June 20, 2012

A scream in the night . . . as least that's what I thought it was when I heard it.  Sitting up late, after 1 am, I heard someone screaming or some loud noise and thought perhaps some neighbor was in trouble.  When I went to the back door and opened it, the screaming stopped . . . then there was a loud confused rustling in the trees, I could not tell from where, and the cry sounded again.  I realized it was a bird, and from the sound of it a large bird, and the cry it was making was like a very loud  plaintive two-toned call.  I never heard anything like it before, and it flew off, still making that enormous ululating call, sounding lost in the night, searching for home, in terror of never finding it again.  Standing on the back porch in the warm muggy night, it seemed like a voice from another world, someplace lonely and wild.

So, of course, being me, this morning I had to find out what made that sound, and though it took awhile, I discovered it was a common loon, not so common to me.  I did not realize this was part of their range, I think of them as northern cold-weather birds, not inhabiting some warm humid night on a southern bay.  We have lived here a LONG time and I never heard that call before last night, and I am often up in the night, heck, I never heard that call in the daytime either.   Though I was alarmed at first, I am glad to have heard something I never expected to hear.  I have read about them, read poems about them even, they seem to be a bird people are fascinated by, and from their call I can see why.  I love the internet where you can find so many answers, and I found that some of their calls sound like wolves baying at the moon.  The call I heard is a yodel, or that's what the experts have named it.   The only bird call I have heard that rivals it in oddness and volume is the laughing call of the pileated woodpecker.  We surely do live in a world of wonders. 

And so, today it's a poem about a loon, actually very close to my own experience, as the poet was reading in the night when she heard it as well.  Sometimes the best thing about poetry is that you recognize your own circumstances in it and know you share some experience with another human beings.  Makes you feel a little less lonely, and a little more joy to think of that sharing . . .

The Loon

Not quite four a.m., when the rapture of being alive
strikes me from sleep, and I rise
from the comfortable bed and go
to another room, where my books are lined up
in their neat and colorful rows. How
magical they are! I choose one
and open it. Soon
I have wandered in over the waves of the words
to the temple of thought.
                                            And then I hear
outside, over the actual waves, the small,
perfect voice of the loon. He is also awake,
and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out
to the fading moon, to the pink flush
swelling in the east that, soon,
will become the long, reasonable day.
                                                  Inside the house
it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight
in which I am sitting.
                              I do not close the book.
Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

Mary Oliver

Something so alien, so haunting makes lovely poetry, doesn't it?   And who better to write it than someone who has spent her life with the wildness of nature as a daily companion.  And I like her "long, reasonable day" and her response to that weird wild call is to just sit and hear the echoes of it.  After hearing it, I went in and went to bed, lying in the dark thinking how astonishing even the most ordinary place can be.

We are going on vacation tomorrow.  We are going to see Linda and Lee Ann and to my husband's reunion, then we will see the boys and Kaci and Shawn in Oklahoma for our mostly annual July 4th visit.  We are leaving . . . very early, it's a husband thing.  So this will be the last note for awhile, until after July 7.  And then on July 10th, I will have cataract removal surgery on my right eye and it will be a few days after that I suppose before I will be back to normal enough to do the morning note.  Anything having to do with my eyes makes me nervous as I try to imagine life without being able to see what I see every morning.  It makes me nervous, in a different way, to be so long without the early morning writing, but at least when I come back I might have some new things to say. 

June 19, 2012

Grom . . . the Russian word for thunder and there is a lot of it this morning, rumbling from far away and closer, seems the whole area is socked in with clouds and intermittent rain.  In the night rain poured down on and off like someone flipping a switch, hard rain for a few minutes then a trickle, then just dripping off the leaves, and then hard rain again and the cycle repeats.  I sort of imagined a line of rain bubbles trailing over us, bursting, then emptiness until the next bubble burst.  This morning even gray light and the rain-darkened leaves and branches drooping under the weight of water.  The birds all sheltered somewhere else and too cool for cicadas.  Even the gulls that usually come in a little from the bay are absent.

I am always looking for a poem about rain . . . one that shows some new thing that rain brings . . .

Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.

Peter Everwine

Now it is raining again, hard, another bubble burst, and an evening darkness taking up the sky, the sounds of all the water, drumming on the canoe, splattering from the trees, even running off the roof to splash on the back porch making almost a roaring equal to the thunder.   You can feel the deep thunder in your own chest, vibrating as the windows do with the bass of it.  There is little wind so that sound is not added into the mix, the only movement of the leaves is the water falling on them from great heights.  

We need the rain . . . the fear of drought begins to crawl into us now when there are just a few weeks without rain, the dryness edges into our sight and we begin to suspect trees are dying, and crops withering in the fields.  The deep darkness of a good soaking rain is welcomed and we do not hurry the clouds away to get a glimpse of the sun.   We give up the sunlight to have our continuous green, a small sacrifice, and for some, who love the rain for itself, no sacrifice at all.  I just saw a blue jay plummet from an upper branch to land huddled on the smooth curve of the canoe and slide off, catch wing and vanish.  I don't know whether it meant to land on the canoe and it was slippery or whether it fell out of the tree and slid off, but since it flew away, I hope it was all right.

The darkness is expanding, more rain is coming.  What is it about rain that seems to make us nostalgic, or melancholy, or filled with the quiet joy the sound of it sometimes brings?  It may not be the rain but what is inside us that goes out to meet it and bring it home.

June 18, 2012

A morning of early noise, cicadas and birds, early heat, already kind of breathless out there, early light, while the sky looks full of cloud they do not seem to be hiding the sun.  Later they say rain is coming, but, again, I'll believe that when it starts falling.  The stealth rain was not forecast and yet watered the yard some, and often forecast rain just passes us by.  There are new shoots of cane coming up through the leaf litter, spears that have not opened to leaves yet.  It was a nice weekend, lots of food and family and fun. It was an opportunity for me to use my new dishes and napkins and such, bright colors and festive.  It's good to have a pleasant break in the routine.

Some beautiful pictures this weekend included several pictures of rivers, a vast oxbow of water in one of them, a swiftly flowing river, a river slowly pushing out into the gulf, you could see the silt carried by it.  They all reminded me of a poem I had written several years ago, mostly about getting older, but about rivers as well.  The end of this week we are leaving to visit my husband's sisters and attend a whole school reunion for his high school, and after that we will go spend July fourth with the boys and see Shawn and Kaci and their boys.  I guess I remembered this poem because it's a kind of looking back . . .

Natural Process

Stepping again into a river
it's never the same river
the next moment
a new river
and the next
and after that . . .

The water is clear
moving makes it so,
when it slows
toward a bigger body
it's full of . . . stuff
collected on the way.

Aging is natural
and incontrovertibly
irreversible,
inevitable as dawn
irrefutable as time
incomprehensible.

It's the stuff of life
that makes youth
irretrievable
silt of events
sift and swirl
making mud of us

in that mud
all that we are
makes food
for other lives
we pour ourselves
into more and more

until at last
we become vast
by disappearing

S.  Crowson

I hope we become vast, by giving, by sharing, by ending up part of something bigger than ourselves, part of continuing life, and knowledge, and the particular will we have to join our lives to others.  In a long life, we gather up so many things, so much . . . stuff, our connections to others live in those things, are reflected in what we keep, we turn into hoarders of experience, we touch those things and remember kindnesses, and absent friend, and family far afield yet still connected to us.  Every place we connect brings us more connections and on and on until we can experience being joined with the world, with what is out there, and what is inside as well.

June 17, 2012

No stealth rain this morning, just blatant sunshine, so clear and bright it's one of the blessings of the day, Father's Day, and Sunday.  It seems to me the a lot of times father's miss out, they do not get to spend as much time with the children as mother's do.  As both my father and my husband were sailor's and away from home for great stretches of time, this was particularly true of them.  There were all kinds of ways to include them, letters being the most common, but even letters and in our case, tapes of the children, did not replace the day-to-day intimacy of being there.  Yet, their work made all that day-to-day living possible, the safety of it, the permanence of it.  Even in hard times, it did not occur to either man in my life to leave, to go and live by themselves and not be responsible for anyone else, not have anyone depend on them, not have to give up anything that they made.  They both shared and worked and seems to me rarely got the kind of thanks they were due.  Perhaps the very work that made so much possible, kept them away in more ways than were fair.

I cannot answer for my kids, but they have told me that lessons they learned from their father involved integrity, and hard work, and being responsible, and doing the right thing even when you would rather not.  All those years of getting up and going to work every morning, and never complaining, it's astonishing.  For my husband, years and years of work without ever even so much as being late, and a handful of sick days in all those years, when there could have been so many more.  For my dad, all those extra jobs which had so many reasons but some of those reasons were lessons for us in all kinds of things, art, and music, and dance.  One of the reasons I think that for us any kind of creativity is worth making room for, worth giving time, worth giving a trial.

There do not seem to be poems about fathers the way there are about mothers, and a lot of the poems for fathers seem to involve struggle, and competition, and anger, even sadness, in a way the poems for mothers do not.  Again, perhaps it is that distance that is part of the life of being a father, or perhaps we all need someone to struggle against to learn who we are, or need someone to measure up to, or someone to make the ground of our life a place of safety, of trust.

The poem for today is quiet, and demonstrates a father's love . . .

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When  the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

For today, and every day, for all the fathers providing love's austere and often lonely offices, happy Father's Day.  Though we may not always remember to thank you for that daily work, we appreciate it, and know it's part of your love, part of being the dad, part of our lives that like the air we breathe is essential and rarely gets noticed.

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers, may your special day be just that . . . special in every way!

June 16, 2012

A stealth rain . . . lying in bed I thought I heard a bird outside rattling the bushes as they do some mornings, but after listening for a minute I decided it must be raining, and it was.  A very gentle rain, collecting on the roof and dripping off, more like a trickle.  This went on for a bit and over the next few minutes it began to rain a bit harder, now you could tell it was raining, but still hardly wet the porch, but the end of the driveway, out from under the trees has a few puddles.  Reminded me of the quote from Shakespeare about mercy "The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath."  So we got a gentle mercy of rain this morning and our place was grateful.

The pictures from one of the cameras downtown show big black clouds building up and gray streaking the early morning, though here there is more blue showing, there are enough white clouds and haze to make the yard mostly shady with occasional stripes of sunlight.  The cat is making his careful way across the yard, shaking his feet off at nearly every step.  He does not like to get his feet wet, but seems this morning finding out what is going on over here is worth the trouble.  He has been cruising the margin of the cane for a few minutes now.  I don't see anything in there, but perhaps I am not looking with the eyes of a cat.  The rain was just enough to make everything quiet, no cicadas this morning and only a little bird song. and no lawnmowers . . . yet.

In the night, for several nights now, maybe a week, a frog has sung its song outside the study window, for hours, from exactly the same place each night.  I have not seen it, but feel intimately acquainted with it, lying in the dark hearing its small croaking tune rise into the night, barely pausing for breath, reeling out on and on, making darkness its stage, and the night its audience.  This morning its gone, sleeping in the heat of the day, even the rain not enticing it to sing again.  In going through poems this morning, I though a poem about frogs and love could start the day, as the frog's song has started each night lately.

Green Frog at Roadstead, Wisconsin

It is the way of a pleasant path
To walk through white birch, fir,
And spruce on a limestone trail
Through the quiet, complacent time
Of summer when, suddenly, the frog jumps
And you jump after him, laughing,
Hopping, frog and woman, to show
The stationary world its flat ways.
Love is a Frog, I grin that greenly
To your green eyes and they leap
At me. Up, I will enter the Frog World
With you and try the leaping ways
Of the heart that we do not fail to find
The sunlit air full of leaping chances.

James Schevill

I am fairly sure our frog is black, and so tiny you could not imagine it would have such a large continuous voice if you saw it.  When I go outside in the early afternoon, sometimes the little black frogs look like crickets in the grass until you realize they leap like frogs, with such perfect abandon that they come down again flat on their bellies, splat, not at all like the lightly leaping of an insect.  You have to admire them, their strong legs propelling them in a leap that ends in falling so flat, yet they keep going.

June 15, 2012

We seem to be in a lull this morning.  Earlier there were lots of birds singing and chattering and carrying on, but now everything seems quiet, even the cicadas see to be slow starting.  You can hear the ubiquitous sound of lawnmowers in the background but they are not close at had, which is good because today is Mikayla's day off and she is feeling under the weather.  I was hoping she would get to sleep late, but in the summer you are often awakened at ungodly hours by yard crews trying to beat the brutal heat of the middle of the day.  And if I did that work, I would do the same thing so there is no way you can even be annoyed by it.   If we did not have the Hernandez brothers come at least every couple of weeks in the summer, our yard would look a LOT worse, because, while my husband has great intentions, the work is really just too much for him now, even though he is battling the cane because the crew, in their fifteen minute mowing and edging and blowing, just don't want to deal with it and will only trim around it, and I don't blame them for that either.  Three of them do the yard so fast, one to mow, one to edge, and one to blow and bag if needed.  They have that routine down to a science.  In the front they use the big riding lawnmower they got last year, but in the back with so many trees they really use the weed-eater mostly, we don't have that much grass by this time in the summer . . . too much shade now.

In the summer, when we were kids, days lasted forever, even though the summer seemed to melt away fast as ice cream, each day seemed an abundance until we were called in at dusk.  Sometimes, we would sit out on the trunk we used for a step and watch the fireflies slowly filter into the yard, and occasionally we'd catch them in jars to put on the dresser between our beds.  And in the night, Mom would come and retrieve the jar and let them out, if she remembered we had them.  Some mornings they were still there crawling around the leaves we put in for them, their long slender bodies dark in the daylight, their beetle wings closed. This morning's poem is a young girl's remembrance of summer evenings . . .

Young

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

Anne Sexton

I recognize how this feels even though our circumstances probably couldn't have been more different, it's the summer, when you are beginning to know you are going to change, but before you have done it.  The summer where everything is just the way it should be, even for just a little while.  Where you are in that pause between seasons, both the world's and your own, where it has been summer long enough to be relaxed into it and not so long yet as to be boring, where your body is still something familiar and not changing, or full of new feelings, new changes you don't quite understand.  It reminds me of a line from a song by Dessa, where she says a flat-chested, gap-toothed girl was the best thing she'd been so far.  And I understood that feeling, though I am more . . . myself now that at any time except maybe that far back, maybe the two times have more in common than first appears.

The summer sky today is changing while I watch, the sky here often does, the same green land, but the never-routine sky, blue or white, gray or hazy, the elements in constant flux, something to remember, even about things that are a lot harder to see than the sky.

June 14, 2012

So much bird song this morning after a night full of frog song, it seems this is a noisy time of year with ever creature looking to find someone to share life with.  There is one frog that over and over croaks from the same spot in the back yard and goes on for hours as soon as it's dark and for most of the night.  By morning, the birds begin to sing and the frog goes to sleep, some something is always making some kind of music, and this morning the cicadas will be adding insect chorus to the other songs.

Here is a short poem, one that in this place and time is easy to understand . . .

Everything Lush I Know

I do not know the names of things
but I have lived on figs and grapes
smell of dirt under moon
and moon under threat of rain
everything lush I know
an orchard becoming all orchards
flowers here and here
the earth I have left
every brief home-making
the lot of God blooming into vines
right now then and always

Kimberly Burwick

And here, even in winter, there is . . . lush, so that the green here is the green of every place, especially the places that don't have their own green.  It's the morning that does this, the new perspective, the way seeing in the morning colors the whole day.  Oh, you often can't get back the serenity of the morning view, but something of it carries over, like a secret color that shines from everything.  I think that's why it's almost impossible to write this later in the day, I can never seem to get back to this perspective where the "lot of God" blooms into the day and I can actually notice it.  The morning is like the smell of rain, that taking up of the dust in the haze of moisture just before the downpour, it's the anticipation, and the rain is the actuality.  After the downpour, there is still moisture but you can't get back that smell of anticipation, it's been overwhelmed.  But the experience of every morning is the "right now then and always", something that is a brief home-making created by notice, by the brief cataloging of what is blooming in the "lot of God".

June 13, 2012

Shadowy morning, lots of clouds, deep shade all over the back yard.  Two blue jays are chasing each other through the trees, making the little branches bounce with their takeoffs and landings.  It's daylight but the kind of daylight that has no bright sun, clouds all along the bay this morning delaying the sunlight.  Before dawn, the mourning doves were out with their owl like mantra, and the mockingbirds were serenading the world with stolen song.  Last night after the sun went down, there was some little frog outside the window, crooning the same two notes over and over like a rough heart beat.  I couldn't see it but heard it until I fell asleep, imagining it was one of those tiny black frogs with a big voice.

Most of the time when I read a poem, I get some sense of where it is going, but this morning's poem surprised me into laughing out loud!

Origin

The first cell felt no call to divide.
Fed on abundant salts and sun,
still thin, it simply spread,
rocking on water, clinging to stone,
a film of obliging strength.
Its endoplasmic reticulum
was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length;
its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, RNA
magnificent. With no incidence
of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
no predator nor prey,
it had little to do but thrive,
draw back from any sharp heat
or bitterness, and change its pastel
colors in a kind of song.
We are descendants of the second cell.

Sarah Lindsay

Well, I guess we would have to be, yes?  But just saying it brought in a whole wealth of conclusions besides the obvious one.  Could we exist without conflict, without the concept of predator and prey?  If we did, we wouldn't be . . . us.  We would be some other species all together.  I would like to think we could get out of that rut, but I imagine it's cell deep and there is no getting around it.  We can choose how we react, how we modulate those influences, that's what civilization is . . . an attempt to moderate the "second cell" influence, to be more than just an organism responding to its environment.  When you see hummingbirds at a feeder, you realize that those beautiful jeweled birds are mean!  They fight over access to the feeder, over territory, but they can cooperate as when you see one lead the most aggressive off so the others can dash in an get a drink, and they take turns doing that.  So descendants of the "second cell" can cooperate even on such a small scale as hummingbirds.  This year in our yard, the cardinals and the blue jays both have nests somewhere in the yard and pretty much leave each other alone, only occasionally having a squabble.

Also, reading it again made me think of how many times in the old Star Trek that the crew found a planet "paradise" like the one worshipping Vaal, where everyone was virtual immortal and happy but not progressing at all and rejected it, found it unappealing, even though to ancient civilizations it would have been the equivalent of heaven.  I guess we just have to deal with our heritage and make the best we can of it, use the conflict, the influence of predator and prey to make our own response, our own way in the world.  Conflict or competition may be responsible eventually for getting us off planet, open new worlds, even drive changes to solve problems right here.  While we might sometimes like to deny it, Sarah Lindsay is right . . . we are human, and definitely descendants of the second cell with all its trouble and glory.

June 12, 2012

Ah, the cicadas, must have started before dawn this morning, the temperature never got below 80 and they were the first thing I heard when I woke up, lying in the dark, the continuous chorus of the cicadas, its own jungle sounding rhythm one we can't fall into but often hear without hearing through the heat of the summer.  The birds are quieter this morning but I see the gulls and terns at the edge of the trees, circling at a distance their cries lost, just silent arcs of gray and white and black tilting in the bit of breeze there is this morning.  Again the sky is hazy white, no blue, covered with enough moisture to erase all color.  The cat is travelling the yard, quietly stalking shadows, creeping up on the cane, paying no attention to the birds overhead travelling their own airy highways to other yards.

Okay, some mornings in going through books or websites for the poem, one strikes home right away.  This morning it is the poem from Verse Daily, it made me smile in recollection:

Oracle 
       
I believe in a future
when the tuba is what the cool
kids play and sounds not like

the fart of UPS trucks in this
dumb town, not like the loser's
last life moan, but like fog rising

up castle walls would sound
if such things were allowed
to bellow This world

will fall, its flaming guitars
marched to their graves.
The ditches full of tiny phones.

Mark Neely
 
Mikayla played the tuba every year in high school.  The other players were all guys, crazy guys it seemed, ones who shaved their heads for homecoming and wanted her to do the same . . . yeah, right!  Most of the time they played the ompahs, the notes that were the background for flashy trumpets and trombones.  Every year at Christmas we went downtown so she could participate in Tuba Christmas, where every instrument was a tuba or a euphonium, and they played the melody of Christmas songs and carols.  The tuba can make some hellish noises and very loudly when someone is first learning to play, and after that it's a lot of loud repetition of the notes that make up the underpinning of flashier instruments.   I can see someone wanting a future where the cool kids all play the tuba, and, I got so I rather liked hearing it, there is something really primal about it, something fundamental, and it can make notes that vibrate your chest, as well as the walls of your house.  At school, mostly I get the girls with violin cases, or flutes, or clarinets.  I would like it if some morning while teaching I tripped over a tuba case, or a euphonium, or a bass.  Seems the girls tend to stick to the smaller more delicate instruments.  I admired Mikayla for choosing the tuba, for wanting to play something that would be loud and brass!   Perhaps the poet wants us to have more live, fundamental music, played in connection with other musicians, rather than tiny phones, but I think there is probably room in our future for both things, phones and music both keep us connected in ways that are individual and unique.   The tuba is as necessary to the band as the flute or the trumpet, all part of the balance.  And those tiny phones that do so much now, especially for young people, keep them in touch with even old fogey parents, and all are part of that balance leaning toward a future no one knows.

June 11, 2012

Everything is up early this morning!  The birds are going about making song and calling out, the cicadas are whirrin' an' chirrin' since it's nearly 80 degrees already, even at this hour.  The air is shifting around through the leaves and the early cobalt color of the sky has faded to a hazy white with some brighter yellow east over the bay.  That little group of dogs, four of them, two large and two small, just rounded the corner, trotting along, heads held high, tails beating the air, just looking around.  They remind me of the group of bicyclers that occasionally comes by early on the weekends, two guys and two ladies usually riding slowly, all talking together, just out enjoying the morning.

Some mornings things are not what they seem, the little bird with the big voice is not a sparrow but a titmouse, the gray I thought was the cat turned out to be a raccoon trundling along the edge of the cane, the shadow that caught my eye . . . a squirrel, rather two squirrels coming down I think to drink.  And when I was looking for a poem, this poem turned out not to be what I thought it was, or . . . was it? (sometimes I cant tell if I pick the poem or the poem picks me)

Aliens

When they appeared on the terrace soon after daybreak
high above the sea with the tide far out I thought at first
they were sparrows which by now seen to have found their way everywhere
following us at the own small distances arguing over
pieces of our shadows to take up into their brief flights
eluding our attention by seeming unremarkable
quick instantaneous beyond our grasp as they are in themselves
complete lives flashing flashing from the beginning each eye bearing
the beginning in its dusty head and even their voices
seemed to be at first the chatter of sparrows half small talk half bickering
but no when I looked more closely they were linnets the brilliant
relatives the wanderers out of another part of the story
with their head the colors of the end of days and that unsoundable
gift for high delicate headlong singing that has rung
even out of vendors' cages when the morning light has touched them

W. S. Merwin

I don't believe we are in the range for linnets, they seem to be European, or Asian, or North African, but the linnet's song has been extolled in several famous poems and they were often kept in cages for their lovely singing.  They are grayish or perhaps brownish but the males in the spring have russet breasts and on their heads, the color of sunset.  What tickled me, when I looked them up, is their scientific name Carduelis cannabina and yes, that's just what it sounds like.  They were known for eating the seed from the hemp plant, perhaps that's what made them sing so happily! <chuckle> And the common name linnet comes from their fondness for flax seed as well.  So, I am not the only one for whom things are not what they seem, and knowing that Merwin has lived for years in Hawaii the linnet would be alien to that environment.  Still when I started reading the poem, I was not thinking of birds but what I guess is more commonly thought of when you read the word aliens, those that are not of this planet, far from home, or in a strange place.  Yet, the linnets were obviously strangers to that place, telling their own story in song far from their usual haunts.  William Wordsworth mentions them in his poem The Tables Turned:

"Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There's more of wisdom in it."

I know those cheerful songs I hear nearly every morning sure seem to be if not wise at least happy in their moment, and I like books as well, so I can have the best of all the worlds, both books and poems, and the songs of so many birds. 

May you have surprises today, pleasant ones, when something common turns into something extraordinary!

June 10, 2012

A very noisy morning, the birds seem to be gathered up and all conversing with each other, several pairs of cardinals, and a pair of blue jays, a tiny flock of small ones, too fast to identify, and, of course, cicadas louder than the birds and more constant.  It's such a typical summer morning you almost couldn't ask for anything more . . . summery.  Just close your eyes and think beautiful summer morning, and you will have the same experience:  blue sky, white fluffy clouds, trees all leafed out and getting to be that deeper green, lawnmowers, small planes overhead, occasionally the deep thrumming of a distant cigarette boat on the bay, and as many birds as you could want, and the cicadas, even a light breeze to keep the air from stagnating and stifling. 

Sunday and the blessing . . . this poem depends on how you see it, and so does the world, light or dark, half-empty, half-full, which ever way you choose.

The House of Belonging

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light.

David Whyte

Some mornings are like that, we wake up not only to light in the world outside but to light inside us, to moments when we are filled with it, even though we know it's tenuous and things change and that not every change is going to be something we want to experience.  I think of those mornings as . . . full of grace, as in the prayer.  I don't know what creates them, but only know that my mornings looking for a poem to send, watching the same things outside my window, thinking about connections between us, friends and family and the world outside, all these things seem to make more of them, and for that I am grateful.  I think of this time as that quiet pathway of light the poet sat up into.  This is my pathway of light, not just today when I think of it as a blessing, a connection to God, to the foundations of love, but every morning, even the mornings when I wake up grumpy and out of sorts, this part of the morning makes a kind of light that blesses my whole day.

June 9, 2012

Last night storms again.  A contrast to the night before, thunder in long rolling rumbles and great sheets of light, and the rain building up slowly to a downpour.  Something about rain that hard triggers a feeling of being closed in, surrounded, like the night before's gentler rain did not.  When the storm quieted I went to bed but I could hear another page of storms beginning to turn off in the distance, more thunder from the direction of the first storm.  I thought I would try to sleep in that quiet between leaves of storm, listening to the drips falling off trees in the yard.

This morning there is a tiny bird out there on the crepe myrtle making a really loud "Cheebee, cheebee, cheebee" song.  Such a huge voice to come from such a tiny bird.  I looked it up by sound and think it must be the tufted titmouse because it remarks on the echoing quality of the song and the sound is pretty close to what I heard, and the description seems to match.  I have a hard time deciding on a positive identification but between two of us observing, I think we have a good chance of this being a good identification.  Now if I could just figure out which one is the "cheater, cheater, cheater" one I would be happy about that.

This morning we live in a birdhouse, outside the singing goes on and on, not one of the nearly silent mornings, but one of those morning when nearby and far away you can hear a multitude of song, a natural symphony, rising and falling in its own rhythm, one filled with need and joy, two things human beings understand, though some days I think we understand need better than we do joy.

Birdhouse
       
In the garden a single rose,
and though it was a beauty, a brilliant red,
we'd hoped for more, an extravagance of buds,
blossoms, and blooms, visible from our empty house.
We settled for what we could get, then birds
came to the feeder and roused us
with song, music that pierced the heart under the ribs.
Cardinals, goldfinches, nuthatches-some kind of IOU?
a gift of compensation? Not one sour
note sounded from the garden bed.
Profusion of feathers, music, and the persistent scent of rose.

Diane Lockward

We do not have any roses in the yard, no flowers, but a bloom of birds opens every morning, sometimes a single song, some times like this morning a garden full, the small birds come to the water bowl and splash around, the ones I don't see still sing, even in the deep background crows are calling to each other.  I am glad to sit for this time and listen, amazed at so many notes.  It's a quiet joy I recommend, just noticing the songs that present themselves in the day, birds, and others, planes overhead, the hum of lawnmowers, cars on the road, no cicadas yet, still cool from the rainy night.  I am sure they will be added to the chorus shortly!

June 8, 2012

Everything in the yard is moving this morning, wind is rattling through branches and dancing up the cane.  In the night, we got the promised rain, so much lightning and cracking thunder but not a downpour, just steady rain for awhile.  The blue-white lightning broke open the night and momentary radiance struck out from the black-on-dark clouds, followed shortly by the sound of that break.  Last night there was little rolling thunder, most of it was short sharp cracks, and when the storm was right overhead, the light and sound appeared at almost the same instant.  For awhile the noise was almost constant, but it moved off fairly quickly and the shine of light got softer and so did the thunder, then it was dark again, and far off you could hear the grumble of that distant thunder.

The tiny birds have come to the water bowl this morning, they grab a drink and vanish.  I don't know why they have come now, as it rained last night, but they are here, at least for a moment, then in a flash of dark they disappear.  You can hear so many birds this morning and the cicadas are working to drown out even the bird song.  Everything looks brighter, dust washed off, and leaves plumped up.  The wind is turning up the undersides of leaves and the backs of the cane.

Kind of Blue

 Because most stars were born more than six billion
years ago, the average color of the universe has changed
since that bluer period when there were more young stars.
—The Cosmic Spectrum and the Color of the Universe

So the universe is not blue
after all, not even green

but beige because the stars are
older than we thought. But is it

sad, even sadder than
we knew? Describe the sound

of doves — is it coo, coo
coo or who who who? The French

would say it's rue rue rue
and in Italy it would be summer,

morning, already brocade,
Cecilia Bartoli gargling. And the throats

of doves, are they beautiful
or true in their blue and pink

embroidery? Young stars burn
hot and blue but those near death

are red. Did your father believe
in God? and the deer leaped

so high above the road I believed
it had been hit by a car. Dear falling

note, intention, dear
no more, dear rain,

give it up. What remains and need
not be mentioned we'll call

what have you, musica ficta: not
what's written down but what's

been played. What if
you paused for a minuet

instead of a minute? The dark
might sky, the blue might

star, the always
could open, the close

might earth. The doves
are just around

the corner, like a train
before it turns into

view. Miles Davis was
right: there will be fewer

chords but infinite possibilities
as to what to do with them. The doves

are coming, true,
true true.

Angie Estes

All right, this is a strange poem, but I liked the part about music, musica ficta, not what is written down, but what is played.  Kind of like the morning note, not really what is written down but what is outside the window.  There are doves out there, mourning doves, and I always thought the sound they made was . . . who, who, who on a rising note, but now I kind of like the idea of rue rue rue and even the true true true.  We often have to avoid deer leaping across the road, falling into the woods at a bound, and then gone.  The starlight moving away from blue, toward the warmer red, but never beige, I won't believe that, they shine as much in the memory as in actuality and our memory of them will never be beige.   Infinite possibilities of what to do with . . . everything, how many ways there are to see, to hear, to experience the same things, as many as there are people, as many as there are senses, all senses even ones that do not belong to people.  And the stars, the blue might star, dancing their own minuet, all night long . . . 
 
This weekend there will be a bake sale for NASA, a sort of protest against cutting the budget by 300 million dollars.  A bake sale . . . it seems it has come to this, that those wishing to know things, to explore the universe, to discover new technologies in the service of that exploration, are reduced to bake sales.  Surely, the richest, most powerful nation in the world can find money to fund these discoveries, this research that has given us so much and is made freely available to the people, or perhaps not.  Perhaps now it is time for other countries to do the discovering, to reap the benefits of exploration.  We can only hope they will be as generous with the products of their research as we have been.

June 7, 2012

They have promised rain all week; it's Thursday, and while there is a breeze this morning, there are also white clouds and the pale blue, humidity-hazed sky.  I see little prospect of rain, but perhaps later.  The cicadas have been singing since first light, and last night there was one lone frog in the dark croaking repeatedly, rather dementedly, over and over the same bullish thick-bodied sound.  It never moved but came from the same spot in the night until I finally fell asleep.  This morning more insect sound than bird song.  Perhaps the cat roaming the yard has kept the birds at bay.  Everything looks rather limp and dusty, the long leaves of cane droop, and the maple branches turn down, softer and the leaves looking pale and thin.  We could use the rain, I worry about us falling back into the drought pattern and losing more trees that were damaged by it last year.

I'm still thinking about Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451, and what book I would be.  For months now, on my desk has been Nancy Willard's Swimming Lessons.  I think some days I might be that book.  I'm older now and actually think I could memorize a book of poetry.  I like her poems because they are so human, and they deal with a lot of ordinary things, but in ways that make you look at them differently.   There is a section in Swimming Lessons from one of her earlier books, 19 Masks for the Naked Poet, and the poems touch on many ordinary things, things poets wonder about, dragons, the moon, weather, the future, love . . . and yet, turning over her words, something new steps from the shadows of these things and walks into your heart and your head and small wonders take up residence there.  For the bees at my window this morning, for the sound of them in the world, for what they make possible . . .

The Poet Enters the Sleep of the Bees

Turning to honey one morning, I passed
through their glass cells and entered
the sleep of the bees.
The bees were making a lexicon
of the six-sided names of God,

clover's breath, dewflesh,
ritual of thorn, a definitive work
to graft their names to their roots.
For days I hiked over their slipshod sounds.
At last I saw a green lion
eating a hole in the sun,

and a red dragon burning itself alive
to melt the snow that lay like a cap
on the sleep of the bees.
Their sleep was a factory
of sweetness with no author.

Every syllable was swept clean,
every act was without motive.
Please forgive me this poor translation.
How could I hold
my past to my present when I heard
ten thousand tongues flowing along like gold?

Nancy Willard

In Buddhism, I believe, ten thousand things means all of physical reality, the things of this world, of the universe of the senses.  When I see it in a poem or some other writing, I'm never sure whether the ten thousand things are a distraction from the spiritual or the only way to reach it.  I still don't know.  But here in this poem, I get the feeling that entering into . . . the sleep of the bees, somehow brings us into the moment, that ever-lasting moment that is all there is.  The past you cannot hold on to, any more than you can live in the future moment.  You only live right here in this now, and for this moment I might not enter the sleep of the bees but enter into the sound of the cicadas clinging to twigs and trunks.  Here they emerge every year, unlike the ones farther north that have 13 and 17 year cycles.  Here from early spring, as soon as the ground is warm to late summer you hear cicadas, in the day time, the sound of summer, the sound of looking for love, the sound of continuing.  Sound of a southern summer, like the smell of magnolia in the heat of the day, or the licorice smell of oleander, like keeping an eye on the Gulf for storms, the cry of gulls before rain, and the weight of humidity and heat pressing against your skin, all the daily things of our summer.  I like to think the bees flying past my window are making a lexicon of the six-sided names of God, and that their work is never finished, but continues to make that sweetness every day.

June 6, 2012

This morning it's all about sun . . . all week the weathermen have been pushing back the rain.  It started with a decent chance for rain Tuesday then Wednesday, not they say better chance on Thursday and Friday.  I think that there is really little chance of rain, they just need to have something minimally exciting to talk about, and it's beginning to look like even a chance of rain might be exciting.  It's hot and hazy out, the blue is looking kind of faded through all the humidity, the cicadas started early and the birds are out there doin' what they do, mostly looking for food and flying through the yard with an occasional stop at the water bowl.  It seems the repair of the bowl is holding.  The can just came for a drink, which doesn't seem to bother the birds at all after the cat has moved on to other things.

In looking at my home page, I saw that Ray Bradbury has died . . . He was 91 and I don't think he ever stopped writing.  I have read so many of his stories and novels, but not so many of his poem.  I wanted to send one today to remember him.  I had trouble finding any of his poems, and I know I have a book of his poetry but <sigh> still in storage evidently.  So, I found this one, published on several websites.  It recalls his book, Something Wicked This Way Comes and so I will use it, as a lot of his stories take a dark turn, but he seemed to so much believe in the good things of the world that good usually triumphs.  One of my favorite stories of his was one where a last deep water dinosaur fell in love with a lighthouse <smile>.
So today I will remember all the enjoyable, shivery moments of his work, the beauty of his writing, and know that even if something wicked does come my way, it's always possible for good to triumph!  My favorite book of his is Fahrenheit 451, as I believe books are worth saving.  Over the years the book I would be has changed and will probably keep changing, but I am sure that it is probably that way for all people who love books.

The Real Poem

Crystal water turns to dark
Where ere its presence leaves its mark
And boiling currents pound like drums
When something wicked this way comes...

A presence dark invades the fair
And gives the horses ample scare
Chaos rains and panic fills the air
When something wicked this way comes...

Ill winds mark its fearsome flight,
And autumn branches creak with fright.
The landscape turns to ashen crumbs,
When something wicked this way comes...

Flowers bloom as black as night
Removing color from your sight
Nightmarish vines block your way
Thorns reach out to catch their prey

And by the pricking of your thumbs
Realize that their poison numbs
From frightful blooms, rank odors seep
Bats & beasties fly & creep

'Cross this evil land, ill winds blow
Despite the darkness, mushrooms glow
All will rot & decompose
For something wicked this way grows...

Ray Bradbury

Thanks for giving us all such wonderful stories and books, you will be missed but the stories you told will live on in the hearts of all your readers . . .

If you had to be a book, to save it from extinction, what book would you be?

June 5, 2012

It's hot, and going to get hotter.  Yesterday when Mikayla and I were out, the temperature sign at the Kemah City Hall said 99 degrees at 4pm.  And today seems like it will be as hot.  Tomorrow there's a chance for rain, and I'll believe that when I see it, though this is the anniversary of Tropical Storm Allison, which caused as much damage through flooding as any hurricane.  Already two named storms this year before hurricane season even started on June 1st.  As I said before, going to be a long hot summer, I believe.  We've been running the air conditioning on and off since April, mostly on through the month of May.  We keep it set pretty high but it does seem to run a lot lately.  The birds sure are enjoying the water bowl, this morning mostly blue jays and an occasional cardinal.  I saw a couple of grackles in the grass this morning, I know they live in the area but we seldom see any.  They make the weirdest calls, electronic sounding, you'd think they were mechanical birds.  I notice the cane has sprouted up again, a nice little fence like line of white shoots.  You just have to admire something that persistent!

This morning a friend called from Vermont, he's back home from a trip to New Jersey and he told me about a poem that made him smile.  So, I looked it up, a poem about numbers, and the easy companionship of math in our lives, well, easy for some . . .

Numbers

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

Mary Cornish

This poem has a host of ordinary observations that seem to just remind me of things that make me smile: eight dancers dressed as swans brings to mind a scene in Funny Girl where they are doing swan lake, and Barbra Streisand comes down on wires and says, "Whatdaya gonna do, shoot the swans, these lovelies?", the nightly making of dinner, some days harder than others, and so very . . . nightly <smile>, or the sparrows that come and go in the trees here with their little chatter and lively bounces, fish caught when we were young, and Dawm always caught the most, the fortune cookie Donna got that only said, "Soon, in good company", the most enigmatic fortune ever told, and, of course, the perpetual odd remainder, the one sock that isn't anywhere you look, that's got to be so ordinary by now no one is even surprised anymore when you get to the end of folding a basket of clothes and you have that perennial odd sock.  We always talk about tiny black holes that suck them up and spew them out into someone else's universe and there they also marvel at how one sock turns up over and over.

I like that poem and all its little connections that make me even feel friendly to math, a real accomplishment since I have a problem with numbers, not the concepts of math, just the directionality and placement of the actual numbers, which are tricky things that never seem to be in the place they are meant to go.

The clouds have been building up at the horizon, looking like whipped cream almost thick enough to stand on.  They look pretty fair-weather to me, and not likely to produce any rain, but if they keep piling up, who knows?  At the moment, it's hot and humid and summer, with the sound of jets and lawnmowers and cicadas.

June 4, 2012

I believe we are in the summer routine already, warm morning, blue skies with white fair-weather clouds, humidity, and cicadas.  The birds were all out early, you could hear about all of them at one time or another, even the woodpeckers, yes, more than one.  Now, this late in the morning, most of what you hear is the chirring rhythm of cicadas.  It's odd, I rarely see the actually insect, I know they are out there but I just don't see them too often.  More butterflies are out, the little white ones, and some larger dark ones, and an occasional yellow one just for a brightness.  The water bowl seems to be holding water, and the blue jays are taking every advantage of it.  The little sparrow types have to wait their turn, and it's a long wait!

Sometimes a poem will appeal to me and I won't really know why . . . here is one of those poems, today's poem from Verse Daily:

Terra Incognita

I have scaled unknown ridges and cliffs,
only to abseil downward, dropping inside
the holes of caves where stalagmites pierced

the floors of darkened rooms. I have found
mines deep within the crevices of sleeping
mountains, waded in underground springs

of manatees, minerals, sand. I have upturned
rocks, searched the roots of trees in acres
of eclipsed valleys, hiked along shores,

lakes, becks, running streams.
Once it stopped for days at a single hillside,
made a bed inside, woke to the sound

of falcons and the distant morning dove,
the sun glinting off pines that reached
upwards with outstretched hands.

But do not tell me that love makes us into fools.
I know the shadows that pause within the folds
of these hills, still miles from where I stand.

I've heard the secrets farmers keep, irrigation
and rotating crops, when to move in, when to start a fire.
I've seen the red skies. I know the warning of dawn.

I know too that frozen waters can flow,
can once again flow, how fields will blaze
anew, if touched by the sun.

Blame me, but I will open the curtains.
After all, I have lived here for a million years
and am long past finding my way home.

Andrea Witzke Slot

Right in the middle, "do not tell me love makes us fools.", right smack in the middle, the oddest line, and one on which the whole poem seems to turn, that love might be part of everything else in the poem, part of the natural world, falcons, and pine trees, caves and mountains.  And after love, the farmers and all the ordinary things of the world we know.  The red skies in the morning . . . sailors take warning . . . things are beginning to change.  That frozen waters thaw and flow, and, evidently, so do frozen hearts, frozen fields will blaze with that changing sun.  It's the last stanza that made me have that feeling of recognition, that I open the curtains daily on my world, and still sometimes feel I am long past finding my way home, that there will always be some feeling of being alien, homesick for something I don't even understand, that I have lived here forever and still every day something new presents itself.  Sometimes I think that's a good thing, sometimes it just makes me feel a kind of nostalgia for a place I am sure never exists in this world, a place where everything is known, even me.

June 3, 2012

You can tell it's going to be hot today, the cicadas are already singing, birds have begun the trek to the water bowl, and the sun is rapidly burning away the thin veil of white over the deep blue.  There have been several quarrels in the yard already, mockingbird against cat, blue jay against cardinal, and, sort of by accident, dog versus cat, the cat fleeing as soon as a quartet of unleashed dogs rounded the corner.  First time in awhile I have see so many dogs running loose together, two large retriever types and two smaller terrier types, just trotting together down the road.  I'm sure the cat thought they were after him but they seemed unconcerned with anything but moving off at a good pace.  I'm surprised the fat squirrel did not hiss at the cat but it seemed to be more interested in taking a nap in the  thin branches of the crepe myrtle.  We have several squirrels that seem to consider this yard a home base, two fat ones that always seem to be arguing over something and several smaller skinnier ones.  The sleeping squirrel is one of the fat ones, who if the blue jay notice him, will find his nap cut short.  The blue jays seem to take great delight in harassing the squirrels.

It's Sunday and the day for the blessing . . .

On Being Called to Prayer
While Cooking Dinner for Forty

When the heavens and the earth
are snapped away like a painted shade,
and every creature called to account,
please forgive me my head
full of chickpeas, garlic and parsley.
I am in love with the lemon
on the counter, and the warmth
of my brother’s shoulder distracted me
when we stood to pray.
The imam takes us over
for the first prostration,
but I keep one ear cocked
for the cry of the kitchen timer,
thrilled to realize today’s cornbread
might become tomorrow’s stuffing.
This thrift may buy me ten warm minutes
in bed tomorrow, before the singer
climbs the minaret in the dark
to wake me again to the work
of thought, word, deed. 
I have so little time to finish;
only I know how to turn the dish, so the first taste
makes my brother’s eyes open wide--
forgive me, this pleasure
seems more urgent than the prayer--
too late to take refuge in You
from the inextricable mischief
of every thing You made,
eggs, milk, cinnamon, kisses, sleep.

Patrick Donnelly

This poem tickles me because of the way it blames God for distracting us from prayer by all the "inextricable mischief" in creation.  Here the poem imagines the daily work of cooking is a kind of prayer, as are the thoughts that flow from those tasks, and those tasks are themselves a kind of prayer, to nourish and bring pleasure to those that you love, to do the work of the world keeping in mind that it was all made for us to enjoy, to share with others.  The formal prayer of the day yields before the kitchen timer, and the stuffing, and the wish to make things to create an everyday joy.  You know, I think there is a place for formal prayer, and ritual, and that there is also a place for the daily prayer of work and joy, and sharing that joy with those you love.  So, today, while not making dinner for forty, I will go to the market so I can make dinner for us, bring pleasure to the close of the day, be grateful for the opportunity to show love and to share all the 'inextricable mischief" of this world!

June 2, 2012

A summer morning, blue skies, sunny, hot, humid . . . probably not a break in the heat until October <chuckle>.  Every bird is out this morning looking for breakfast, blue jays, cardinals, a brown thrasher, mourning doves, and a bunch of the tiny ones that I can't tell one from the other.  A lot of them are singing, especially the mockingbirds.  I actually tried to find out which bird has the "cheater, cheater, cheater" call and discovered it may be more than one bird.  Some experts say a cardinal, some a robin, some a Carolina wren.  I have heard a lot of cardinals and to me they mostly sound like a rusty door, and I am not sure we still have robins here this time of year.  I tried to find out but the bird sites are confusing. From my own observation, we get them for awhile in the early early spring but usually by this time they seem to go some place cooler.  So until I see one singing the same time I hear that funny call, I guess I won't know for sure., and my luck will be when I finally see some bird making that call, it will be a mockingbird mimicking some other bird <chuckle>.  The sun has moved around so that this time of morning the crepe myrtle is painted all gold and there is sun lighting up the green flames of the cane, their long thin leaves moving with a little breeze.

 In poetry, forms often sound too forced for me, often seem like something constrained beyond bearing within the walls of the form.  A villanelle is a very structured form, full of repetition, not just the repetition of sound but of whole lines.  So what amazed me about this poem is that until the last stanza, I did not realize the form.  I started reading it because of the title and when I was done read it over again to see how the poet had folded the whole poem together, just like the paper birds . . .

Paper Birds
       
Moths must tire of sleeping near the ceiling.
All that waiting for their wings to match
color that changes where wall folds to eave.

This afternoon I found her at the table, asleep
amongst paper, delicate as dreams, elaborate
birds made of folding, made for our ceiling.

I try unfolding one, tail and beak of pleats,
green and yellow flowers on a patch
of wing. No cuts or glue to hold to evening,

to have them flying from fishing line. Geese,
swans, a hummingbird. Window unlatched,
and wind wakes their sleeping from the ceiling.

Song of paper rustling; song of crease
and bend; song of watching
color that changes where wall folds to eave.

We fall asleep like this, a counting sheep,
a listening for paper birds, a grasping
for sounds that sleep near the ceiling,
in colors that change where wall folds to eave.

Julia Koets

I admire anyone one who can take a difficult task and through hard work and endless repetition make it look . . . simple.  Michael over the years made lots of origami birds, and dozens of other things.  He used to fold up dollars for tips into frogs and stars and cranes.  I have one of his cranes still sitting among the bottles on my desk, a blue one with white chrysanthemums on its wings.  Reading through this poem again, I see how she did it, I can see the ghost of the form, but what intrigues me over and over is how the folding paper becomes, at least for me, a kind of folding of the words, the pleats and mountain folds of her words every bit as structured as the origami birds, and every bit as free, as graceful, as surprising.  They float to the ceiling and leave behind a kind of deep tranquility that blesses the day.

June 1, 2012

Such a lovely morning . . . sunny, breezy, the sound of a small plane playing overhead, shadow striping the yard.  Birds were out early this morning, all singing some kind of song, screeching blue jays, sleepy mourning dove whoos, mockingbirds carrying on a musical conversation with themselves, even the tiny ones peeping and cheeping, must be one of those morning when everyone has something to say!

This poem gave me a smile and a chuckle . . .

A Yorkshire Parable

I went to see the wisest man in the world-
he lived above a shop in Cleckheaton.
A nice man, he offered me tea and biscuits
before we got down to business.

Is there an omniscient being? I asked him,
one who shares an intimate
relationship with each and every one of us?
I wouldn’t really know, he said.

Well, do you believe in an afterlife?
A heaven, perhaps: or maybe reincarnation?
It would be nice, he mused-
pushing over the chocolate eclairs.

Realising I was getting nowhere with this,
I wandered over to the window
and watched as cold November light
set fire to the trees across the road.

Nice day, I ventured.
Now you’re getting somewhere, he replied.

Mike Di Placido

I just had to chuckle, kind of reminded me of a lot of the sort of Zen stories with the wise one and the student, and the student keeps trying to get the wise one to say something . . . well, something true, I guess, or something they can use, or something they can be sure of.  And the wise one keeps talking about crickets, or the moon, or the full cup, keeps getting the student to sweep the floor or clean out the stable or do some other work that needs to be done.  Sometimes the student finally gets the idea, sometimes they get angry and leave, sometimes they sit down next to the wise one and watch the sun set in flames over a line of trees.  All the unanswerable questions are a matter of . . . faith.  You believe about them what you believe, there is no proof.  You might just as well live your life as honestly as you can, do what's necessary, and accept the joy and beauty of the world, along with all its heartache and sorrow, because you will never have any proof only belief, only faith.  It's what you believe in, what you actually do in the world that determines the state of your . . . soul.

Nice day, isn't it?