Songs from Along the Cove

"Flowers fade to scraps of red. Small gree apricots.
Swallows are flying
and green water circles a house."
– Su Shi, from "To the Tune of 'Prelude to the Water Song.'"






On land we wait for the fiddleheads to unroll
upward to new sun like little jade snakes.

Off the pier, sitting on the edge of the boat,
there has been a garden rising for days –

Wind stirs up the tips of soft waves and rise
at a constant pace against the broken cove.

Soon there will be sailboats where the ice sheet
lay out beyond like steel gray blankets.

As the city crashes along in the background
behind the isthmus preserve I have forgotten

there are such things as days; stretch out a line
to the water garden and listen to the blue song.

Songs from Along the Cove

"My small house is like a fishing boat
surrounded by water and clouds.
In the empty kitchen cold vegetables are boiled,
wet reeds burning in the broken stove."
– Su Shi, from "Rain on the Festival of Cold Food"





Living on a Boat


How many these days wake
to the crashing lake waves against their boat?
Our double hull here is hitched
to the long pier like a wayward horse.

Out on the deck, against a cool morning sun
I find my legs after a long cup,
then my eyes begin to face back into water
as morning coots scuttle across the cove.

Look around, we are in a great cup!
Rocky lake, shoreline sandstone,
we work all day by draping clothes
across our lines and dry by hours' waves.

"There are a lot of words meaning thanks.
Some you can only whisper.
Others you can only sing." – Oliver,  "Poem: The Morning Walk"







Through the slats of the blinds
you can tell, as soon as you pull the curtains,
whether the day is a thank you.

Three black forks of the oak shadow
crawl across the siding
of the neighbor's house – we know
the most important fact,
that the coming spring sunshine
has finally gathered it's courage
from the east
and will soon parade across the hours
lighting up the detritus
of the sidewalks, the gutters,
and had found its way into dreams.

The river side today splashing
by our wintering ducks
will waddle across the same street,
and the traffic, patient now by the kindness
of sunlight, will stop, watch,
and wish they could follow them
down into the cool blue water.

 Kitchen Daily

"All these, though are relatively important. There are only three things I need, to make my kitchen a pleasant one as long as it is clean. First, I need space enough to get a good simple for six people. Then, I need a window or two, for clear air and a sight of things growing. Most of all I need to be let alone. I need peace." – Fisher, from "Sing of Dinner in a Dish"




Squash is Peace


There was sitting at the end of deep green granite countertop a fine salmon sandwich that I made two hours ago – it was a fine slab of salmon from a night ago (salmon saves for a day so well!), two cut pieces of a Tuscan rubbed cowmilk cheese and a few shreds of arugula and micro greens. My daughter must have passed on the sandwich and let it set as she headed out the door. I was tempted to take it for myself. I had exactly the same sandwich for lunch and therefore knew that it would work just dandy as a substitute for what I would choose to cook otherwise.

But it was Friday night, I was alone, the sun still shone out onto the concrete courtyard that lay right outside the sliding glass door in which, only a few steps across, hung on the side of the garage facing me, a stone mural of the sun still held a slight turquoise gleam at its sunray tips. What had tempted me to wrap the sandwich and begin to unpack the refrigerated ingredients was not appetite, but a very basic need to get some work done in the kitchen.

Have you had this feeling come over you? Sometimes I am left to wonder after a particularly fast and anxious day or, for that matter, a long relatively dull day, how else are urban moderns really ever supposed to get our hands dirty, so to speak, in our days? I can't imagine anyone really imagining that six hours of clicking away at the keyboard, or soaking our eyes over our laptop screens, or thumbing our texts, is considered real work, right? I prod at this question because I am one of them, cuddling up to my own screen as a brother, a lover, a business partner, daily.

I've noticed that at the witching hour of each of these days the draw to immerse inside the even larger screen of the TV is as enticing as the Homer's water sirens, singing to me 'come, sit down along the couch, have the phone next to you, watch till your heart's desire.' These siren songs cannot be an exclusive wooing as evidenced by the glimmering lights that shine through in blues and flashing reds along a good portion of the neighborhood down the street.

One must silence the siren, pack away the phone, and seek out a little sliver of peace as a kind of dreaming resistence. Hence, the packing away of the salmon sandwich into the refrigerator – an easy leftover for the following lunch, pour juicy pale ale (yes, Three Sheeps calls it this), and begin to unpack ingredients for what looks to be a promising recipe for Butternut Squash and Black Bean Chili, a nice vegetarian option for my daughter who I hope might come to the dinner table tomorrow night, see this fine bowl of chili towering with the slender pita chips, and wonder when I found time to make it.

Daily Regeneration

"Abandon all your projects so you can be with the flower with no intention of exploiting it or getting something from it..." Hanh, from "Our Life is a Work of Art"











Or Mere Smile


Buddha had held up a flower among a thousand followers.
He was seeking reactions. What was this flower, who could truly see?
This situation did not lend itself for all to fully understand what was expected.
A particular color, a growth pattern, a hundred cross petals, who could say.
In the crowd, however, Buddha saw a man he knew by name
and he must have been thinking little for all he held was a smile.

The flower is also our hours. The flower the minor miracle of a gull flying overhead.

Yesterday the first day of daylight's savings and we walked out over
slightly melting ice sheet of the bay here near the end of this winter.
It was as bright a white as any seen in the Mediterranean, the Tibetan Plateau.
We might stop in our tracks, loosen up the hoods to fully hear the wind
shake the snow off the surrounding limbs of trees and bathe in it for a moment.
Close your eyes. What comes to mind but the pistil of the sun raining down
and reflecting directly back up.

Morning, darker than before. On the way back from dropping a child at school
a haze of light had by now begun to accumulate along the northern bluffs.
The street side trees had parted to open a triangle of open air,
where a small white plane dashed across, the airport no more than thousands of feet away.
So easy to complain of the airport, the airplane, the early morning dark.
To say goodbye to your daughter in the morning leaves
a vast space surrounding your life, but they are all flowers that rise
up through us, up from a ground that is or is not seen,

a stem, a seed, a longing for summer days or mere smile.

Notes from the Isthmus

"The city, in contrast, seemed to be sizzling and frying with violent hungers. I saw violence against nature in the wanton disturbance of soils, whole acres scraped bare for construction, the bedrock shattered by dynamite blasts, hills cleft in two for highways..." – Tallmadge, from The Cincinnati Arch






One March day, particularly gray, a drizzle across the horizon,
and you have taken a walk along John Nolen
where the thick traffic curves at the shoreline of Monona
and what you see is the dismal streets piled up by dark snow,
vast filters, so to speak, of spit dirt from car wheels,
or white lungs, choiceless at street level, accepting exhaust.
The birds that day are the bounty of gulls. Their shrieks are solemn.
There is a touch of religiosity in the melting gray of March,
as if one brief expectation of a peeking sun would rally worship.
Another day, maybe morning, same precise scene, for we all take
this one many times. It is of the city's busiest and common.
Monona Terrace juts out of the city's belly out over the lake,
its blue windows now culling from the blue sky,
lake a farm of crystal. There is a couple out a way onto the ice.
One of them is pulling a small sled behind them toward a snow hut
that is no doubt slowly collapsing under warmer temperatures.
Today the splatters of the car wheels are of the variety we remember
from our youth as the mysteries of vast puddles used to form
for our jumping or thinly wading pleasure.
That same gull under an electric sun is an omen like a stark
voice from a more benevolent past.
You see yourself walking up among the mid-level skyscrapers
as the cafes are starved for their patios, outlined by wrought iron
holding you in inside your coffee dream
and for this day the lake city an island of gifts floating over water.

Regeneration

"no one hears then as she goes on singing
of all the white days that were brought to us one
by one that turned to colors around us"

– Merwin, from "Prophecy"









We and the World Meet


Air that even here in the midwest lightens
as we gain altitude up an old and long quarry
trail that curves left and right among hickory
and maples and forms limestone hollows
that form spaces of all silence and knowledge

no one else today sees that it is these chambers
that recede inward that also bloom to light
above through the cracks in the rockbound birches

and an eye here sees what it needs of all things
how the soul found its name in the first place

always from where we and the world meet