The birds were louder this morning,
raucous, oblivious, tweeting their teensy bird-brains out.
It scared me, until I remembered it’s Spring.
How do they know it? A stupid question.
Thank you, birdies. I had forgotten how promise feels.
Browsing category: Nature
Geese
A gaggle of geese return to our street each winter
while migrating from one place to another.
They arrive in January, around my husband’s birthday,
and I am surprised to find them behind our house,
honking like cab drivers in traffic. Most leave with
babies but one pair can’t manage to have any;
I’ve watched them sit for years on a wet nest of death,
warming unhappiness. It is only when the other
geese swim past them, proudly displaying
a line of live chicks, that they realize they have
failed again, their eggs silent beneath the love
of their feathers. My neighbors and I don’t agree
on much but we all watch these geese from our
windows, with binoculars sometimes, our breakfast
growing cold on the table. We wish the unsuccessful
ones would have a season of luck, their eggs healthy
and well placed, for each of us has known the pleasure
of spring, the way it feels for something closed
to open: the soft, heavenly weather of arrival.
Equinox
I must keep from breaking into the story by force
for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand
and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun,
your nation dead beside you.
I keep walking away though it has been an eternity
and from each drop of blood
springs up sons and daughters, trees,
a mountain of sorrows, of songs.
I tell you this from the dusk of a small city in the north
not far from the birthplace of cars and industry.
Geese are returning to mate and crocuses have
broken through the frozen earth.
Soon they will come for me and I will make my stand
before the jury of destiny. Yes, I will answer in the clatter
of the new world, I have broken my addiction to war
and desire. Yes, I will reply, I have buried the dead
and made songs of the blood, the marrow.
Children, It’s Spring
And this is the lady
whom everyone loves,
Ms. Violet
in her purple gown
or, on special occasions,
a dress the color
of sunlight. She sits
in the mossy weeds and waits
to be noticed.
She loves dampness.
She loves attention.
She loves especially
to be picked by careful fingers,
young fingers, entranced
by what has happened
to the world.
We, the older ones,
call it Spring,
and we have been through it
many times.
But there is still nothing
like the children bringing home
such happiness
in their small hands.
April
A whole new freshman class
of leaves has arrived
on the dark twisted branches
we call our woods, turning
green now — color of
anticipation. In my 76th year,
I know what time and weather
will do to every leaf.
But the camellia swells
to ivory at the window,
and the bleeding heart bleeds
only beauty.
A Purification
At the start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter's accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.
What the Day Gives
What the Day Gives
Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder
in the middle of gray November
what I hoped to do comes back,
asking.
Across the street the fiery trees
hold onto their leaves,
red and gold in the final months
of this unfinished year,
they offer blazing riddles..
In the frozen fields of my life
there are no shortcuts to spring,
but stories of great birds in migration
carrying small ones on their backs,
predators flying next to warblers
they would, in a different season, eat.
Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin's difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.
September
it rained in my sleep
and in the morning the fields were wet
I dreamed of artillery
of the thunder of horses
in the morning the fields were strewn
with twigs and leaves
as if after a battle
or a sudden journey
I went to sleep in the summer
I dreamed of rain
in the morning the fields were wet
and it was autumn
Autumn Quince
How sad they are,
the promises we never return to.
They stay in our mouths,
roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
Houses built and unwittingly lived in;
a succession of milk bottles brought to the door
every morning and taken inside.
And which piece is real?
The music in the composer’s ear
or the lapsed one the orchestra plays?
The world is a blurred version of itself—
marred, lovely and flawed.
It is enough.
Apples
Rain hazes a street cart's green umbrella
but not its apples, heaped in paper cartons,
dry under cling film. The apple man,
who shirrs his mouth as though eating tart fruit,
exhibits four like racehorses at auction:
Blacktwig, Holland, Crimson King, Salome.
I tried one and its cold grain jolted memory:
a hill where meager apples fell so bruised
that locals wondered why we scooped them up,
my friend and I, in matching navy blazers.
One bite and I heard her laughter toll,
free as school's out, her face flushed in late sun.
I asked the apple merchant for another,
jaunty as Cezanne's still-life reds and yellows,
having more life than stillness, telling us,
uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast
but for themselves, and building strength to fly
at any moment, leap from a skewed bowl,
whirl in the air, and roll off a tilted table.
Fruit-stand vendor, master of Northern Spies,
let a loose apple teach me how to spin
at random, burn in light and rave in shadows.
Bring me a Winesap like the one Eve tasted,
savored and shared, and asked for more.
No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once,
hard, never in comfort. For that bitter fruit,
tasting of earth and song, I'd risk exile.
The air is bland here. I would forfeit mist
for hail, put on a robe of dandelions,
and run out, broken, to weep and curse — for joy.
Apple Season
The kitchen is sweet with the smell of apples,
big yellow pie apples, light in the hand,
their skins freckled, the stems knobby
and thick with bark, as if the tree
could not bear to let the apple go.
Baskets of apples circle the back door,
fill the porch, cover the kitchen table.
My mother and my grandmother are
running the apple brigade. My mother,
always better with machines, is standing
at the apple peeler; my grandmother,
more at home with a paring knife,
faces her across the breadboard.
My mother takes an apple in her hand,
She pushes it neatly onto the sharp
prong and turns the handle that turns
the apple that swivels the blade pressed
tight against the apple's side and peels
the skin away in long curling strips that
twist and fall to a bucket on the floor.
The apples, coming off the peeler,
Are winding staircases, little accordions,
slinky toys, jack-in-the-box fruit, until
my grandmother's paring knife goes slicing
through the rings and they become apple
pies, apple cakes, apple crisp. Soon
they will be married to butter and live with
cinnamon and sugar, happily ever after.
And Now it’s October
the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run
to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells, the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery grasses shine in the slanted light. It’s time to bring in the lawn chairs and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker down. Summer’s fruits are preserved in syrup, but nothing can stopper time. No way to seal it in wax or amber; it slides though our hands like a rope of silk. At night, the moon’s restless searchlight sweeps across the sky.
A Thousand Years of Healing
From whence my hope, I cannot say,
except it grows in the cells of my skin;
in my envelope of mysteries it hums.
In this sheath so akin to the surface of the earth
it whispers. Beneath
the wail and dissonance in the world,
hope’s song grows, until I know
that with this turning
we put a broken age to rest.
We who are alive at such a cusp
now usher in
one thousand years of healing!
Winged ones and four-leggeds,
grasses and mountains and each tree,
all the swimming creatures,
even we, wary two-leggeds
hum, and call, and create
the Changing Song. We remake
all our relations. We convert
our minds to the earth. In this turning time
we finally learn to chime and blend,
attune our voices; sing the vision
of the Great Magic we move within.
We begin the new habit, getting up glad
for a thousand years of healing.
A Reward
Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall-the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.
Anniversary
When the world was created wasn’t it like this?
A little flame illuminating a rough sea, a question
of attraction, something fermented, something sweet?
And then a bird or two were added, the crow of course to
joke about humanity, and then another kind so beautiful
we had to hear them first, before our eyes could be imagined.
And it was, we were then — and there was no separation.
The cries of a planet formed our becoming.
We peered through the smoke as our shoulders, lips
emerged from new terrain.
The question mark of creation attracts more questions
until the mind is a spiral of gods strung out way over
our heads, traveling toward the invention of sky.
Move over and let us sleep until the dust settles,
until we can figure this thing out.
What was created next is open to speculation or awe.
The shy fish who had known only water
walked out of the ocean onto dry land,
just like that, to another life.
Frog imagined meals of flying things and creatures in flight imagined hills
of daubed dirt and grass in which to settle and make others
to follow in their knowledge which they were building
as sure as houses on the tangled web.
And in that manner we became — elegance of fire, the waving grass.
And it’s been years.
Blue Morning Glory
Voracious, yes. But when you see it,
shy blue flowers blaring like trumpets in spite of themselves,
centers star shaped and yellow; when it startles you,
early in the morning, all over a white picket fence, say,
in Massachusetts, you might think “triumphal,” “prodigal,”
“awake.”
Of course you don’t want it in your rose garden
among all the pruned, the decorous bushes. You don’t want it
in the vegetables, for it will romp through the tomatoes,
beans and peas, will leave no room on the ground, or even
in the air for the leafy lettuces and cabbages soberly
queuing up in their furrows. It will hog all the sky it can get,
knowing as it does what enormous thirst is satisfied by blue.
Father Michael says Follow the God of abundance.
Says we hurry from the moment’s wealth
for fear it will be taken. Think of this:
the morning glory has been blossoming for so long
without permission that in some gardens it is no longer censored.
What does that tell you? See how it opens its tender throats
to a world that can sting it, how, without apology for its excess,
it blooms and blooms, though even yet
it seems surprised.
Early Hominids Slept in Trees
This was before they slipped into caves
and painted the drama of the hunt, before
their stone tools and splendid fires,
when early hominids filled the trees
like night. They climbed a ladder
of branches into evening where they
arranged themselves beneath
the applause of leaves. There were
wind storms and lightning and somehow
babies were held and people snored
or turned over. Surely someone was
afraid of heights? And someone
must have secured a place at the bottom,
or slept on the ground, demonstrating
how it might be done? Balanced up there,
in the mythic beginning, they were
safer from predators that walked
on four legs, swishing tails.
They clung to the trunk: felt the world
growing colder, the new power in their thumbs.
Trees were like houses and going home
meant climbing into the sky where words
appeared inside them like stars.
Falling Asleep in the Garden
All day the bees have come to the garden.
They hover, swivel in arcs and, whirling, light
On stamens heavy with pollen, probe and revel
Inside the yellow and red starbursts of dahlias
Or cling to lobelia's blue-white mouths
Or climb the speckled trumpets of foxgloves.
My restless eyes follow their restlessness
As they plunge bodily headfirst into treasure,
Gold-fevered among these horns of plenty.
They circle me, a flowerless patch
With nothing to offer in the way of sweetness
Or light against the first omens of evening.
Some, even now, are dying at the end
Of their few weeks, some being born in the dark,
Some simply waiting for life, but some are dancing
Deep in their hives, telling the hungry
The sun will be that way, the garden this far:
This is the way to the garden. They hum at my ear.
And I wake up, startled, seeing the early
Stars beginning to bud in constellations.
The bees have gathered somewhere like petals closing
For the coming of the cold. The silhouette
Of a sphinx moth swerves to drink at a flowerhead.
The night-blooming moon opens its pale corolla.
Goldfinches
Some goldfinches were having a melodious argument
at the edge of a puddle. The birds wanted to bathe, or
perhaps just to dip their heads and look at themselves,
and they were having trouble with who should be
first, and so on. So they discussed it while I stood in
the distance, listening. Perhaps in Tibet, in the old
holy places, they also have such fragile bells. Or are
these birds really just that, bells come to us — come to
this road in America — let us bow our heads and
remember now how we used to do it, say a prayer.
Meanwhile the birds bathe and splash and have a
good time. Then they fly off, their dark wings open—
ing from their bright, yellow bodies; their tiny feet,
all washed, clasping the air.
Gradual Clearing
Late in the day the fog
wrung itself out like a sponge
in glades of rain,
sieving the half-invisible
cove with speartips;
then, in a lifting
of wisps and scarves, of smoke-rings
from about the islands, disclosing
what had been wavering
fishnet plissé as a smoothness
of peau-de-soie or just-ironed
percale, with a tatting
of foam out where the rocks are,
the sheened no-color of it,
the bandings of platinum
and magnesium suffusing,
minute by minute, with clandestine
rose and violet, with opaline
nuance of milkweed, a texture
not to be spoken of above a whisper,
began, all along the horizon,
gradually to unseal
like the lip of a cave
or of a cavernous,
single, pearl-
engendering seashell.