"what did I care about worldly fame

now I'm living in a distant town

with mountains and rivers keeping us apart

the Tao doesn't come with many burdens

until the memories pile up on this day..." – Wei Ting, "In My Prefecture Quarters Affected by Autumn: To My Cousins"

"...that turned in the other had been carved long before in the form

    of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be

asleep the features worn almost away..." – Merwin, "Fox Sleep"

Another Sunday Morning

Out in the valleys along the city highway

    the churches this sunday are still filling their lots

matched inside the hollow nooks of the iron

    bluffs still tangled in late March by the leafless

black trees we speak of the good word still

    of those who can tell us that the world is not

lost but it is the ridge lines the fine deep carpeting

    of the sleeping golf course that is the church

this time and we plan on our run along the marshland

    trail and over the old creek bridges to watch

for the waterfowl and learn the patterns in the dried

    mud of all the passers-by just when a low flying

eagle passes just overhead just forty feet high

    and circles only once over the steady beaver dam

tucked inside the clefts and the stacks of water

    sedges wondering where the ripples part the water

just down below where the geese slide to protection

    and where a single buffle head like a royal

like a stroke of precise direction tugs itself

    in shallow lurches under one of the old railroad

bridges and here we must hear something

    of a sigh in between the dedications and sermons

of all these falling words of mind to mind

    until the pair of cranes built like inspecting

farmers walk along in front of us the knees tight

    the beak tucked down to terms and not a love

of us no mention of who gets the next lesson

    and we wonder where the center of the times

have gone and turn to run never to hide again

    

 

"In the old dark the late dark the still deep shadow

    that had travelled silently along itself all night

while the small stars of spring were yet to be seen and the few

    lamps burned by themselves..." – Merwin, "Ancestral Voices"

And the Few Lamps Burned by Themselves

    remember we used to hold the world up by lamps of imagination

another name for fires that rise up from the very touch

    of a hand if it is underneath listening to the flooded trees

rise up as a flame would from uncertain origins seeds

    set a hundred years ago before your own before memories

of such and such before the photographs of ancestors

    were lent to relatives and you held them in your hands

the river trees began to mount their productions and bends

    but today you hold the one that holds the eagle's nest

she had just flown in from over the city over the course

    sounds of metal and sadness to descend on these fierce

sticks plied together over two years so that when you paddle

    directly to its gray base you can only wonder if they feel

the flood and the timber wave by the pulse of the current

    that shriek that strove a moment ago on its arrival

that shriek that came from a time torn by unseen space

    that I could grow to be old and hear again what they did

 

"So gradual in those summers was the going

    of the age it seemed that the long days setting out

when the stars faded over the mountains were not

    leaving us even as the birds woke in full song ..." – Merwin, "The Speed of Light"

Even as the Birds Woke

We would have to go back a ways to cover our tracks

    of the dreams of moments that included the nothing

of every last thing of any trail or sky or pond or wintering

    bird that you might not recognize a mere pattern of dicibals

reaching away from the open limbs not as a chorus

    but of course more primitive a blot back there against

the wide open months of the treacherous season that takes

    and wills you away from yourself where the prairie

made more sense than the tasks of gain when the words

    we too spilled in under marshland canopy across

a boardwalk had the weight of tufts of dark flowers

    to give and receive eyes as rocks gleaming mouths

as organs still alive to the air and our own sounds crunching

    purposefully across thin sheens of ice where time always

sides with the long stretched torrent of life in winter months

    wake to your birds like hearts that can predict the sun

 

"Here are the fields I became a naturalist in, beginning back in the 70's and still come to with Anna, to walk out her questions..." – Claire Walker Leslie, from "December 2, Thursday, Sunny & lovely" Drawn to Nature

Nov. 8

The compartment of memory set aside for this view

across the street from the yellow Riverside house.

On summer days a hundred people slip past this corner

from the Rutledge Bridge and head along the narrow

lakeside park trail. By afternoon the yellow stucco

reflects itself off the yellow falling sun. Is that an Acer

Japanese Maple at the edge? Paintbrushes over the years

have no doubt been jealous of the natural vermilion.

Leaves tucked to tight fists on the sidewalk click 

to the slightest shoreline wind. Inside, it's as though

your inside the joy of the eyes of the house. Kids march

across the street with no more thoughts than the river below.

You sense that by the end only these hours will stand

to words you'll write by then with watercolor and pen.

 

"On Reddit, someone theorized that, during the preparation of hot chicken, 'the oil combines with the chili to make some kind of undigestible lava.'" 

– Paige Williams, from "The Spice Trade"

March 12, 2021

If you haven't had a chance to travel to Nashville recently to try the famous hot chicken profiled  in "The Spice Trade," that seems understandable seeing as cross-country culinary travel is not advisable. The hope is though, for those of us stranded in winter Wisconsin, that hot chicken finds you from some local menu still open for safe entry. I found it by pure happenstance only four nights ago and it's more than a little possible that a smudge of cayenne is still glowing like lava under a cuticle or two.  That's not to say that the number one entree listed at Cafe Benelux, located in the Historical Third Ward, Milwaukee – directly kitty corner from the Public Market – was a disappointment in any way, taste, or form, but that it is far easier to read about hot adventures than to go through them yourself. The visual of the arriving plate at Benelux was nearly identical to a variety of other pics you find for the dish – a glistening slathering of deeply bumpy ruby sauce that is, at first glance, noticeably gooyier than any standard bbq. The description above of 'lava' seems well justified. And yet the knowledge that this should pack plenty of heat seems tamed by the fact that there is brown sugar in there also... how bad can this be, sweet should salve anything. A little metal cup of cool pickles is set alongside for safety sake as well as nice green-centric bowl of house potato salad. A glass of ice water tends to sit up at the neck of the plate and if need be a Tandem Double at 7 percent ABV offers palate diversion. There are three legs. They are each the kind of tender we all wish for as the fork slides down the bone to unfurl the core meat. The skin and the hot sauce has become one and textures are simply fun. However, by leg two, there seems to be a heat-trap that has been set-up in your mouth wittingly. By bite two on leg two something has established in your mouth that can't be reversed, a kind of heat-in-motion momentum that is at once cravingly wonderful to the point of addiction but also something to be avoided, similar to running toward fire. "Would you like some of my chicken" I ask my daughter, now that I realize I have plenty to go around. Young, sharp, and prepared always for my own culinary mischief, she says, "sure, I would love to try just a touch," as she peels the chicken away from the sauce and eats the meat, yes, but the skin stays put on the dish. Although she did not get much by way of lava, there was enough there, set deep in the meat, for the 14 year old reaction. "What is in there, is that, like, sugar, oooh." I say, "I don't know, the menu doesn't say." Later, a slice of carrot cake comes out, caramel lined and coconut frostinged, a more pure sugar sans cayenne and all will be well again for her anyway. I, on the other hand, could at certain times of the following day still taste hot and sunny Nashville.

A Friend Beside Me

"...a friend beside me whom I do not see
without words making it come clear to me
the youth of heaven the ages of light"
– Merwin from "At Night Before Spring"










Owl Down

As important to know owl
that soft bunch of wind blown feather
who must have slipped the night before
perhaps the light of the road
was lower than that of the moon
I suspect a car or two passing above
and the silver sheen of old snow
had found it lying along dead oak
nothing more than new weight
a glove from a hand dropped
and as I pass watching another silver
curve of cloud above in blue
I sense before I arrive here the woods
know less than I do so still and numb
my bones of the same trunk
and of the same of half froze cones
that stand tilted submerged near owl
the eyes of an island of all living
opened as if a map to a hollow
near as bone and timber and lost
untold dreams of dark mice singing

Enter the Driftless

"The tempest being over, I waited till the floods of rain had run off the ground, then took leave of my friends, and departed. The air was now cool and salubrious, and riding seven or eight miles, through a pine forest, I came to Sapello bridge, to which the salt tide flows."
– from Bartram's Living Legacy









The little local side trips of life can mean the difference between sulking boredom and an immediate spiritual lift. Watch how you nearly, sometimes, have to drag yourself up and into a coat, hat and gloves, pack the dog, and get in the car for even the shortest of drives during the dreary, post white winter months. We all know time itself stands a little stiller in February, March, April and at least the TV is still showing us sharp images of things. Indeed, I just last night finished a contemporary documentary movie following a mother and daughter who decided to walk and ski back country from Vancouver Canada to Skagway Alaskay over a series of several months. The footage was, of course, distinct, raw and exhilarating from right there at the couch. This morning is so bland and gray that I have already begun to devise my plan for yanking myself out into it, run the dog along Picnic Point, listen for incoming birds of any color, and watch water from afar. The domestic traveler has to do many many things to recreate in the smallest ways that which we watch on our screens. Who doesn't wrestle with the mismatch of abundance offered on screen versus the seeming dirth of a midwestern spring. Nonetheless, as I know, only twenty minutes out on trail, head phones off, even the gray world will come alive and a certain spirring of the spirit will invariably come.

Only two weeks ago I did some of this initial self-dragging. I was in Onalaska visiting; this is smaller city set right along the Mississippi and surrounded by the great chain of bluffs. It takes very little time to get onto one of these bluff sides and start your way up relatively mild climbs through nearly always accommodating forests, really some of the most hospitable countryside one could possibly imagine. There has always been a favorite rock that we liked to hike up to for years. Access can be fairly easy as a new conservancy allows for parking half way up a bluff at a cul de sac, a great route for a very quick nature dose. The trail immediately begins as an invitation; it is an old farm log road and winds through a remnant oak opening – those that would have virtually defined this entire area two hundred years ago; and in fact the LaCrosse area used to be called Prairie La Crosse, and if you had sidled up to the downtown shoreline hundreds of years ago, by most accounts, you would have not seen a tree for miles, all sand and prairie. Now to find prairie you have to find the little remaining pockets left, very few natural occurring without maintained tractor trimming or burning. As quickly as I can I turn on the old farmer persona and wonder what it might have been like to push cattle up this higher road for grazing or storage. These particular set of bluffs at Greens Coulee would have been empty except for a smattering of homesteads; they are now suburbs, lined at every amenable slot by large houses, but the rolling contours still visible, beautiful, and full of life above the building ground. A short walk takes you up to the always diverse ridge lines of these bluffs where a new semi-micro climate of growth often begins – the standard basswood, maple, elm forest transforms some to birch and scrub pines as well as juniper low lying along the ground. The crown jewel of the bluff works though is always the sandstone. Small cairns or quarries might appear, as it does just one lobe away from here at a primary quarry of old, which now looks like a cut out dome with park table and fire pit for the casual visitor.

My rock is a windswept head with neck. It's the only of its kind in the area the I know of. How it has maintained itself over all this time is hard to know, but it stands out as foreign to the landscape, not by coloration, but that it looks like its directly out of somewhere at Arches National Park, a fairly slender base that then forms to an eight by eight rock head. You can climb it with ease and sit on its titled but flat surface and watch the entirety of the valley. I give myself five minutes to sit and breath it in, watch my breath, remember the snapshot, and realize at that very moment that this could serve as its own footage of the drift less region, the scenes dramatic enough to capture anyone's attention. It took me approximately twenty minutes to get here. I have the bluff to myself. I see the roads below at the food of the neighborhoods. One or two people walking past the last red barn in the area. Cars to and fro.