, waiting...

Lines Written in Illness

Fevered, the mind drifts, helpless, in its shell

Like a dismasted boat within its round

Of blank and ever-shifting fog.  No sound

But the pulse and fizz of each passing swell;

No motion but the motion of the waves

Heavily rocking the water-heavy

Hull, and the inexorable levy

Of half-felt currents binding us, their slaves.

Will we hear at last the comforting bell

Clang at harbor mouth?  Or the terrifying

Groaner warning of the impending shoal?

Will we hear, will we hear its moaning tell

Our years as we sink, broken, cold, and dying?

It speaks not yet.  Endless, gray oceans roll.

Forcing The Thicket \ Pilgrimage

Nancy: The old trees, mine and those I can see from the roadside, marking long forgotten house sites, are succumbing to time and shade. Perhaps, here and there, a stump sprout or a seedling from some wild forgotten meal, still bears witness to the comings and goings of settlement, still reminds us we aren't the first.

Forcing The Thicket

The apples –

not wildlings – three, no, four –

the apples are leafless;

most of the fruit has fallen

(as it has for years),

uneaten.

What were they, Sheepnose,

Summer Rambo, Famuse?

Does it matter?

These trees have lost their names.

Now they belong to porcupine,

to deer,

to anyone who’ll force the thicket.

Their flesh is sharp, green;

it starts the saliva.

But to be shared as a sacrament,

they’ll do (remembering that they had,

once, names –

and were planted in hope).

Alan:  Many years ago, in London, I picked up a little paperback copy of Burton Watson’s translations  of  100 poems by the T’ang poet Han-shan.  I have been searching, in one way or another, for Cold Mountain ever since.

Pilgrimage

for Han-shan

I.

It is not a state of mind,

these mud flats, scabbed worn woods –

nothing as jagged and cliff-like as your poems:

nothing to lead the imagination skyward through mist;

only the outward-flowing fog, sea-smoke

obscuring the ledges, islands:

a singular, ordinary coast.

Yet it is the mind that starts, here,

seeking Cold Mountain’s paths

along the shore, among the winter-fallen leaves

that trail further and further inland

away from this actual place, this actual sea.

II.

Within a scrolled landscape

of inked strokes and washed space

I struggle, bent, the loaded basket

weighting my back, brim of my straw cone hat

almost brushing the steep ascending track.

Far above, unseen gibbons in unseen pines

ululate sorrowfully; below

the stream flashes in its rocky gorge.

Somewhere a heron fishes by smooth water

or flaps up ponderously over waves

of bambooed ridge.  Somewhere

the cataract spills, sojourners rest at an inn.

I am so small here: lost in another’s world.

If I should meet anyone, I will ask:

is this the way?  is this the way?  but already I know

it is not.

III.

The Black Monahka lived at the foot of my road many years ago –

many years ago the Black Monahka’s shack fell down.

The people who knew this, the people who told me, are dead.

The Black Monahka lived alone and died alone, long ago.

Today the garbage truck turned in my road.

A bag of garbage fell off the truck as it turned –

the black plastic split open, spilling its garbage.

All the papery trash blew into the woods, into

the place where the Black Monahka lived all those years ago.

IV.

Laughing, he ran from the temple kitchen

with his friend Shih-te, shouting and pointing

at the scholar-official

who came to pay them homage.

Pursued into the hills

they disappeared in a cavern

that closed behind them forever,

leaving only the three hundred poems

on bark, rocks, the village walls

to be quickly gathered

like wild mushrooms after rain.

With me, it is the poems that swallow me up,

and here is your windy cave, shallow and empty,

except for a few old toadstools at the mouth.

V.

I walk out under a blurred egg-moon

haloed in ice,

the sky striated,

the wind edging toward snow.

The lane is hard under my feet;

there is no give anywhere.

This is a hard place: a land,

not a landscape.

Even Han-shan might think twice

about staying here,

as you and I have now, foolishly, enduring

these twenty years.

VI.

For forty generations you have lived –

if you ever lived at all – in this verse:

these eights, these fives; parallels, allusions;

character by character the hidden, the revealed.

Even in my own thick tongue with its slack rhythms,

paltry tones, you speak, offering

the same world as ever of poignancy, delight.

Somewhere among green fissured crags you yet dwell.

Reading these lines, I think,

what of my own fine teachers

a thousand years hence?

VII.

When we first came here

I imagined some day

an old man and old woman

living harmlessly and quietly

apart from the world.

Little could I know

how surely the world would find us.

Our house had to grow legs

like Baba Yaga’s hut

to chicken-dance away from danger;

the garden can be rug-rolled

and hidden at a moment’s notice.

So it is that folks 

arrive to find only an owl and a crow

looking down very solemn

from a nearby tree.

In this manner we honor

through our various stratagems

the ways and teachings of the ancients.

VIII.

I have tried for decades

to reach Cold Mountain

by every means I know

even though you say

truthfully

I can never find it.

The closest I have come

is when, waking from a dark dream

to listen to the wind

I lie for a long time, eyes open

unsure of who I am

or where.

IX.

Ice fills the ditches, mottled, lumpy

under the coldest month of the year:

ditches that flow for a time and then stand parched

while we long for summer rain.

Ice rises on the bay in plates with a noise like animals

surfacing to breathe.

Ice forms, melts, reforms, holds the color

of evening, sloshes

at the edge of white or black water,

skins the low tide flats, marbles a line

on the shore at high.  Ice is everything now.

If Han-shan wants, he can find me here,

choosing a hot afternoon some August,

sky intense, tide flowing in.  We will plunge

our pale bodies in the sea and then

warm ourselves on the broad smooth rocks.

We will scoop up mud and shells,

scribble our nonsense on the stones,

watch it dry awhile and then be washed away.

“Forcing The Thicket” first appeared in Living On Salt And Stone (Stone Man Press, 1984)

On A White Day \ Corvids

Nancy: When "color" is defined as white and black and shades of gray, a cleft in the rock sheltering a streak of moss is astonishing in its brilliance.

On A White Day

With a brush and black ink

I might sketch the stepped ledge,

the frozen bay, even the spruce

that takes all the light into its dark hunger,

but could I ever risk that slash

of moss, the broken lip of rock

green green greenest green?

Alan: Sometimes poems write themselves in reaction.  This one did, to the lines quoted.

Corvids

    for DLB

          “two flapping, hoarse malevolent shapes – ravens for sure –”

Crow wakes me, early.

Raven soars, stately, mocking the eagle.

Jay mimics the hawk, crashes invisible gates in the trees.

Raven inspects my work-in-progress, spring and fall.

Crow guards me, warning of owls.

Jay chides me for keeping cats; jay chivvies the dog.

Raven sings to me, secretly,

singing the Dharma

in the season when everyone sleeps.