One of the Those
Stones

"One of those stones is precious.
It can change everything.
It can make the darkness shine.
It's the light switch for the whole country." – Transtromer, from "Further In"










One stone had felt like a little piece of home
there were all the proper steps
along the ridgeline for those who would
walk past the architecture of extinction
the old and tilted radio towers
no longer blinking red
and the long wires for power to a broken shack
this ridge they did not quarry
and it likely stood as a hallowed gate for the crushers
and and diggers of stone all those years
a gate that was immobile and held within it
a kingdom of fog in the morning
and of the villages of small animals
of the forest floor by night
where I leap to right now and land with as much of their eye
as I can
then walk along the golden carpet
of loamy limestone
along that bridge to the air where all the gaits
are said to begin

The Fields Want
Us to Walk Upright

"It's been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright." – Transtromer, from "Standing Up"












I

Finally on our way back down the bluff, along the asphalt road which used to carry the crushers and quarry equipment, we passed a woman with sunglasses on. It was nearing January. No matter these days that it was fifty degrees. The sky that color of the robins' eggs. A false excitedness had filled the air all along the ridge above as if the wild, perhaps gullible, that perhaps winter would be forgiven this year and we might skip right to spring. The woman could see nothing and as we passed she lifted her hands to her eyes and said blindly 'it feels like spring.' All the woods had been transparent. No leaves to stitch a remaining fabric. Crooked limbs revealed. Without the growing towers of leaning snow all the romance of the woods had been forgone for what we could see as its truest survival: the craggy trunks of the stone bound pine or birch trees sipping from thin stocks and the seeds and walnuts had already been hoarded. Nothing to read; no secret tracks along the frozen cheeks of the snow. We had walked in among the curled detritus of the limestone quarry, no doubt used for the base of highways and interstates. Old shacks, half-walled, surrounded by power lines, the perfect architecture of extraction. Short stacks of mud to gravel. Little pits. False roads that now curved in around the long white candles of birch. The woman we would later pass would walk right through with her sunshades on, her hands over her forehead. Old rock, vertebrae, houses of the world, used to reach blindly themselves to the sky and a similar sun had loved.

Touching the Earth

"But look this is not yet
the other age
this is the only one
between the brown
pictures and the blank film..." – Merwin, from "Frame"







slender foot trail
along the Monona
very few walk
this morning and
the benches become
markers of age

those frames of ice
have crushed to the shore
and there you can
speak to them
even though we
are told not to

for a loneliness can
only come when
there are not others
when there are no
exhibits of the earth
and here are ancestors

as the sky looms
and the shoreline
calls and carries
us their lives back
to us by every
letter and live face

Still Enough Strangeness

"Pissing out the door of a cottage
in an after-squall wind before dawn
in the tame hill country of Wales,
farms everywhere, fences and hedgerows,
but still enough strangeness, precipitous
pastures, patches of wood shadowing
tangles of one-car-wide lanes,
to take you out of yourself for a time...
– CK Williams, from "Naked"




Far too many hours counted within
the house, the stagnant and ironic
air as the light outside all day long
has looked glamorously approachable,
as it had tangled itself up along
the beach tree roots at the terrace,
you turn on your thickest coat, scarf
and walk down the now tar dark street

where suddenly the shock to mind
comes, as porches flicker by motion
lights and the fuzzy green limbs
of Christmas trees poke out of corridors
well-wishing as they do by childhood
ornaments and the likely stars,
red as printed paint, at the very tip
of the thirsty frazier firs,

when it dawns on you, your feet
cooling now, face hardening, nose
red, that each house is world,
like you, that when you were ten,
you walked into strange living rooms
of friends, if even temporary,
and could see mother fold damp
clothes smoking a filterless cigarette.

High Windows

"By day we pace the many decks
of the stone boat
and at night we are turned out in its high windows
like stars of another side..." – Merwin, from "The Estuary"










here there is always a coming back to
shadow
here along the tangled spine of trail

we do not hide above the footbridge
which has laid over the swift
tongues of the November creek

the steepest sandstone cliffs
listen to our own echo as the walnut strikes
or the boot soles slide over morning ice

the saws of yesterday still sound to the other side of the hollow
and the last morning wren
colors the the gray air with its punctuated note

the tumble of the lost stone dumbly spreads
the car lights probe
nothing but the bald naming of hours

that cross this life

As One Blade of Grass

"What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass..." – W.S. Merwin, from "A Contemporary"











Long green hips of the bluff side fairways
we can run along them by winter
as the golfers have only left their spring dreams
and before you know it
it is of an original scene by eyes of natives
the corners of the blue river
in the distance would be the knowledge
of water near for encampment
the prairie along this way for hunting rabbits

walk in under the roof of a limestone cave
and we know we can hear mother's voice
emphatic that children complete their tasks
and here I am wandering alone
among the hillocks peering through old growth
hunting for the view of the three hawks circling
above thermals knowing my shadow as it flies off

Blue Bridge Inn

"I remember waking at the rivers
to see girders of gray sleepless bridges"

– W.S. Merwin, from "Traveling West at Night"










Even here, among the crowded seats of the Blue Bridge Inn, the roaring of jazz
pumping muscularly through the speakers at every corner,
I cannot think that it is in the circles of chattering people that I live;
the car that almost clipped the back end of my own on the way here,
flagpoles along the way, posted at front yards, spinning, wrapping,
signaling the things that the household supposedly stands for and those
things espoused by a montage of voices by the news radio in the car,
I see drift away as so much vapor by morning lifting from marsh;
and then I enter by dream, by memory, last spring bent over a thicket
on my denimed knees scratching over the cross thatched leaves,
the old and sometimes cut stems of honeysuckle trees or bittersweet,
the emerging pink lips of the dames rocket, invasives to be eradicated.
We pull. We toss to a clump. Neighors that are strangers walk about.
Down below a fresh springs bubble under a hand made boardwalk,
this was the place where the Winnebago moved among the savannah.
They walked along the creek and watched the green underwater grass
curl over the same original rocks as a water so clear as invisible,
cleanse and move on as the thoughts of the breathing buddha once did.

A Friend from Yeh

"In flowering willows,
we rein in our horses;
at parting, we are free
to drink all the wine we desire."

– Chia Tao, from "Memento on the Departure of a Friend from Yeh, Last Day of the Second Moon"







The plates-full of stacked
turkey and potatoes all eaten;
it is late into afternoon
now and the stomach winces.

I pull the dog across
the street to tie her to a tree;
she will skip around the dirt,
dig holes seeking scents under snow.

If friends were the pockets
of moon glowing over
the white frozen bay
I would be in abundant company.

A stack of books is waiting for me
inside alongside a flute
of champagne still bubbling
over the rim of thin glass.

Never Find Me Again

"The rain I watch fall in the courtyard comes down at quite varying tempos." – Francis Ponge, from "Rain"










The bittersweet berries are so vivid laying along their emerging vines in the leaved canopy as to remind one of something entirely else; there is no need to think that these are berries of organic origin; as though, corpuscle by corpuscle, they emerged through a season and exploded to such orange pearl-like beauty; you sense that this must be of a miracle; it is truly the only word that works your mind at that moment; look around at the rest of the knoll; see that the juniper is a raw and savage trunk, leafless but defiant, like the old woman who you see so tough at the bus stop and you stop to wonder how she has done it all these years – to rise, dress, no help of others, no handout, hair a mess under a scarped bonnet; but not these berries; cosmic; I would take oracular advice from the voice that it heeds; a globe onto itself, a little sun without heat; and I enter into it, as we all must one day, curl up, lay my head down, take a taste, and know they will never find me again.

One More Part
of Our Watershed

"Our old truck too, slow down the street,
out of the past–
It's all so old – the hawk, the houses, the trucks,
the view the fog–
Midwinter late sun flashes though hilltops and trees
a good day, we know one more part of our watershed..."
– Synder, from "So Old"







We haven't been here long this morning.
Just arrived. Can hear the highway
from a quarter mile away.

What'd the old settlers have in mind
here at Juniper Knoll?
Not far off from Leopold's Arboretum workshack–
his old work table still in there pungent
of bootdirt and old feathers
windows looking out over
Gallistel Woods, that mixed and strangled
thicket, bittersweet snaking up every trunk –
but here, at the knoll, little berm,
Junipers leafless all the way up to the crippled crowns
would never thrive in rocky sandy soil.

Fill up the truck with loppers,
those little flip out saws bent at the handle
for buckthorn and the occasional thorny castor,
fill up the boxes with floppy work gloves
and warmed up water for tea and chocolate.

Sun layers down in between the plantings,
microscopes across the ridges of ice crystals
where the dirt road mud has all hardened
like ripples of sea waves,
white and jeweled at the edges and so temporary
that you have to get down on a denim knee
to see the surprise of early morning frost.
So this is how the real world lives.

Three cranes right along the trail at Curtis
early autumn had hobbled forward
on thin legs as if a cadre of farmers with hands
clutched behind their backs inspecting rows.
Last owl perched up there still as a clock.
On the ledge of the manufactured savannah,
quizzical deer poking noses into the brush
flapping spirited tails in love with shadows.

It was Leopold
who just about died when the city said
sure as hell the highway would be built.
He planted a row of towering pines
to block it all out but the noise.

I pull red vines out from under soggy leaves.

Under the Tumult was Peace

"For the groaning sound of its straining timbers, and the engine throbbing like an overtasked human heart, had made the ship seem a living thing to me; and it was tired of the struggle, and under the tumult was peace." – WH Hudson, from Idle Days of Patagonia










Above, by mind, the dream
of that steamer led by Hudson,
what I'll never know of El Negro
is that the earth passed
and passed around the image
of the Patagonian Aracauna
as the Conquistadors might
but as mist and vapor and the speculate
of something never achieved.
I too see the purple sparrow
flit around the odorous thorn bush,
what, perhaps, Darwin saw
by the long port of the Beagle,
a chiseled land flawed only
by its counter mirrors of the flesh
of the native indian born to defend.
For me, today, it will rain
along the eyelash of the bay
here at the frozen fields
of the midwest by November.
It would not matter whether
I had taken the helm of a Viking
ship here at the Mississippi mouth;
to fly along the braided edge
of the bluff lines familiar
by old farm trails matter less.
Set upon the tortured beautiful
land of the Andes only I grow.
A heart by mind and see straight again.

Aerial Farm

"...the blue day opening
as the sunlight descends through it all like the return
of a spirit touching without touch and unable
to believe it is here..."

– W.S. Merwin, from "Before A Departure in Spring"









And before I had arrived by the old highways
that we remember when by car light our parents
knew the country roads back home to the cities
and those days in November after the fields
had been harvested stood like sun peach baskets and stayed
that way in our minds and we always wondered
what drove us from the family of the country
as today I stand in a farmhouse kitchen fermenting yogurt
the television in the corner quiet and unused
below windows that frame the fields of red clover
and fallen rye used I am told for crop cover
and there it is the picture I remember when ten
years old in my grandparents' white tall farmhouse
the aerial photograph of their entire acreage
I used to sit and watch that photograph
and wondered what it might be like to pass over
by small plane to capture the face of the earth
so interlinked by the purpose of corn and soy
a thousand little creatures hidden under their fallen
oak limbs as two cows stand against a wooden fence
silent as songs we only sing to ourselves
the only time their picture would ever be taken

The Felt Voice
of Land

"And we desire to see the world intact, to step outside our emptiness and remember the strong currents that pass between humans and the rest of nature, currents that are the felt voice of land, heard in the cells of the body." – Linda Hogan, from "Creations"












Olbrich by Night



Now by 5:45 on the way to a class at Olbrich
all of the clatter of the streets has quieted
to the softer sounds of cold bike tires
or the dog-walkers crunching stiff ice
the entire miasma of colors have ceded
to simple lightless slate off the faces of houses
where from some smoke lifts gray to gray
and somehow dampens the siren of ambulance
along the capital end of East Washington Street
and I feel I am of two persons at the moment
the one who had wished away the days' busy hours
filled by fingertips of keyboard tasks
and now the other who has found friend night again
the lake quietly awake in its corner of the watershed
reflecting white piers of lights from apartment buildings
the shoreline trees themselves speak of permanence
brush strokes lifted over the pages of beaches
the last seagulls bobbing white candles
who will tomorrow leap up from the water
and follow clouds blindly beautifully south
holding the voice of the teacher again

Peach Blossom Spring
Bed and Breakfast

"My home? I'm stopping near the town,
stopping in a peaceful way, free and easy.
My sitting stops with the shade of tall trees,
my strolling stops inside the brushwood gate."
  – Yuan-ming, from "Stopping Wine"










We rush out to the side terrace to rake the golden leaves;
they are rich and supple born by a wet a autumn;
a snow had come and then preserved them like a treasure;
quickly, quickly! I say to my daughter, always in a rush;
neighbors walk by in something that stands for peace;
a dog or two behind them on leashes as they wag and bark.
I look up to our wise yellow house and see it reflects beauty.
It is of the same colors as the beauty of autumn,
wet in places but resilient against the coming of winter.
I pull the rake into me and come to love the grass underneath,
the leaf piles like little mounds of memory and I want
to take hold of each and dive down into the hidden spot,
and listen to my daughter sing again and hear her smile.
I have grown old and a bit too brittle to enjoy the clouds pass.
By tomorrow my heart will burn with the fires of compassion.
Lost last year off the tree and let it seep to soil and seed.

Peach Blossom Spring
Bed and Breakfast

"Liu Tau-chi of Nan-yang, a gentleman-recluse of lofty ideals, heard the story and began delightedly making plans to go there, but before he could carry them out, he fell sick and died. Since then there have been to more 'seekers of the ford.'" – T'ao Yuan-ming, from Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring










Now by November
here go the clouds
as hours along a clock
overhead white but
without numbers
and she said to me
sit for awhile and leave
your clicking work
reach up into it with
a fist and make it your
own hold it to your
breast for in the end
what else do you have
if not the eye
and the body your days
as they might widen
as sunlight to love
or grow up bone by
bone can you feel it
a dream has just floated
past and we could
not catch it the past
itself only a lost
season of leaves
blown to the street

Peach Blossom
Bed and Breakfast

"The other villagers invited the fisherman to visit their homes as well, each setting out wine and food for him. Thus he remained for several days before taking his leave. One of the villagers said to him, "I trust you won't tell the people on the outside about this place." –  T'ao Yuan-ming, from Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring










An Art of Coming Awake


They say you will come to miss everything
remember those days with busy mind
trying for hours to do nothing more than escape itself
it had worked all day and rarely fell silent

Or a first snow that fills up all the open spaces
six inches high in a circle along the small table
the rooftops white and shine as a new kind
of velvet laced along the eaves and gutters

even so it is always happens we reach for something
other and have come to know these days
as something to move away from never
by the burning hot ember of coming awake

Hours of the Soul

"The noisy honking of trucks and cars outside the window accompanies the drone of a teary conversation which gives me goose bumps – it seems to be coming from a movie which is showing on the basketball court. It's the same old story of melodramatic separation and reunion, only the time has changed." – Gao Xingjian, from Soul Mountain








I walk out onto my city courtyard,
it is all stone and only shows weeds
coming up from muddied cracks;
along the edges are planting beds,
raised a few feet above the shadows;
so this is my city farm and I walk
along hidden inside its tall gates
and I listen to the geese trail
their passing voices over the lake
which sits just across the street.
I do a little mind-roaming on sunny days.
I am sure I can rid myself of modernity
by thinking nothing and watching breath.
Here I am on an ancient mountain,
I am looking down on a string
of valleys speckled by friendly farmers;
after tending to a plot of mixed
crops and flowers a certain hour of the soul
comes calling again like the passing geese.
I pour an ale and I am not sure
where my imagination begins and ends.
Little poems circle about in the wind.
One last finger smudge of sunshine
streaks across the courtyard wall.
Tomorrow another poem will come.

Moving House Poems

"In one generation both court and city change–
be assured, that's no idle saying.
Man's life is a phantom affair,
and he returns at last to the empty void." – Tao Yuan-ming, "Returning to My Home in the Country, No. 4"











Could my days be like any others?
I flip up the screen of my computer
and click away for hours at papers and tasks;
but those are nothing more than wasted hours.
Outside the windows on fine fall days
there is a dream of autumn colors stirring;
I put the dog in the back and we drive
to Lake Mendota at the peninsula path.
Here the people are so outnumbered by golden leaves;
we find ourselves along a cove,
two foot waves spraying up along the ancient limestone;
a hollow of yellow maples and birch
stands like a stage of theatric beauty –
who needs the false contours of screens?
We run by old vestiges of hundred year old farm.
An apple orchard here built up into a shallow hillside,
horses for carriage and work, children at lessons.
Inside the mind of every man
is the old farmer standing over the produce
of the spring tilled land and secretly
in love with this world rotating a sun.

Never the Bluebird

"I am grateful
that red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else can do."   – Oliver, from "Red Bird"










Do you associate
the years of your life
by the beauty
of the birds you've seen?

Do you find then your
voice underneath
the crusted hush
of a world gone loud?

Someday I'll wish
back to me the hours
I've spent when, alone,
staking out my random

claims along the trails
behind our suburban
home the birch
stand poking its white

candles up through
the limestone
alighting the forest
a protest to all things gray.

Where once, unless
I was mistaken,
a bluebird had darted
out of a deep pine ring

as such a flash
that it startled me;
it was as if being
tossed onto a new ocean

from a stable boat
for the blue was a fabric,
no, it was a wise eye,
no, it was a plume

of planetary crystal
disrupting, thankfully,
the boredom that loomed
over that year of life.

Mary Oliver and the Art
of Observation in Nature

"When the high school I went to experienced a crisis of delinquent student behavior, my response was to start out for school every morning but to turn most mornings into the woods instead, with a knapsack of books. Always Whitman was among them." – Mary Oliver, from "My Friend Walt Whitman"










In the first class of the "Mary Oliver and the Art of Observation in Nature" series, we try to establish at least two important points as an introduction to her work. We take a brief look back at some of those influences such as Walt Whitman, who Oliver tells us she held so dear to her development as a young poet, and to set out ahead of us a framework of possible themes that allow us to hopefully enter into the mindset of a poet who has so distinctly chosen nature as her subject over the course of her writing career.

We make the brief point that when it comes to nature studies we can commonly grasp what it is that the naturalist might be seeking when she enters into the wetlands, forests, or seashores – natural data, phenology, growth patterns, wildlife – but what about the poet? Is there some kind of similar list compiled and used to seek from? For the poet, it seems that observable facts serve more as starting points of reference. They offer images and actions that allow pause and inspiration for some other less scientific, more personal, list of unfolding themes of observation which often aspire to fuse together nature and human experience.

Experience itself, the regular or prolonged interface with the natural world, is how the poet comes to recognize both the obvious otherness of nature but also the visceral interconnection of all things. If the nature poet has created a fine poem, based on experience, and lifted it into the realm of the meaningful beyond the mere scientific, then we too as readers have come as close as we can to contact with the natural world without being there ourselves.

Oliver pulls us through this transcendental flow nature appreciation in one of her wonderfully lyrical short essays "Comfort," where she recalls several hours of a night spent considering the meaning of a rainstorm along the narrow cape where she lives:

     And then, thinking of those bodies of water, I go mind roaming. I could name a hundred events,   
     hours, creatures, that have filled me with delight, and fructifying praise. Experience! experience! – 
     with the rain, and the trees, and all their kindred – has brought me a comfort and a modesty and a 
     devotion to inclusiveness that I would not give up for all the gold in all the mountains of the world. 
     This I knew, as I grew from simple delight toward thought and into conviction: such beauty as the 
     earth offers must hold great meaning. So I began to consider the world as emblematic as well as 
     real, and saw that it was – that shining word – virtuous. That it offers us, as surely as the wheat 
     and lilies grow, the dream of virtue.
     
     I think of this every day. I think of it when I meet the turtle with its patient green face, or hear the 
     hawk's tin-tongued skittering cry, or watch the otters at play in the pond. I am blood and bone 
     however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and 
     they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, 
     poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping.

Hours for the Soul

"Living down in the country again. A wonderful conjunction of all that goes to make those sometime miracle-hours after sunset – so near and yet so far. Perfect, or nearly perfect days, I notice, are not so very uncommon..." – Whitman, from Specimen Days






Oct. 12


The now idle harvest of October colors seems to hold its very own personality as it sits in waiting to show itself, as if a performer in make-up, as the dulling rain hushes the lights of the cameras. To some, we are audiences here in the midwest. Some drive hours along highway 53 north to find the great outposts of autumn colors. I found the contrast once again just yesterday as I awoke and again tended to the water pumps which has been fishing the excess from under out home for two weeks now and the rain comes down intermittently and at all hours; the world becomes something of a thousand little rivulets along the sidewalks and down through the jagged gutters where the semblance of glorious leaves clutter the flow but also desire to glow like the trees themselves. Will we ever do away with such subjectivity? Transcendentalists we are, but hidden, as if underneath the detritus of history and lack of reading; who does not revert themselves to a desire of awakening of the love that is nature inside our hours for the soul? I claim here an abundance. I could rid myself of the near terror of standard brick and mortar hours; I sense an empathy, no a pure sympathy, for those of us stuck inside the clouded inner walls of old buildings and catch only the glimpse of one day's sunshine out a crack of the window. Deprivation is not how the earth whirls. Eons have crowded the first and most profound love of the blazing star and shrunk it to false galaxies of our screens; all the while, the trees explode themselves by the processes that lay technology as a dormant hoax. I drove back to LaCrosse and the rain lowed. Trees along the interstate so vivid as to rear the mind back to some confounded pulse, an essence, the origin of color itself; the cars became blurs; the people within ghosts; it takes but minutes to tip ones proverbial hat at all of that, duck out the door, say hello again to the world.

Brute Neighbors

"Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life." – Thoreau, from Walden









October Gulls


Oh that flicker
of the white kite
that was the carousing gulls
out the back window
a handfull
filled the glass as if inside a frame;
for the midwest
has now become rain
by autumn,
the dampening of the rusted red
and the electric
fuchsias that once
carried along
in our childhood
memories of such season
has dampened
as if the tender
of a basement light
has lost the switch;
but the gulls
aflash,
who sweep down
the miniature
jet streams that ripple
the crust of the dark bay,
I did not know
they were as precise
of fishers
as the eagle or osprey;
I did not know
that the fry
might use this little
manmade plot
of the bay
for their incubation
and flop
as if silly lures
up over the surface,
brown bellies
gleaming as if a celebrative
offering
to gulls otherwise
waiting along the docks
the patience
that comes by the scavenger's
understanding
that the world is a meal
of you wait long enough.
The one
had dived down
far enough to lose its beak and eyes
for only a moment
to the charcoal water;
do you imagine
the eyes closed and the water
awoke some skeletal
symbol
from eons past?
Other gulls in the distance
had already plucked their share;
they had felt
the electric shock
of another kind,
a stern love of moving
to warmer air
for the season.
From space the clouds
look like puffs
of fisherman smoke.
There is blue everywhere.

Wannabe Farmer

"That happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer?       – Oliver, "Roses, Late Summer"







Last night
as the sunlight faded
across the hall
of the October bluffs
the bay flickered
by young fish.

What fish they were
did not matter,
for it was a sound
and a hundred little
flashes of silver
that caught the eye.

It was an entertainment,
the kind that flashes by
along the broad surfaces
of the earth every moment,
of every day like messages
of love that emanate
from our minds, silent.

Later we learned
again the childs' lesson
of our sun, our largest star,
how it's enormous
powers had been unlocked
by an explosion
and then re-coralled
into its own clouded, circling empire.

A million miles
away the last of the burst protons
have reached the thin
gray sheen of water of the blackening bay
and indicates night –
a warmth stirs the fish to bite.
Gnats, perhaps, no larger
than dust specs find the belly
of fish and wash
into another universe.

Why We'll Love
The Bluebird:
A Notebook

"Sacramento River, along barren hills, tawny,
And spurts of shallow wind from the bay
And on the bridges my tires drum out a meter.
– Milosz, from "The Separate Notebooks"












He suggests to himself daily that there are few left.
A voice from radio news is nearly pungent.
It is that there may be a kernel of truth in the verbiage
that he continues to listen as the billboards pass,
as the orange cones that line our lives surround
us all left and right as the river below, green, floods.


How could he not remember the years that passed when, young, his mind had come to fill with the necessity of nature, not the nature of the previous generations of farmers and hunters, of the stern men with long jaws who hid in blinds with shotguns waiting for the birds to pass overhead – the smell of those feathers eventually, the buckshot laced in the untamed meat of the mallards – but a nature that was the fabric of the very self, the wetlands that passed by on long bike rides, how the green smatterings of landscape were composites of his own relative speed through that very scene. He could not have seen then this was a truer earthly love. Trails up limestone ridges; how the flora and fauna evolved as the climb rose up to peaks, over and over again, to touch the sky, and that hope rose in unison as the sounds of the city fell to shadow and then disappeared.


Now out the window of the city house flood water
is expelled out of a long white hose that reaches the sidewalk.
Houses across the street wrapped in autumn gloom
as climate has arrested its old patterns and sit to brood.
Earth asks for little; it takes; it tries to breath; we pass
in cars and swift and calculated dreams that tether us to screens.
He once sat outside on a back deck and wondered
whether it was a bluebird he observed circling a new nest.


Bluebird, bluebird what am I
Bluebird, a fine and delicate art
bluebird a flash of all things
Provide the sky; the leaves for nesting;
Bluebird, someday we will learn
to love the world (ourselves) again


"In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance on faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature." – Emerson, from The Transcendentalist

Watershed Poems

"I made my home west of the Sea
where water fills Sky Lake and the moon fills the river
people are frightened when they see the heights
but once they arrive they know the trail..."  – Stonehouse 1







1

Our street name is fitting at Riverside Drive
from any window the Yahara river flows
old city bridges made of quarried stone
click all day from neighborhood traffic
even though each fall these days is flooding
we know that water is not the menace
we build an entire world on top of an isthmus
lakesides swell and the dam is overridden

2

Here on our corner my yellow house glows
it sits under a young oak rising up the boulevard
the bridges are like palms handing over traffic
and the ducks on the Yahara know nothing of flooding
five years ago I saw a courtyard full of neighbors
outdoor tables lined by fine foods and drinks
September here it rains all day like a monsoon
farmers by the rural areas sit behind wet windows

Songs of the
Santa Catalinas

"...who can get past the tangles of the world
and sit with me in the clouds..." – Cold Mountain 32













3

The Catalina outcrops never end
I follow the false horizons ever upward
finger rock trail a desert pilgrim
look back down the canyon to the fading city
downtown skyscrapers the size of the saguaro
that stands right before me green holy symbol
the ripe red fruit of the prickly pear
tumbles down quietly in offering

4

city streets under the cloud of desert heat
streetlights flash and cars idle to a stop
we dash across the street in hope of safety
loud music blares from a truck the size of a tank
later when I reach the top of finger rock trail
I hold like a grasshopper each thought
then let them leap up and fly to the sand below
release every blinking image and know home

Santa Catalinas
Revisitied

"Wise ones you ignore me
I ignore you fools
neither wise nor foolish
I'll disappear henceforth..." – Cold Mountain 30










1

A fine stampot of pork at the Dutch
Two ales and thoughts of whiskey
The streets of Tucson become lit up
and students pass in dark happy masks
I look north to the Santa Catalinas
for my daily earthly sustenance
the day I finally disappear as canyon
you will finally know who I am


2

the mind today pairs with electrodes
washed screens full of bright pixels
the world is an electric mess with no soul
and we spend our days knowing less
someday you will hold a canyon rock
and inspect it for its thousands of years
one strand will reflect your guazy eyes
you could still learn to live again

And So, The Desert

"...friends hug your suburbs
farmlands are given a nod
but I know the path
to your wilderness."  – Snyder, from "The Earth's Wild Places"











I saw the pool on my own
out at the end of all the haciendas

sat out on the last chair pointing
at the foothills of Santa Catalinas
like a compass    was no barrier between
us

just a glass fence and then the suburban
cacti the rough old horse paths
littered by blown water bottles other trash
golf course rising up
like a string of green lush islands linked
and made it all seem alright

other eyes looking down on us
from Mt. Kimball out on the horizon
up along the Finger Rock Trail
were my own eyes from a day ago

I wolf that I had never seen
I mountain goat bobcat ochotillo rising
up by its thick living room stalks
where I was in love by the saguaro green

one had fallen only one
and lay flat along the trail
just the ribs of it brown and dessicated
the clear outline of what was before
sleeping now

Her Singing Has the Lilt

"This maid is from Hantan
her singing has the lilt
make use of her refuge..."
– Cold Mountain 28










We could watch all night
the moonlit jacket of the bay
we might sleep for hours
and awake with mountain eyes
and yet we will still part
from our lives like old friends
one man stayed out on the boat
another off to the city alone

The Green River's End

"Sitting in the boat, I look at red trees and forget how far I've come.
Drifting to the green river's end, I see no one." – Wang Wei, from "Song of the Peach Tree Spring"











The Sunset Trail very few have taken and we are the only ones gliding along on bikes.
It is near dawn and each powder green pocket of the woods swarm by mosquitos.
We pass along fast enough, chasing the last bars of sunlight across the trail, and they cannot land.
All of the cars along the shoreline road have exited the Peninsula.
We watch the round blaze of headlights as they follow their own trail back to hotel rooms.
As all of the people have retreated we hear only the great lake now as our companion
and it laps along the rocky shore as if an enormous snare across a drum.
A few night hawks circle above the old bay lighthouse as we pass it, now asleep, window lids shut.
The old world opens up. Whose postcards had shown men and women from the thirties
gather around a wooden stage up near Nicolet Bay and the children helped to build a fire.
We might hear singing and the crackle of flames from a bonfire as faces lit up like bright moons.
At every old and haggard pine rising up dark as charcoal we found the spirals of silence bloom.
We had thought of living along the blanket of the beach. What morning bird woke us up.

They Know the Trail

"...people are frightened when they see the heights
but once they arrive they know the trail..." – Stonehouse, 1












1.

Spend most of my days thinking of mountains
not necessarily Rainier or Hood out west
but any place where perceptions fall away
and the leaves from aspens become new friends
Out on Sunset Trail along Door Peninsula
there was the great lake just waiting there
what else do we want from our oldest of friends
wide beautiful blue faces singing invitations

You Can Carve
All You Want

"...even if they manage to avoid the karma of good deeds, bad deeds, and inactivity, if they deceive others with words, their meditation won't be true. It's like carving a turd to look like sandalwood. You can carve all you want, but you can't make it smell like incense." – from Stonehouse, Zen Talks











Aug. 8


We took Cty. Rd F from Fish Creek to Bailey's Harbor, nothing more than a fifteen minute drive through the inland farms and wildflower fields. All the edges of Door are full of every imaginable business, restuarant, cafe, park for observation, but the inland is still a throwback to old times where you can use your imagination again and wonder what it must have been like to farm a piece of land that was, only a few miles away, completely surrounded by Lake Michigan. This is what you find out once at Bailey's Harbor. The Ridges Sanctuary is not something you see often, a preserved and finely trailed (accessible) swatch of land that shows us the various receding shorelines of the lake, beginning somewhere around 1400 to current day. Every new shoreline had left its mark and its residue and has left now terraces called swales – a sort of flat ring of land parallelting today's lake and which grows in a variety of flaura and fauna. We stopped along a boardwalk bench at sandy swale, one of those of a series of four, and looked out onto a brilliant field of high rising grasses, not a single invasive in sight. It trailed off in the distance much like a pond might, its own edges not quite visible, surrounded by the foreignly beatiful and layered Tamarack trees which must feed well near water. Of throwbacks – and who doesn't need to experience things that they have never quite seen before – we get a chance to see a Boreal Forest thriving and virtually untouched. The contrast of this purity, this history by green, tells us immediately a story of encroachment, of course, for, as mentioned, the rest of Door is encroachment, the very essence of it. What is it that works over the mind here? We had just come off the Wintergreen Trail, lined by ground cover Juniper, more Tamaracks, Blackberry bramples and sedges a few feet down. The deeper we got into Wintergreen the less we could hear the traffic. If you make it this deep, the phone in your pocket begins to seem like a disturbance. I believe the mind needs a sort of counter balance at all times in our age. If we are not stunned by what we are doing away from the phone, then we will grab for the phone. The silence here at the Sanctuary, the pristine diversity is very much like walking through a painting of rare beauty and therefore gathers our attention, silences that spinning that always working over us the rest of our lives. I consider it for art and would be inspired to make my feeble attempts at painting. Later in the day, driving away from here, I can actually sense the magnetic beauty of the swales fade some. Could I live here? Could I live in among this natural bath? Love does come in a hundred forms. We spend most of our days thinking it can only come by one form, that of another, a mate, and the conversation and intimacy that comes along. All the while we walk among a earth that constitutes virtually all of our existence. All of it. Everywhere, all the time, bathing us, not asking a thing but to exist. We don't even have to think of it as necessarily giving. It just is. But because our selves have evolved along with this such scenes, we may (and should be I'd say) attracted to it. Instead we live as though the swales and other parcels like it, are something of a traveling minstrel show, only to be loved here and there like visitors. We might just as well uproot our lives, move to a swale, learn to love again all. What would happen then?


1.
I left all my things at my city home
A bed a couch every little kitchen utensel
And filled the car with essential clothing
Then headed out for the town of Fish Creek
With a certain frame of mind nothing mattered
Not the fifty years behind or decade or two to come
I found it a good omen that the sky was cerulean
And that I found my little cottage ten steps from the Lake

One Granite Ridge

"One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool..." – Snyder, from "Piute Creek"











"Once you get past
the thousand cars
then you will see..."
Could close your eyes
for first hour not yet
to the four hawks
circling up there at top
of Pothole trail
where the rockfall
as mystic as a wild curtain.
"Who made this place?"
Could close your eyes
for the first hour not yet
craggy juniper that
dances right out of cracks
of the erupted quartzite
where we'll wonder
why the world does
to come to call here
for all the worlds' secrets.
Could close your eyes
for the first hour not yet
that gulley we've come
to love like a sister, mother
father and elder
for it has laid its hand
wide open for us,
gave us that creek.
"Why don't we learn
to love like the creek does?"
We sit and learn
that the lake isn't just
a lake – it speaks.
Listen says the wind
and is off leaping rock to rock.

Pines Grasp the Clouds

"In splintery cookhouse light
grab my tin pisspot hat
Ride off to the show in a crummy-truck
And start the Cat..." – Snyder, from Myths and Texts











Same old brown water bay
at the receiving end of spillway.
Been on TV recently,
log rollers spin away in the shallows
sponsors' flags, fine crowd
for a saturday, cameras aroll,
a train rolling past shrieking brakes.
Just across the impoundment
an airport and the metal birds
all day circling waiting their moment.
It's not what I'm doing
but the want of it – jump in!
the lake, shuck the two-hull pontoon,
get rid of the fast little machines
and floating blow ups.
Swim up stream alongside the fish,
bot with the corking timber afloat.
Wade up into deep sand shorelines
find the wood, start the fire,
listen to the wildwoods
and find great blue heron friends.
The old Voyageurs
used to tip their boats upside down
at night, light up a smudge,
listen to the bugs buzz
around the birchbark, smoke 'em
out and peel off the skin
of carp – the tomorrows
of the tomorrows down in raw river.
Trade shacks ten skins
hanging along the drying rope.
"Good to see ya Slim."
Then off again into the woods.

The Way is the Refuge

"The way is the refuge for the myriad creatures.
It is that by which the good man protects,
And that by which the bad is protected.
Beautiful words when offered will win high rank in return." – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching









July 31


At eye level
hunched over paddle board
chop of waves
comes the voice
of the earth

listen to the chatter
listen to the alter ego
for most the time
we stand so stern above
and say to ourselves
        – thank you river for the fish
           thank you for the blue
           thank you for the speed
           by motors
           and our lovely sails

feet down there deep
under the board
and it is the bowels
of the earth cooling
down to where the washed
over timber has been
blinded but not unloved
by the call the flow

let go of the board
who are you my son
water to water
two diamond eyes
two miracles by pupils
back home again

Long Day's Eyes

"The sage in his attempt to distract the mind of the empire seeks urgently to muddle it." – Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching












July 30


Late evening, sun an orange cloth
laid out over the bay
and this way, out among
fish splash, a last warmth
and here comes neighbor
pulling down his kayak
to the beach slowly folding
into shape his lifejacket
looking out of long day's
eyes all covered in numbers
raised voices to the office.
Who am I but Lao Tzu's
silly old sage really – always
thinking the mindpot
through, casting out what
to do, who does it, why.
Pontoon boats tied to docks
hover cheerily so unknowing
over on the other side of bay.
A sort of cartoon of beauty
now laying there for the take.
The grass over on this side
groomed as a golf course.
Neighbor paddling perfectly
stabbing at the silver,
the orange, the blue green
that laps up along side.
Tomorrow he wishes
he'd not decided to forty
years ago to live without
the world at his side.

As the River and the Sea
are to Rivulets and Streams

"Only when it is cut are there names.
As soon as there are names
One ought to know that it is time to stop.
Knowing when to stop one can be free from danger.
The way is to the world as the River and the Sea are to
rivulets and streams. " – Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching









Too fine a day.
To waste on details, detritus
to clean up every crack
of the courtyyard
out back – itself now aglow without my help,
first thing that comes
to mind is not more of this
more of that, but subtraction of things,
pull out a few bricks
relearn love of earth again,
get hands wet,
and so set kayak
up on my back and walk
across the green
to old friend Yahara
plumb and ripe – a flowing fruit.

and paddle over boatswell rivulets
to Starkweather Creek
where old bridges span
over duckweed wraps,
motors like choking lions
spin off the landing docks
black carbon swirls
up through the unknowing
giddy leaves of cotton trees.

I look into the neighborhoods
to either side of the creek.
Old houses asleep.
Cars twenty years old
at ready outside back doors.
Garbage cans at curbs.
Hiding up in a little muddy
cover of river bend ahead
little family of city ducks
line up at the breast wings
of ma and pa

and don't move into phosphorous
water until
the giant blue floating leaf
passes ten feet by

not a trace
of me
left

Another Day Has Come

"Another day has come,
Another fabulous escape from the damages of night,
So even the gulls, in the ragged circle of their flight,
Above the sea's long lanes that flash and fall, scream
Their approval..." – Mark Strand, from "A.M."










We could just as easily guage our terror
by how the lightening had begun to spear
down over the darkening bay, itself lit
like such a black mirror struck by jagged fissures,
for aren't they so indiscriminate as to tease
us away from any knowing of what is to come;
now, this is no longer a childhood of weather.
I remember that clandestine meadow
once lured me into its own innocent
auditorium as if by a Circe's fleshy fingers
and most of me then felt of the meadow:
a buzzing above the pollinators soaked
by a motherhood of sunshine so pure
as to wipe away every single lingering fear.
I remember the stolid blue bays of Superior
how they too sent out a sort of hand
to knowing, the ancient rocks surrounding,
buoying up the docked tankers which had
made its own course journey over mere
lake waves and I had come to its secrecy,
those scenes which have lasted forever.
The lightening had come and hovered
over our lives for the stretch of hours,
it knows nothing, it does not strive or repent.
When the world first too breath we wonder
if this was one of the scenes. Look inward.

Learning to Cook Alone

"Any oyster stew is made quickly, about as fast as the hand can follow the mind or the mind the eye. Oyster soup takes longer, can cost much or little, and pleases some people even more than it bores others." – Fisher, from "Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup"





What you might gain by cooking for one is the simple rerouting of the signals of hunger directly to what results on the plate. What you lose is nothing less than the reverse – as you cook for others, your own hunger is set aside and refashioned somewhere in the food imagination where you do your damndest to picture how so and so might enjoy the dish you are preparting. One satisfied the vanity of the individual taste, the other, if done well, satisfies the tastes of a variety of mouths. In a perfect cooking world, of course, these two seemingly stray phenomenon merge and the restauranteur, for example, or the good home cook, as another example, prepares simultaneously for just what he or she would love to eat, and only the praiseworthy eyes of the other eaters will tell the tale. This might all sound a little overly philosophical they are ideas that come to mind as so many of us home cooks lose a few mouths due to one reason or another.

Last evening I had decided on scallops and a cream corn concoction – a very simple recipe really, essentially a surf and vegetable combination that didn't need much flare, but it was a recipe that I had chosen for myself because it looked tempting in the magazine and I could just about taste the perfectly browned and cooked scallop, a fine art onto itself as most of us who tried cooking the scallop can attest. It's also a meal that might have been predominantly pushed aside on the plate in the past as three daughters, without any doubt, would have poked, prodded, and smelled the scallops for a few moments, surrounded by a cream corn which advertised bits of red onion and even clips of basil, another potent aroma not always craved by youth.

Even for myself, I wanted to take the essence of the ingredients and cook it all in the way that I would like to eat it. I would pull out a few past tricks for the scallops first – not exactly a revelation for anyone who has dropped a scallop on an overly hot pan, not properly oiled, and proceeded to watch the most sensitive skin stick so severely to the bottom that the scallop becomes, before you know it, half its original size. I decided to use my cast iron this time around, not copper, which is notorious for fast hot heat and needs the most attention of any pan type that I own. The cast iron heat is a fascinating one – it is deep and long, and the many little bumps of its surface can serve as a way to avoid the sticking properties of smoother metal. Pat away all the moisture of scallop, drop them down onto a medium heat and give them a swirl before the initial sticking. I flicked pinches of southwestern spice over the tops and let the first side go long enough to picture a browning along the bottom without blackening and an invisible heat to rise up through the bottom half.

For the corn, I used frozen corn instead of cutting away kernels from the cob. First, diced red onion to sautee in another pan, then the frozen corn, and enough evaporated milk to cover. I wanted to picture how much time it might take for the milk to tighten the corn; then a few cut vine ripened tomatoes, plus salt and pepper. I realized then that I had a fine base that I could easily transfer over the scallops into to finish out any cooking that was necessary. No need for basil, parsely, or anything else. I began to see it all as a sort of stew. That was not what the recipe was called, but how I began to see how I might like it. My scallops came up clean off the pan. I gave them a gentle prod in their middles – nobody likes a scallop that has the beatiful venner of a perfectly cooked bi valve, but then is cool in the middle. These are some of the cooking zones that probably persuade some eaters against the scallop – rubbery potential, lost skin due to too high of initial heat, uncooked middle. In the end, I wanted to test to see whether any other cooking method could beat grilling on aluminum foil, a technique that is very hard to mess up and so one of the more common.

Scallop essence commingled with a strengthening taste coming out of the corn, onion, milk combination, which began to boil up, congeal, and I knew that the scallops by this point were likely cooked through from the moist heat. I quickly dished. A touch of salt, a scratch of pepper, a wonderful compliment. I can't claim chemical expertise with anything that I cook but I will always vouge for the common eye to stomach test. This time it told me that the textures of the soft muscle of the scallop and the semi-sweet crispness of corn kernels, draped by a milk base, might hold well. I'm not one to over indulge on scallops – they usually find a place on the table once every three months, but I was easily able to eat four large, the corn underneath a nice stew. I told myself that I was satisfied the self responded back that that was it had intended from earlier in the morning when the recipe first flashed on the page. Another part of me wondered if anyone else would have eaten such a thing.