Spring Prairie

"Last night's rain makes me sail in my wooden shoes."
     – Wang Wei, "Things in a Spring Garden"










Noon sun. The spring grass becomes its own canvas sea.
Lakeside homes in the distance stationary ships.
I walk around the prairie trail with hands above the goldenrod skeletons
dreaming of the coming honey emerald buds.
Eagles in the oaks, slow heart beats, sit on limbs
that must have been strokes by a dipped black pen a hundred years ago.
So long before I walked onto the page.

Alms you Resist

"So you are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me." – Mary Oliver, from West Wind









Now, today, there will be no boat. Not even the hardened fisherman who hold those long motor stems of the flat bottom can quite make it in. The bay is a backwater and it is of the season that is still gray across the surface, the thinnest of lenses, only enough for the flagging seagulls to peck away at the accumulated detritus of the thousands layers. No, today, there will be no boat. All this way you have come, as if pulling your pack through the winter months like the prisoner who has escaped and wanders alone through unknown woods. All so that you could reach a wild portion of the ocean, a ragged beach, maybe, where nobody has been since the natives, and call this home in your mind for a minute. You would send a skiff out and watch it live – the dynamics of floating, above something so clear and wise as warm water, that is spring. Even then, true to yourself, you might not swim out to the floating skiff but, like the predicting of the coming summer months, watch it, and by the powers of the mind, feel its thin casing of a hull touch the water, slip down a finger that is splashed when, at that very moment, is where you wake up and you see that the world is before you, awake, alive, full adequate. For now the gray curtains have been drawn over the sky. It is that old house, and the bedroom is on the second floor, windows closed, the sharp tracking of an oak limb across the roof as it carries rain drops like alms you resist.

Goose Pond

"Tired of holding back all winter long, the trees suddenly feel they've been had. They can't stand it anymore: they release their verbiage, a flood, a vomit of green. They try to achieve a complete foliage of verbiage." – Francis Ponge, from "A Cycle of Seasons"







Only the true soldier of love for the outdoor world will continue to walk through these beige and dessiccated pastures of early spring marshland. The cattails and the reeds that create the scenery here are so brittle and so colorless, that we have to feel some apology to the otter who has been crossing the pond back and forth and nosing into the sharp foliage for cover. What a dullness! Surrounding out at its edges, as sort of masters of the colorlessness, the tangled oaks, revealed now for what they are, castles of random dark and twisted corridors unlit by torches of the leaves and a thousand small cliffs, watch over the scene at this season something like prison guards. It is not a sadness. It is more of a nothingness, a stark anti-memory, which, when followed along inside the imagination, become something more of a what we soon hope it will be, wild green, yellow blots, petals of twenty wildflowers, orange, indigo, violet, all blazes and depth soft as tongues. There is, however, one old performer that steals the easy scene – the pond itself, which has molted its gray flat jacket of ice some weeks ago and turned, in among the shameless colorlessness of the marsh, a deep cool blue which reflects the dome of sky blue itself and we see that perhaps they are looking at each other, mirrors, and offer wonders. The Canada geese have landed here and move around randomly to plunge and feed. This is the only life. These mammoth birds who are never heartbroken paddle on against a stiff breeze that shakes the dull grass against the water edges. They move through their parade of gestures like an entourage to a queen, honking at our approach, raising wild wings, even staring us down, as if taking over the scene from tar black oaks. Under our feet the seeds are rumbling at every blade of grass; small planets shaking, yes, but still, and when they come there will not be much to say. The old guards of the pond – otter, goose, oaks, cattail reeds – will sink slowly to the background where the belong. An exuberance of color speak to each other all day long. Songbirds do not know how to stop, their small red hearts like rose petals, tying ribbons of music along the trunks of old oaks.

Little Drumlin


The city is loud
to one side of the conservatory,
heavy traffic at Stoughton Road
to the other.

They saved this little
patch of marshland which rises up
to the ridge of a glacial drumlin.
Here sits a native mound designated
by a small stone and plaque.
Old oaks hold their teachings
here in the the long fingers
of their limbs;
depending on the season,
drop them to the canopy
or grow by golden flames of buds.


Though the late March
trail is cold and empty,
I see that there have been footprints
of students lining the mud.

March 19

Fifty five and sunny mid-afternoon

Two at a time,

as if on cue,

the floating geese

would look left then right,

dive their black bills

down just below the surface, 

tipping their bodies up toward

the cool blue sky

as if shaking
crumpled white paper at the sun.

All the while, along the edges

of the marsh grass

two otters slid 

across the surface,

their glistening heads 

perfectly still,
drawing arrows
across the blue page
like ink pens.

March in the City

"The path immediately behind our condo gives an open view of the floodplain. In winter, the the foliage gone and the sedges pressed down from the snow, the wetlands have a vast uneven surface, like a thick, lumpy white bed quilt..."  – Robert Root, from Walking Home Ground



Interlude

Late March, and with the weather break, as those old entrenched patches of ice along the sidewalks and in the darker corner of the parks and driveways melt, the nature walker begins to silently sing himself, for there is a new companion waiting right outside the front door. The sun, the gradual entrance of birdsong on the scene, and the breaking up of lake ice, are all good friends. There's no reason for winter to take this the wrong way – I like to walk across the street along the banks at Yahara Park any day in the depth of winter, and watch how that world of liquid water turns to a white platform; how Madisonians like to walk and skate and fish out of their tent-like shacks day in and day out. On the best of the deep freeze days, let's face it, the scene of crystal blue sky above and that white smooth platform below, the action in between as the wintering ducks still paddle along the open water of the Yahara river, is a boon for the artist's eye. A month or so ago, during a shockingly cold snap, we had walked out onto the lake, two daughters and I, and tossed a nerf football around as slipped and slid across the Monona ice, the sun so bright it left those shards of burning light in our eyes. The capital dome, off in the distance, rose up white itself among the low lying cloud, as if to wink at its own companions.

And yet it seems that there are few people who would welcome this icy white scene over the warm sunlit breeze that ruffles through the fiery beige marsh grass of late March day. Out there, on the ponds at the Aldo Leopold Center and the Edna Ruth Conservatory, the geese are loud and dipping their bills down into the open water to feed; three otters cruise back and forth along the surface of one of the ponds there, leaving their v-line trails, heads somehow perfectly steady, as they test the strength of the marsh reeds for their building purposes.  As I walk along the looping paths here, even though both of these nature preserves are built directly inside the confines of the city, it doesn't take much an imaginative leap to let Stoughton and Femrite road fade and disappear, and see this wonderful little patch of old woods become the oak savannah of old, supporting those gnarled and unpredictable lines of the black trees, contrasted ecstatically by the grass and marshlands below, and the string of ponds, great dabs of silvery blue, resources for the critters both seen and unseen. This is a scene of city restoration, and one that is so accessible that a hope quickly stands out: let us get every child in the city on these and other trails like them, weekly, daily, as regularly as possible.

East Washington 

"To-night I have been wandering awhile in the capital, which is all lit up. The illuminated rotunda looks life."
   – Whitman, from Specimen Days







March 17

We drove up East Washington toward the capital -- St. Parick's day, saturday, a March shift of blue sky has overcome the gray of February and the buildings, so many of them brand new, look clean and glitter now, and match the bald white round dome of the capital itself just up the road. We can imagine the same roadway so many years ago leading up to the grand building of the city, its massive pillars and shoulders sturdy and timeless stationed there at the isthmus hill, a sort of blessing of what could be inside its halls. We walk along to the coffee shop – it as the street level, windows looking out over the traffic and the city now out and walking again in happy troves. Colors of spring clothes, bikes spinning along the street bike paths, lights blinking bright at the intersections, and who knows, the slightest breeze of the memory of that old democracy as it trails down into the city neighborhoods in all directions like unseen branches sprouting the greenest buds.

Into the Busy Sky

"The little boy wants to fly like the wrapper from a hamburger, all brightly colored, into the busy sky."
   – Louise Jenkins, from "West Wind"









How many more fishing shacks can still stay level on the thinning March ice is hard to know.
Tilted and slender, old truck wheel tracks lead up to their entrance.
But no trucks today,
the sun is the kingdom, has taken over,
and a hawk just down the track has let us know with an unreal squawk
that doesn't seem to match its squat, fiery, wild body.
"Do you think they are still inside them," my daughters asks,
and I can just about see what might be a puff of smoke still trailing up
from the makeshift chimney out of one of them, close to the shore, hopefully shallow water.
"There's no way to tell, but they could be."
We walk along the quiet railroad tracks, over the tall bands of bare iron,
and try to avoid landing our feet on the unstable quarried rocks,
landing instead on the wooden cinder blocks.
"If it got warm enough in one of those shacks, I wonder if the fisherman would fall right through. Don't they build fires on the ice?"
Who could help it, I pictured the spring-eyed crappy,
slipping out from behind a sunken oak trunk
so to dabble at the last flickering glow of a fire ember as it sank down to the muddy bottom.

Shadow of Tall Trees

"I sit down at a table and open a book of poems and move slowly into the shadow of tall trees. They are white pines, I think."
– Louise Jenkins, from "Library"









Spillway Tunnel


The sun is still high late in the day by the benefit of daylight savings.
This was a grateful surprise of a day,
supposed to be slate gray,
all wind and gusty according to the fierce symbols on the weather app.

We walk a trail that follows above a railroad track,
it is all slush and grooved, pocked by winter's old footmarks,
and so we take careful steps around its edges littered by bark
and gravel and there stands below an underground tunnel,
an entry a bit like some old visions of a Scottish highlands home,
made by old limestone.
"It's dry, let's just sit on it, we can dangle our legs over the top"
my youngest daughter says.

There is no one around us.
Not a train to be heard coming for miles.
The city is far behind us now, on the other side of the short bluff.
Down at the lake, water rushes over the spillway in rapid streams,
flowing down the side into the Black River where wind is now stirring
the water to a mixture of what looks like glass jewels set on long strings.

Why not try the tunnel?
Graffiti says that Ellen was here back in 1962,
etched likely by the tip of a hard nail.
Love, peace, and understanding, rough strokes, litter the side walls
of this dank but pristine cellar,
as it gets darker and darker until the other end stands there like a perfectly square frame lens,
full of old white snow, bright as the sun itself.

Nobody for miles,
after school, a father and daughter,
what we've always known
that here it is to live again the natural world.

Why Not Realize Your World?

"Worse, I observe that in the history of mankind there is never a solitary example of success, – taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, Why not realize your world?" – Emerson, from "Experience"








Blackriver Bay


Oh, the natural world! The love electric, it is true, I tell myself, as I sit inside that wonderfully gauzy hour at 4:30 in the afternoon looking out over our small chipped wood deck which overlooks, at certain months, one the grayest of scenes that one could imagine.

It is not one eagle, but two, and then three, four, five, all the way to ten, eagles, that I see sitting perched along the gothic limbs of the bayside oaks, so still as if to exude a strange thought of premeditative silence, small men hunched over with their black-coated backs set towards us.

One of them casually jumps out toward the frozen slate gray bay and then swoops back around, wings as long as blankets, towards the very direction that I am sitting comfortably inside, a good micro beer in hand. What wonder! Does it have the nerve to land on that thin saucer of its receding edge? I suspect it could do anything it chooses; a life lived without a single predator, above looming itself like a dark soldier.

Two or three follow suit and dance around, mechanically, as if wound up – not so elegant as in the air, talons on ice, I think, and watch their beaks like sharp clubs, peck down on the surface for what kind of scarce food I am not sure.  The scene becomes a show for no one. But we add the contours of drama, and wonder how precise these eagles' actions really are.

All the while my baseball game is on, the enormous screen, like a drive-in, five feet in front of me.  The batter is a starter in preseason and he carries himself seriously up to the plate. I have a very slight ring and hum of my jazz playing quietly in the background. That sounds nice against the graying of the day and the baseball game.

I wonder for just the briefest of moments, what would it be like to sleep inside that eagles' nest tonight, dangling there, legs stretched out over its course walls, cold, every second a fright.

Journal Restoration

"We are so accustomed to these essentials – to the rain, the wind, the soil, the sea, the sunrise, the trees, the sustenance – that we may not include them in the categories of the good things, and we endeavor to satisfy ourselves with many small and trivial and exotic gratifications..." – Liberty Hyde Bailey, from The Holy Earth




Now, we had visited Devil's Lake more frequently, the Baraboo valley much closer to us than it had been in previous years, and began to see it as quite exotic in its quartzite made from a billion years of compact sand, really a kind of ancient ancient formation that was different than much of the younger rock that made up the bluffs in the rest of the region. It was a grand cup, as seen from the top, along the ridge lines, a mystery of how the lake got there, where it was going...

Rise up through
the purple quartzite, steps
laid out for you,
hands, fingers down on the shiny bright layered sides
creases for footing
and take a seat
on tilted tops, you become the crow
ruffled feathers
from wind swept up
through junipers
basswood, hickories, thank yous.

                           how would we sing
                           our silent song this
                           pre cambrian world?
                           how would we praise
                           by silent signals
                           these terminal moraines?

Over Devil's Doorway
hands this time
on bark shredded limbs
gnarled birch prongs
from out of ridge line creases
the crow, old friend, of our own,
sits as ornament
at the top of the very last
branch
and wobbles as a lookout

                            how would we sing
                            our silent song this
                            pre cambrian world?
                            how would we praise
                            by silent signals
                            these terminal moraines?

We follow deer trails
hands this time
on the fallen pines furry by lichen
which all lead
to false ends and for this moment
there is no other
on this earth who knows
where we are
but the squirrel and three
finches that flutter
and little pieces
of us will leave along with them
                              thank yous