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