On the Yahara 

"It's me–Mama, Mama said. I opened up and she's there with bags and big boxes, the new clothes and, yes, she's got the socks and a new slip wit a little rose on it and a pink and white striped dress. What about the shoes? I forgot. Too late now. I'm tired. Whew!"
– Cisneros, House on Mango Street







Dad said two weeks ago that all this water was about to recede. I asked him what recede meant, even though I think I knew all the while, because who wan't saying the same thing all around the neighborhood? It had been well over a month. I'd take ol' Blue with me (or try I really should say) across the street and up onto the bridge where we could see where the water had crept up way over the big rocks. That's where our trail was for dog walking. Now we had to walk along the street on that end. I learned that recede was on the minds of al the neighbors. Their own houses were along other streets close and they wanted it to go away.

I told dad right then that I didn't want to go to school again on monday. "What else are you going to do my child," he would say in his kidding voice, but I meant it. "I want to work and take care of the dog, and listen to the neighbors about receding and help. Maybe they would pay me?" Oh, I had visions of it all, that I will tell everyone now that would listen. Visions. I saw myself right then skipping right over school years. Getting right into things, not waiting around.

Blue and I were outside all the time in those days. Out in our backyard playing around a hundred kinds of bones. Hundreds of kinds of things. Little tricks I tried to teach her, why not. I had visions of being a pet professional. Could I train animals for a living? Let's get started. Right now. Let's not wait. I had ideas for my dog walking business already set. We watched the water rise. I hoped it would recede, always, always.

Dad was distracted by everything but I knew his heart was still with me. Always, always. I never quite knew how he did it, but when he asked me what I was doing it always already knew. He didn't really have to ask. I wondered if he had the binoculars on me. How did he do that?

We learned to run over the bridge by the end of september. Leaves were falling. The river was moving back and forth still, big and green, side to side, you could tell it was still too much for its tunnel. I taught myself to cook, and who didn't appreciate that?

The Path to Han Shan's Place

"As for me, I delight in the everyday Way,
among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves.
Here in the wilderness I'm completely free,
with my friends, the white clouds, idling forever."
  – Han Shan, 12







We slip on her dogleash and are finally free.
There is a little road that is bordered by tough pines
that guard against the blaring highway.
What do we see ahead but the hope of open road?
A few more miles and out into the cattail
reeds and hawks hunting mice from cottonwoods.
Across the continent the mountains sleep.
We walk alongside the last of their night's dream.

Some Fine Talks

"Lunch in my mountain kitchen
the spring provides the perfect sauce."
     –Stonehouse, 67











Sept. 24


And so we had a fine talk about ideas of reciprocity.
What is such a word it sounds too close to legal.
It is not. It is not bound by permanent scratchings
of some other men in some other city some other era.
As I open the door I overlook a back channel
of a long river that feeds into the Mississippi.
I know that lines that we have created to hem it in.
A fine loop around the water as rising banks
and twenty boats like houses afloat and at ready.
I also know the river as a circulation of wild water.
I know that the names uttered by others named
the same thing but that they all flowed over earth.
I paddle to ancient banks exploding by roots
upturned willow trees exposing a hundred wet years.
I follow the egret as she strides alone across
the thin shallows eyeing the slivers of small fish.
These are not my things; I am possessed by mystery.
While we talked of reciprocity we came up with fine
examples where we come to see things give and take.
We call it also, as the waters, by a hundred names.
It is not whether we know that I am it but whether
we give it a hundredth of a blink of our time to see.

The Path to Han Shan's Place

"Keep Han Shan's poems in your home.
They are better than sutras.
You can place the book on top of a screen
and read it through every now and then."  – Han Shan, 307








2

You should have arrived at the college earlier.
There was the placing of the bone back home
directly in the right place at the corner of the kitchen,
so that the new white young puppy could chase.
You should have taken another street through city,
this one an afternoon barrage of car lights
strung through the center of city like gaudy lace.
Oh if you only would have been patient!
Stopped there latched to the back ends of trucks
like the puppy teething against her bone.
What stirred? Looking into the rearview, nerves
like the pulsing roots lit up under shaken trees.
The sky had been blue powder for first time in days.
The fire was pleasant. Old man ahead of you
slow to turn, no blinker, hardly awake, sad.
You should have arrived at the college earlier.
As they stood in the courtyard doing poses,
breathing in the air as rose up from soft grass.
They didn't know you were coming; who cared?

The Path to Han Shan's Place

"The path to Han-shan's place is laughable,
A path, but no sign of cart or horse.

And now I've lost the shortcut home,
Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?"
   – Snyder, from Cold Mountain Poems









Lowlands here in midwest sopping green.
September rain a new gray breath every hour.
By seven we walk out to the hydrant,
itself red as any spring cardinal, a spark,
erect, unscathed by any stirrings underground.
Two little curly terriers scoot by on leashes.
Master has his headphones securely attached.
His music bright sea waves lapping at dunes.

Prairie East

"But Pip rose this morning more animated than he had been yesterday at breakfast time, when he refused the three regulation milk bones he expects to find waiting for him on the edge of the breakfast table every morning after his early constitutional." Klaus, Weather Winter







Sept. 20

The waking up now is fast and furious, similar to the old days of charging across the hallway at 5 in the morning to care for an infant or two. It might randomly begin with a Samoyed puppy bark that is crisp and shrieking, time to get going, in essence, and along with that, dare not retrieve her as immediately as it might take to hop out of bed, pick her up and take her outside, it will likely mean at least one clean up puddle placed on the center of the hardwood floor. Who needs a good stretching in among soft warm pillows anyway. Such small complaints, the ones that oddly are the ones that make a difference, while for others on the current east coast mull over their house drowned in floodwaters, or the conflagrations that seem to spur up on the west coast monthly. So we head outside at that hour is quiet and fairly empty except for the other dog walkers. Rain grays the scene this morning but it is animated by the plunge of a duck across the street onto the high surface of the Yahara River. Such continuous action. I consider the duck's night and wonder at what creature comforts they dismay. Here, along this cut of water between Mendota and Monona, ducks overwinter. I presume that unlike dogs they don't exactly fluff out in another warming coat. No matter the weather, back in the water it is. Frankly, I'm glad they can't literally complain for I sense we'd get an earful. Coffee in hand. This helps. Then it is the pup's daily constitutional, and the coffee becomes something of an unsavory sight, sharing with the scooping hand. A bus roars by, charging up as it does to the crest of the Rutledge Bridge, then bearing down quickly onto the stop sign. A few more cars whizz past in the rain. No more quiet. Poop in hand. Unsavory coffee. I think back to my poor ducks and wonder, just for a brief second, what would it be like to fly out there to the middle of lake, bob around for awhile plucking away at the lake weed tips?

"Sunday morning,
only one place serving breakfast
in Colusa, old river and tractor men
sipping milky coffee." – Snyder, from "River in the Valley"







Go off in my own patch of the Evjue Pines
can still hear the belt line
the long steady winding highway
directly at the edge of the woods clunk and clatter
  no meaning just sound
bend down to my knees into Garlic Mustard
the entire floor green, leafed, waxy
old tendrils of Bittersweet under fallen oak limbs
looks like a new kind of snake
peaking out by coils
and I begin to lop at the Buckthorn like a mower.
Two hundred years ago
what the farm wife was doing right here,
what she did all day with mud
scraped on her legs for relief from mosquitos,
but gather kindling for another fire.
Blue jay out there a handful of blue cloth
or a rag tossed up in the leaves
then falls a little then wafts back up
to wherever it chooses.
Bluejays always had it right – still waiting for us.

How We Go On

"To be shaping again,
model and Tool, craft and culture,
How we go on." – Snyder, from "Axe Handles"







Outside the shed,
buckets of loppers and small limb saws,
the mosquitos
fly in like gray laces,
little shadows
against our beige shirts standing out here under the plum tree.
"Not sure if we should even go out,"
one says, another, "we'll try it, and if it gets too bad, we'll turn back."
Look out onto Curtis Prairie
Golden rod dominates under morning sun,
can't see a thing
no swarms, no under the brush heat,
and so we load the old Ford,
and it takes its bumps across the service road
like an old dog, not much to say,
a couple of bad hips.
"Today we're after Buckthorn," we say
"when you see those long tendrils climbing up the trees,
those are Bittersweet, yank at the roots,
pull it down like Tarzan."
You'd think with loppers into the tangle
you'd be safe, clip away,
stack, take the road, prep the tendrils
in the truck for burning.
Deeper you get in under the old oaks,
now under attack by Buckthorn and Honeysuckle,
every other invasive imaginable,
garlic mustard seizing at every step,
the world is no longer yours.
"No matter the deep," you call out.
Look in on sweaty arm
twenty needle pricker noses
down into the cloth,
how do they know – try anything.
"Walk around a bit and create a little headwind,
maybe you can outrun 'em."
Out on the Evjue Pines service road
cutting back down
toward Savannah Oak and Tract Knoll,
long patches of sun
burning up the air, cleaning it out.
Look off longingly as if stuck out in some
desert, looking in at the waterhole.
Out on the road it's all better.
Better world,
Buckthorn there under control
already for another month or so.
How we go on.

Riverside Drive

"It wasn't as if I I didn't want to work. I did. I had even gone to the social security office the month before to get my social security number. I needed money. The Catholic high school cost a lot, and Papa said nobody went to the public school unless you wanted to turn out bad." – Cisneros, from House on Mando Street

Paddling the Bike Trail

You could never find it in yourself to blame the little yellow house. It stood out on the corner, on the other side of the bridge, as something like a Tuscan revelation, really, something else entirely from the rest of the neighborhood. Mother had said the previous owner lived in Europe most of the time and then when she came home, she wanted to Europe to move back along with her. "There were nights that we lived here," said Sandy, the construction owner of the company who had worked on the little yellow house for years, perfecting it, building courtyards where there had been none, garages out of nothing, even raising the house a foot to protect it from the possibility of the river across the street. "We are sorry," Sandy said, when he came after the flood, "but it never would have mattered." It had rained for three weeks nearly straight. The two of us and Puppy watched darkness from the upstairs windows. Traffic had slowed, the city had become quiet. Each time the enormous bus drove past in its deep hum it seemed to slow as it approached the bridge, wondering if it would make it this time for the water continued rise up to its bottom to the point where cancers could no longer paddle underneath without ducking. It was the very first day that we realized the river was flooding across the street from our little yellow house that Shannon and I kayaked all the way up the Yahara River without much permission...

Flash Nonfiction

"Yet poetry is in Nature just as much as carbon is: love and wonder and the delight in suddenly seen analogy exist as necessarily as space, or heat, or Canada thistles.." Emerson, from April 1859








Sept. 14


Reading from a physician in Japan who speaks of the needs of Forest Bathing, its profound naturally occurring positive effects on the soul, psyche, body, and as I imagine days surrounding this one, back a few, forward a few, I begin to see, perhaps like others, those very comfort zones that seem to serve as ease and security as a mere walk in the park, a short run along the banks of the Yahara River, the short walk that it took from my car down to the banks of Lake Wingra where the great college building Mazzachuli sits. Do men and women alike share such visions of comfort? Has humanity succumbed to a 'nature' of things in which we have unknowingly extracted the very thing that offers to us, without any thinking, menace, selfishness, our very course of health? Such questions. Men spend miles in their minds and in their verbal work for the day it seems chasing something forever in which, if caught, more like trapped, and secured, that it might make them for once feel at fine east in the world, in which mind and action were placed in unison, and a love rose up through the self out into the world...naturally. Yet they have lost the very first step in the sequence! The very first steps are not found in hours bent over laboring against the numbers of accumulated success; they are not found in mere dreams of a more golden tomorrow; not necessarily in what they eat; how long they run around the lake; the extra thirty minutes bonding with their sons. These are the effects; the cause is the first connection, the very one that lingers in all of us like a ringing invisible fiber that runs throughout, what Wilson called Biophilia, and it is an understanding of our natural surroundings. Who does not chase in their hours the invisible catalogue of what we are supposed to be doing? Who does not long achingly to the very place where peace for all lies, the quietest, least desperate of all things? Dwindling nature does not cry or entertain and therefore it recedes in our imaginations for it is ultimately humble and far more stable in its own patterns than the human mind. Stars sometimes align. A thousand lights shine inside the mind and connect with the forever traveling lights of the universe.

Flash Nonfiction

"All men keep the farm in reserve as an asylum where, in case of mischance, to hide their poverty,– or a solitude, if they do not succeed in society." – Emerson, from Farming









One my way back early in the morning from dropping my daughter off school, pass by old original ramshackle of warehouse not far up from the backwater sloughs of the Black River, itself on its way to the Mississippi, a tributary, a flyway, a great expanding waterland of beige greens, cattails, flicking away at the tips of its broad sheets of seeming canvas below. Always there, just out of old red cadillac, the owner, slunched, gray frothy hair, opening up a metal lock or two by key, into half-broken doors to get into a nearly windowless building. Months ago, spring time must have got in that building, for he had a crew build him a nice new office overlook at the top of the second floor, white, a rising piece of perfect cake stemming up out of otherwise broken box of a cobbled building. And so I follow the footsteps up what must be a musty ascent up through root cellar-like walls, up stairs that likely lack a handrail, chipped at the stone, lightless, then up into an office which overlooks the woodmill, itself a fine clean assembly of wood stacks and yellow forklifts with front pronged teeth silver as stars blinking by night. "The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity," said Emerson of farmers, men who we know must have had two things always in those old days: the panorama to himself each day as he overalled out to his pastures and cornfields, that raw possession of not possessing, for he knew, as our man in his high tower this morning, overlooking his marshy landscape, that he is of this air, this time, this geology; but that he too must create, to purchase his hours, so to speak, to survive his days. "Then the beauty of Nature, the tranquility and innocence of the countryman, his independence and his pleasing arts – the care of bees, of poultry, of sheep, of cows...." Emerson goes on, is acknowledged care of things. I drive by slowly thinking of how to start my essay.

"Not everyone will get it, though; the language of stone is difficult. Rock mumbles. But plants speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food." – Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass








Sept.

The water bank sand bags lining the initial curve of the Monona Terrace are as large quarried boulders. Only a little leakage makes its way underneath these mammoth fixtures, blue handled for the sake of the crane which must have lifted them into place. The water is so high underneath the lower terrace that you can tell it is higher than the very place you have your feet. The New Orleans dilemma, if, of course, only on a much smaller level. Bright blue on a sunny day for as far as the eye can see; off to the other side, a network of destination, as I see that pools of water have gathered at the loading ramp going into the Terrace, all down hill, pumping pipes spiraling all over the place...but pumping where? Let's face it, I say to myself, when the mind has the choice between these two scenes – water as blue, beautiful, and holding the jewels of fish, or supporting ducks that wash across with such ease – or as sodden, moldy devastation, we tend to the blue. I run past and the park rises to the first overpass at Broom Street where a cluster of streets merge in and out of one another and an internal alert of loud crashing sounds made by cars kicks in...and now that is the concentration. The city I see is just like this: a zooming in, and zooming out; a clinging to the beautiful but also a necessary nod to the hidden bowels of concrete or, in the case of our homes, our wet basements as a consequence of last week's city-wide flood. Later that night you read of a hurricane making its train tracks inland at the Carolinas. It is told that a previous hurricane back in 1954 whipped up such devastation that it is truly unimaginable, 6, 8, feet of water up to the middle of your house.  The mind, thinking about such terror, skips to the hope of the settling weeks afterward, to the peace of the inhabitants, to settling their claims, and tending to the frightened. For us, here, to get through our part with relative ease, is a fine gift and one very worth receiving.

Prairie East

"Two rivers meet at this corner of the city
where a one-thousand-step polo field is smooth as if planed
and a low wall stretches around three sides." – Han Yu, "Poem to Commander Zhang at the Meeting of the Bian and Si Rivers"









August 

Fives Lakes of the Yahara have been rising for what seems like weeks. Those of us on the isthmus watch the nearly golden green bank of the River rise, inching up into the grass like a thousand eyes of snakes. Ducks now splash in unknown banks, plucking, surely, at worms who have lost their skinny canals in the rich earth: a bounty for some, loss for others. No matter. On the fine and bright days, the flood is a new and calm sheet of crystals, new contrasts, frothy in among the long line of bridges that span over, and we can no longer take them for granted. We walk new paths to check on the lochs at Mendota. Rumbling water, churning, surging in between two mammoth walls of four foot concrete, ease our concerns until we look downriver and see the parked pontoons under large and temporary canvas roofs, rising up to meet its ceiling. Tennis courts tilted, and exposing how basically uneven its surface. Hills and valleys exposed at every turn; we are all curious animals, watching the inevitable.

And so a trip to the prairie. And so a trip across the city at rush hour. Main roads closed, traffic in a hurry, hands gripped to steering wheels tighter than ever; all as we find pockets of water damage at the bike path or the swell at a street side storm drain, but quietly glide afloat and behind the wheel. Turn on your music. Ward off the rain forever. Transplant the rain to California, to Spain, the red targets of wildfires, to the villages of the Sahara, find that answer. City is contrasts. City is a game, a love, a world onto its own, Monona Terrace a bright wide smile against the churning blue below; the rip rap down the path has been undercut and weedy water has crept up to the wall of the terrace. What will it be? At Longenecker I follow nothing more than a path lit by sunlight. That is all. A dry path, through the horticulture of crabapple, hawthorn, and finally the prehistoric spruce, limbs like loving arms, draped by beads, kindly as mothers. Two fawns don't scare easily. I am quite sure that they see me as something as a long companion, as they move closer to me, biting away at the plums that dangle down like finger fruit. The sky is a powder. Faint voices of walkers along Arboretum path are cheery against the Wingra quiet.

It is true that at the highest bench, stationed at the top of a drumlin, I sat for an hour and watched out over the mismatched trees, a long green procession without people and without the gulping of water. It is true that there I told myself not to keep moving, as we are trained at home, keeping watch, checking emails, tuning in baseball games, plucking weeds, prepping meals. It is true that I was already sitting there from the time before I had visited. I had never left. A rabbit began nibbling close to me because it knew I was and was not there. I was the shape and shade of a tree, still, reliable. Crickets did not sing for me and for that I thanked them. Three turkeys passed below pecking at old chestnuts. One of their feathers sat the shape of a miniature boat against the green grass. I took a picture and sent it through my naturalist phone app to test it. The city was not a city. The water of the lakes was not thinking of moving one way or another. There was none of me there. Soon, here, I will leave.