A Friend Beside Me

"...a friend beside me whom I do not see
without words making it come clear to me
the youth of heaven the ages of light"
– Merwin from "At Night Before Spring"










Owl Down

As important to know owl
that soft bunch of wind blown feather
who must have slipped the night before
perhaps the light of the road
was lower than that of the moon
I suspect a car or two passing above
and the silver sheen of old snow
had found it lying along dead oak
nothing more than new weight
a glove from a hand dropped
and as I pass watching another silver
curve of cloud above in blue
I sense before I arrive here the woods
know less than I do so still and numb
my bones of the same trunk
and of the same of half froze cones
that stand tilted submerged near owl
the eyes of an island of all living
opened as if a map to a hollow
near as bone and timber and lost
untold dreams of dark mice singing

Enter the Driftless

"The tempest being over, I waited till the floods of rain had run off the ground, then took leave of my friends, and departed. The air was now cool and salubrious, and riding seven or eight miles, through a pine forest, I came to Sapello bridge, to which the salt tide flows."
– from Bartram's Living Legacy









The little local side trips of life can mean the difference between sulking boredom and an immediate spiritual lift. Watch how you nearly, sometimes, have to drag yourself up and into a coat, hat and gloves, pack the dog, and get in the car for even the shortest of drives during the dreary, post white winter months. We all know time itself stands a little stiller in February, March, April and at least the TV is still showing us sharp images of things. Indeed, I just last night finished a contemporary documentary movie following a mother and daughter who decided to walk and ski back country from Vancouver Canada to Skagway Alaskay over a series of several months. The footage was, of course, distinct, raw and exhilarating from right there at the couch. This morning is so bland and gray that I have already begun to devise my plan for yanking myself out into it, run the dog along Picnic Point, listen for incoming birds of any color, and watch water from afar. The domestic traveler has to do many many things to recreate in the smallest ways that which we watch on our screens. Who doesn't wrestle with the mismatch of abundance offered on screen versus the seeming dirth of a midwestern spring. Nonetheless, as I know, only twenty minutes out on trail, head phones off, even the gray world will come alive and a certain spirring of the spirit will invariably come.

Only two weeks ago I did some of this initial self-dragging. I was in Onalaska visiting; this is smaller city set right along the Mississippi and surrounded by the great chain of bluffs. It takes very little time to get onto one of these bluff sides and start your way up relatively mild climbs through nearly always accommodating forests, really some of the most hospitable countryside one could possibly imagine. There has always been a favorite rock that we liked to hike up to for years. Access can be fairly easy as a new conservancy allows for parking half way up a bluff at a cul de sac, a great route for a very quick nature dose. The trail immediately begins as an invitation; it is an old farm log road and winds through a remnant oak opening – those that would have virtually defined this entire area two hundred years ago; and in fact the LaCrosse area used to be called Prairie La Crosse, and if you had sidled up to the downtown shoreline hundreds of years ago, by most accounts, you would have not seen a tree for miles, all sand and prairie. Now to find prairie you have to find the little remaining pockets left, very few natural occurring without maintained tractor trimming or burning. As quickly as I can I turn on the old farmer persona and wonder what it might have been like to push cattle up this higher road for grazing or storage. These particular set of bluffs at Greens Coulee would have been empty except for a smattering of homesteads; they are now suburbs, lined at every amenable slot by large houses, but the rolling contours still visible, beautiful, and full of life above the building ground. A short walk takes you up to the always diverse ridge lines of these bluffs where a new semi-micro climate of growth often begins – the standard basswood, maple, elm forest transforms some to birch and scrub pines as well as juniper low lying along the ground. The crown jewel of the bluff works though is always the sandstone. Small cairns or quarries might appear, as it does just one lobe away from here at a primary quarry of old, which now looks like a cut out dome with park table and fire pit for the casual visitor.

My rock is a windswept head with neck. It's the only of its kind in the area the I know of. How it has maintained itself over all this time is hard to know, but it stands out as foreign to the landscape, not by coloration, but that it looks like its directly out of somewhere at Arches National Park, a fairly slender base that then forms to an eight by eight rock head. You can climb it with ease and sit on its titled but flat surface and watch the entirety of the valley. I give myself five minutes to sit and breath it in, watch my breath, remember the snapshot, and realize at that very moment that this could serve as its own footage of the drift less region, the scenes dramatic enough to capture anyone's attention. It took me approximately twenty minutes to get here. I have the bluff to myself. I see the roads below at the food of the neighborhoods. One or two people walking past the last red barn in the area. Cars to and fro.

Enter the Driftless

"Both agree that human mechanisms of perception, stunted as they are by screens of social training that close out all but the practical elements in the sensory barrage, give a very limited picture of existence, which certainly transcends mere physical evidence." – Mathiessen, from The Snow Leopard









March 23

Sometimes you can follow along your handheld weather predictions so closely as to lay wasted a tomorrow's trip – as you see the symbol for clouds and rain, you might decide that is that and cancel before the day has even begun. I had already written yesterday off as another in a long line of cloudy and mercurial days; it is old winter now, only a couple of days ago from the official day of spring and as anyone who has lived in the heart of the upper drift less, weather here does not spoil you. That utterly lush growing ability of the midsummer breadbasket at this time of year is one long extended blanket of beige of fields of either corn cob or weighed down field grasses. The golden rod has still held its shape but it too blends in with the blandest of coloration. And so the surprise to wake to the luxury of vast sunshine borders on the truly religious. I, like others I presume, work relatively hard at maintaining the spiritual commitment to life-as-gift, but that most certainly comes easier when a fresh and thin snow has covered the surfaces of all things late night and now the sun turns it to a blaze. You wish, as always, that you could simply save this screen of life, hold it forever, and watch the eagles do their methodical dives down onto the edge of a sparkling patch of ice on the bay and call it up for whenever we need.

This has been a lonely and long old winter. The virus has indeed taken much of our recreation away from us. Not just the bars and restaurants and the retail outlets, but moreso, an attitude of the days a gifts. We endure them now at home; I regularly think of those who have not the outdoors to keep them company and have to say I wish every person in the drift less would take these hours on a sunday to dress up, take a hike up any one of these bluffs, and enjoy this blaze of the drift less. It doesn't take much. I sense that we have relegated this spirit of a love affair with creation to some very small venues and portions of our lives. If we were trending in the direction to adore creation, this earth, the nature that it is, and ourselves as part of it and in it, our news ways and media ways would be singing right now with the voices of the exalted participants of the world. I usually get to my trails here in the coulee region only to find the spare footprints before me. Yesterday I arrived at my quarry trail head and found three cars parked in the lot already! By the end, as I returned back to my car, the lot was full; the sound of children happily screaming in the back ground. They might not articulate it as such, but that walk they just took up this steep hill up through the ridge lines to either side, was of the spiritual; the scenes, perhaps not entirely accounted for and registered on any sheet or app, would carry the imagination through for days. Nothing out here is of one dimension; no pixels; no fingers across small and reduced screens. But here is the rub: you, and others, have to be willing to place the proper clothes on your back, set aside a few hours, park at an enjoyable spot, and then walk up that hill despite any vocal backlash. Now repeat and repeat and repeat and you will have yourself a spiritual practice, what our ancestors would have only partially taken for granted. To be outside would have been understood day to day; but that doesn't mean they would have taken for granted the gift of the growth alongside them.  Does anyone truly spend much of their time in such a domain of gratitude for our various live-in screens. You see, they have become nature of old; but their case, they do not grow, live, flap in the wind, snow or bless with sunshine.

The first steps are steep along this old quarry road. This would have been a steady stream of traffic in the old days – quarry equipment, bulldozers, conveyors and of course the heavy rock dump trucks. The road is considerably well built with its own curb along the edge side and built to last. You can't tell just how much they had to dig out of the side of the bluff to get the flat road, but this is truly a primary quarry within the region and no doubt helped build thousands of roads over the years. When you begin to see the results of years of digging away at the sandstone left and right, all around you, you have to take your own spiritual inventory for such things, such extraction. You look back down to your own car and you have to make a little argument with yourself: if you want to give up your car and not worry anymore about the nice smooth roads that you drive on, then it is time decry the quarries. Until then, it is still worth while to think of rock memories; any devastation of such an enormous resource will have some effect on the memory of stone. It is a perfect an example of the anthropocine as you can get, really, for what we are talking about is the human transformation of entire ecostructures and yes, this one could be seen from space. Ironically, what the digging and the transformation of the ecostructures have given in its place are some sheer sandstone cliffs rarely if ever seen on a standard bluff hike. Most ridges rise up at the top by only a small number of feet, but because much of the ridgeline in place has been dug up to its edge, it has left the bluff looking something more like mountain, and I want badly to do some climbing.

Spring to Come

"The first fact on January third
is the fact of winter,
more than dead banks, lost wars,
violence erupting here and there."  – Holm, from "Winter Facts"










Against the orders of a new world,
we set out on a short trip,
out onto the periphery of city,
where bald cornfields lay decrepit;
no TV screen was going to duplicate
what we see as our midwestern
ancestors still move through those scenes,
rough clothes, dour lips, hats,
cold days and minds in the wet.
We keep going through the years.
Let us go way back to geology.
Does anyone else's mind work like this?
Time is the new exploration
if your imagination has not yet halted.
Ridgeline of sandstone carry off
in every direction outside of Barre.
Forests, leafless, stick out like stubble
off the dreary cheeks of hillsides.
We have music inside the car,
so we are safe, hold back the boredom,
"who do you think would make a good farmer?
what do people do all day in the country?"
Rise up through the near dead fauna.
Blessings of green scattered
here in there under old invasives.
I pose the question whether all this would
look more fun from three thousand feet.
I point out a circling eagle.
Have you ever seen how the steely
sharpness of the eye wondering nothing?

No, This Can't
be the Place

"No, this can't be the place, but it must be
the road that leads there, always beginning
when morning is slow and hazy, suffering to
get somewhere..."  – Angell, from "The River Has No Hair to Hold Onto"











It's always true that your day could
start with a long drive past the grocery lot
you want to see if every last stall is full
and can see by the packages of toilet paper
walking out this won't be your day

because it is right there, always at the crosshairs
of your go to anchor store
and the highways a thousand feet away
that the woods sit somehow empty,
bombarded by spring detritus, that temptation

reigns, that somewhere out on that long trail
that cuts through the marsh, past the refinery
that mills the stone from the bluffs,
there is one bicyclist brave enough to live,
and right now feels the cold wind tickle her eyelids.

Yesterday I admit. I had my moment.
A ghost of self, the real you, something
that knows something of the ancients,
drove straight past the auto doors of grocery
and found itself at the edge of bluff.

I snuck out of this car. Houses moaned nearby.
They live inside said dream of escape.
How dare the bluebird sing, duck and weave,
my little blue frisbee, beautiful as a word,
alive, honing its color off a drab pallette

that it all came alive; kids' eyes along the moss.
Thank you green blanket, thank wind
creeping the shifting of the misplaced cedars,
thank you darkish knoll where time reads.
Thank you to this wind-swept rock I climb

at the top of the ridge where the eagle flies
and knows it as a planted fractal in the mind.
You get your toilet paper and stock it in the hutch.
Someone inside me leapt out cried dry.
Always suffering to get somewhere else.

Utopia Rock

"When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you."
– Merton, from March 11








March 15

Days come where, despite any downtrodden spring weather, the mind the soul the body will tell you, similar to seeking vitamins or water, that it is time be out on some trail where you will find rocks and sky and even leafless underbrush. There are the same series of trails here in the back coulees that I have walked for twenty some years. The area is all old farm and therefore lined by native trails that cut up along hillsides until they reach the ridgelines which overlook, in this part of the area anyway, the great and vast Mississippi watershed. Time moves on. Hikes do indeed look similar. Yesterday I parked at a small cul de sac which both invited walkers but warned off the parking of the car and dogs; I dare say that I played minor infractor, parked, took the dog up a wide old cattle trail through a nice dense forest up to my own favorite rock that I of in the coulee area. I might give it a name, but that can't matter. It has held us many times, much like a palm rising up from the mossy ridgeline, like a spiral with a giant head. You can just reach one jut out of a step at its side, position yourself, then leap up and you are standing ten feet up on the face of it looking out over neighborhood, river, bluffs to the backside. Is this enough for utopia? I sense there is only one left. The concerns of city has nearly taken our mental wherewithal. We pass such trailheads as these and hundreds of others as if ancient relics. Forget our imagination of those who lived right here and used these trails daily for pasture, some crops, and firewood. You sense that we have passed a spot where we recognize ourselves. Is that safe to say? That is all I want. I want to recognize the species. God, nature, eastern thought, it all has to have somethings in common: a mind interested in deeper engagement than the things we call modern and mechanical life. Merton, upon the life of brotherhood, still seeks it himself; I think it may be time for religious life.

And the World Again

"All that coming and going, so much
life spreading its wings in both worlds,
soaring beneath the crust of the handshake and signature,
between the lines of stories we tell
in order to be heard here,
In order to feel confidently at home..."
            – Angell, from "Subliminal Birds"





When You Were Watching Idaho: The Movie, What You Thought 
of the Fisherwomen Who Spoke So True of The Nature of Things




Third, fourth generation, out onto family pier
tossing lines into Prior Lake
that line seeking out what they called a hybrid trout,
twenty peaks off in the distance
like signs that speak, don't speak, but know
that a home softly sways across its peaks.

Another at the stern of a float boat down Henry Fork.
I don't see a single phone.
Rock shores and dirt cuts line the banks
for twenty miles as each elegant twist of the wrist
must circle then release onto a surface.

She walked along with dreams in her feet.
Talked about the Palousse fields full of lavender.
One crooked barn cropped up in the corner
of the acreage, gold retreat, and she called these
fields the world and wrote words
to their meaning as speaking to a being.

I look out the window and see nothing but streets.

"This isn't a city, but a forest.
And a child on an adventure who
happens by a stone farmhouse..."

– Ralph Angell, from "Long Shadows, Many Footsteps"










Perrot Trail, Where We Met a Dog, a Farm and River




Not only my footsteps but a dog named Riggs.
Owner a backwoodsman left him off the leash.
The trail was of a silver ice and I disappeared

somewhere in the beginning; mossy bridge
that took us over a run off creek to canopy.
The world was waking underneath me.

Why hadn't you come? We stopped at the top
of Perrot skyline trail where three metal prongs
stood without a bench just waiting for spring.

It's there you would have come to know me.
We sat down on one; a wash of cornfields east.
West, a galactic blue flow of the Mississippi.

The natives would have taken a time-out too
among a rush of tasks and weavings and fire.
Some moments would fly into mind like eagle.

Likely a breath and a vision of oneself rising
up out the river of the heart seeping into stone.
Here they still stood watching and waiting.

Let Us Study Idaho
and Other Poems

"Every book that comes out under my name is a new problem. To begin with, every one brings with it an immense examination of conscience." – Merton, from "Looking in the Mirror of My Books"










March 12


Such a fine late spring walk two days ago along the trails at Trempeauleau Mountain. This patch of the world – quite vast, really for the midwest – is one the great representatives of the Mississippi watershed and used to be considered by our native americans as spiritual. I realize more and more, especially in this particular season – early spring, some melting of past snow, wet, mostly dreary here in the midwest – that the spiritual dose that comes from these little mini-getaways are the most critical things that we could possibly do for one another. I would make the explicit point that a walk along the very same trail we just were on is the new church, the new religion, and that we are very far away indeed from any true fount of understanding a god that does not meet us in the here and now. The trail was an open channel through leaf flushed woods; above, at all times, the rocky outcroppings of the sandstone ridges and pocketed here and there remnants of old oak savannahs that have not been entirely overtaken by invasives or encroachment. I see, again and again, that this is it, this is the thing that we have to hold onto, experience, if we are to either see ourselves or, as Buddhism would encourage, let ourselves and self-perceptions disappear, becoming the very thing that we are witnessing. We walked up to the top of a ridge. There were a series of metal prongs there that would be used as a wooden bench in a couple of months. We sat on them for five minutes. To our right the farm fields still in play all the way onto the horizon; straight ahead, Brady Bluff, one of the highest bluff peaks in the state; to our left, the broadly majestical River lined by rolling bluffs. What this world is, is enough. In only hours, I would begin to hammer away at a keyboard, place a variety of abstract pressures on myself, worry for futures, regret some past maneuvers. The sandstone said nothing. It's yellow trail leading up held our feet.

From Naudanda

"From Naudanda, the Yamdi Khola is no more than a white ribbon rushing down between dark walls of conifers into its gorge. Far away eastward, far below, the Marsa River opens out into Lake Phewa, near Pokhara, which glints in the sunset of the foothills." – Matthiessen, from The Snow Leopard










For it is life we want. We want the world, the whole beautiful world, alive – and we alive in it." – Bill Holm


Observations Made About Mathessen's Snow Leopard After Walking Around the Ice Out back


This isn't the Himalayas, no not quite.
It's been said by a few that when driving along the interstate into the coulee region
which is right in the heart of the Mississippi watershed
that they can understand why the old beer company used to call this god's country;
look at those rolling bluffs seemingly bubbling up from nowhere
after the stark plateau of eastern Minnesota farming plateau;
look how that little dipping cup of blue water forms down there at the end of the road,
that is the great river, one of the worlds' big ones, and it curls
and is stopped, curls and is stopped, how many times on its way down to the delta Norlins.
Here we are right inside all that.
Right here we walk down onto a platform of ice by mid February,
shoveled here smooth as it could and two hockey nets placed for fun;
its a mirror over water and here, once in a while in morning, three eagles
swing out of nowhere and gather down at a slivery open edge to gobble up the freebies
of frozen fish; they look as big as children, alone in the landscape
nothing up against them to provide appropriate shape and height.
Now, how is one going to complain of eagles and ice and major rivers?
I wonder if the sherpas in The Snow Leopard might read of Mark Twain as a cub pilot
floating down the river right here in the coulee region
and longingly consider sea level and no real reason to carry heavy packs?
I imagine something like a snow leopard out there on the ice.
I conjure up a monastery that might extend out from a rock formation,
real live Buddhists inside, chanting away, making sense only to themselves,
learning again and again how track down that loud mouth inner voice
and soothe it purposeful breaths; well, then, that would be something wouldn't it?
I kick at the top layer of an oggered fishing hole wondering if there is wild mystery within?
Walleyes bounding about at the bottom, cool backs, hungry, scrounging along the mud
all day and all night for something; their minds are quiet, enlightened.
So far, then, we have enlightened tourists and bottom feeding fish. The ice is mindless.
The sky doesn't think that much of me, either, and I appreciate it.
No, it is only the sky inside this word mill that projects my legs over the cauldrons
of the Himalayas, has me camping along a wild-named mountain creek,
and thinks it sees a ghost gray cat smelling at the scrabble
at the other side of the ancient ridgeline above.
I listen close and do hear a purr seize up from somewhere around my socks
and rise up through my lungs to sing to myself.

That Day's Destination
and Other Prose Poems

"After the storm the ocean returned without fanfare to its old offices; the tide climbed onto the snow-covered shore and then receded; so there was the world: sky, water, the pale sand and, where the tide had reached that day's destination, the snow." – Mary Oliver from "Three Prose Poems"



1.
Owl, forgive me, I have never seen such a thing. Owl lain down among the thin trailine trees. Owl as fresh as its day of creation. Owl, feathers aflame by a careless wind. Down to my knees to see the thick brown jewel of your left eye. Blank as space, the night there still captured. They say that crows in their black hoods stalk you.

2.
What is the winter ice across the lake but curtains of waiting? As of any other day, when out the back door at first light, a temptation of morning air holds the coarse and vibrant sting of wintering bird song. Today a cardinal, by six in the morning, peeking along the line of the neighbor's front yard apple limb lines. My dab of crimson, a spot color as the manufacturers might say, among the drab confusion of melting winter rags of lawns and the dumb cement of sidewalks. You see, I am always in waiting; like you I want the flash and the electric string of things; more cardinal, less trash. Two selves by urban morning know not what to do. Out along the river will be the crash of inertly bold ducks who have made a living at the open water below the bridge. Against the silence the ducks erupt. The morning is still the earth's and I want to walk only among the refugees of night to early morning. My mind wanders, standing just there outside my back stoop, a monk, a jesuit, a costume of the holy, but then drag myself back into threaded rooms of house. Do you see the world? The march of hours dances along the passages of mind settled there since a child. Some new venture of mind, call it age, call it what you will, stands inside to a computer, hunched over caressing all the should do's. Later, the owl. Later, the ice casts hanging like staffs of the surreal off limestone cliffs of Raymond Cove. All these love letters to the earth and still the tied curtains of waiting.

3.
We once lived at top of our own hill. A little town bluff, sequenced like tied ribbon by houses tucked into their little plots of coulees and manmade plateaus. The day we first visited, I walked out the back door to bent auditorium of oak woods, many of the limbs tending to the eaves and roofline of the house. I walked to the edge where the lawn met woods. No one had lived here months and the brambles and mayapples had asserted like silent troops up ward and up ward. I looked up into the slender leafless basswood. Through a section of limbs, a silhouette like a black sack, stood. Who sees an owl understood.

Journal the Urban Wild

"Before each sip he puts a finger into it and flicks some of the charcoals which splutter noisely and send out blue sparks. It is only then that I perceive that I too am real." Xingjian, from Soul Mountain











March 3


When you do finally give up the entirety of the game what you are left with is your home and your interests. On a bright and sunny day, the river across the street is an extra benefit. It is like a palace all to its own. I had spent the years previous walking past the front windows perpetually in a hurry, taking notice of the things like reminding myself to clean the dust or pick up the art supplies on the table in the corner. I now live inside the hours and the angles of sunlight as they fill up this row of west facing windows. I walk across the street to say hello to water. Somedays there is no matter whether the quality of the water is poor and the phosphorous might be mounting now that the ice is melting and that a few farmers might access fields long enough to spray over ice. There is a little throb of common sense that comes over all of us at these moments. We place ourselves in the farmer's head and what we wish is that we could move back in time fifty years, hand out the crystal balls to each farm family and ask politely if they would kindly shun the huxters soon to come. The Yahara River is open and clear enough to see the sandy bottom. The nutrients wax and wane depending on season. There will be months that come when the water will predictably turn green. Algae will bloom at any given corner of the shoreline. Young kids, even during this green phosphorous period, will jump off the bridge into the water. Onlookers hope they don't accidentally get any water in their eyes, ear mouth. What is nature, exactly, we might wonder? The river here begins to thicken to old ice a ways ahead. We walk out onto it. Suspended by a foot of ice, a new world opens. It is a radiance like no other. A blue on blue. I ask myself if it is acceptable to wonder if this is a paradise all of its own? Who am I? Would many notice if I moved on and into such a place? A world of its own. Abbey had lived in the Arches and Thoreau at Walden, Haines in Fairbanks. I've made connections to others here on earth, but what happens if I am subtracted from that world and added onto the radiant white ice? Does the man in the office ten hours a day understand this?

Eclogue I
A Guide to Prairie Restoration

"But on this day, the quavering had stopped, and a clear, bright calm had descended and had covered everything with its sweet peace." – Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year








 ...."Your worries about things that haven't come your way are ceasing,
and a simple botanist may take care
of commenting upon daily life and mores." – Brodsky

II

Three months of shaggy winter ages you threefold.
Skin pools under the eyes twist and harden
and eyes as tough as rocks dry and their stories told,
of old patterns, an affair with the sun, they soften.
The atmosphere of mind might turn to trembling seeds.
Even the vertebrae, down deep, sends signals

to the limbs that the fire again will soon erupt.
Why should we let the ghosts rival love?
Out on the ice yesterday was a thin layer of blue,
the dogs in the distance pranced with sticks,
a new world opened up; a bend in the wind
lifted off the side of your head and woke you again.

Eclogue I:
Guide to Prairie Restoration

"And there are the dawns and the dusks when the snow is falling, when the lights in the villages take on a fat and gauzy glow, when the whole prairie world, although dark, seems somehow aglow, when the sky above the storm becomes the particular pale pink of a prairie rose in bloom." – Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year






Winter! I cherish your bitter flavor
of cranberries, tangerine crescents on faience saucers,
the tea, sugar-frosted almonds (at best, two ounces). – Brodsky

                                                                I

By the bony silence of winter a dream of flower.
Rattle of traffic carries in it the headstrong whispers
from tech inside every screeching work truck.
Must push through the vision, lessen the frigid tension,
hold dear in the palm of our dream one image:
the sunshine rose is coming, Rosa Arkansana –

tend to it as we know we should like child.
A light rises up along the ice crusted lake.
The flat hammer walls of the city brighten just a touch.
I'll lean toward late June by conjuring the the achenes
as they unfurl, the fleshy floral tube will sing.
Hear the huddled seed throbbing in soil by spring?

Neither Fox-trots
Nor Maidens

"Even being hurtled
out of the spacecraft, one wouldn't capture
any sounds of the radio–neither fox-trots nor maidens
wailing from a hometown station."
       –Brodsky, from "Eclogues: Winter"










A fantasy of molecules. A sun drench
for example, along the coast of Seychelles,
where blue becomes the white of a sand
that is a fog that is the dust of a dreaming hand.
We of the north spend most hours
inside of another eye planted there as tours.

The hours can only burn through with memories.
The broad sheet of house walls under canvases
of fallow light bridge to synapse of sand islands;
the eye a new world tipped upside down
and shaken to happiness. A lover is found.
There at the water we don't think, just touch lips.

How to be a Good Ghost

"...when after about ten minutes in Aix, I knew without even looking at my girls' faces that we must come back, leave Switzerland, change every schedule, seize this moment of being at least on the same side of the oceans as Aix then was to us, for as long as I dared make it last.
   By then I knew more how to be a good ghost."
–MFK Fisher, from Map of Another Town








There is enough food to go around in the city of Madison that, if one thought it beneficial to mind (here in the dead of winter), you could buzz around town by bike, by car, by Uber, and test some new fascination virtually every day of the week and fall in love with some new quarter of the city. When I first moved here, I had the Quixotic dream of dabbling in such a way; I would pass anything that resembled restaurant or dive lounge and place that on my mental list; I would then fantasize about making myself there a regular and memorizing the menu, get to know the chef intimately, pass along the good cheer in writing to anyone who would read such things and then, by the end, become the food critic in the greatest food move of all time Ratatouilles, and singularly change peoples' world by the touch of food writing. Some of this has held true, and much has not. I spend a good part of my day thinking of such side schemes but very often only a brief cookbook review for a newsletter to show for it; perhaps a rapid dash off to the west side of town to Cafe Hollander, and fantastic multi-level Belgian off shoot pub that endears bicyclists with bold Belgian art along the walls and real bikes dangling from the ceiling. I then ask myself the most fundamental of all the critical questions, as it pertains to cooking and living life, the very two purported prongs of hope for my future – do I cook? Alas, a tragedy has struck, the tale of the single person who has lost his desire to move through the once beautiful gears of recipe picking, the grocery shopping, the prep, the cook, the consumption. I might very well attribute this sickness, if you will, of apathy, to a partially more benevolent reason, and that is I have always preferred to cook for others, as I had for three daughters and a wife for some twenty years virtually nightly. Those were the days of kitchen command whereby my hours, whether known to others or not, was built around the 'process.' For all of us who have been drawn into the quasi fantasy and quasi purposeful schedule of real cooking knows...this is the kind of thing that can sustain a person through thick and thin. I think of my own hero's singular title "How to Cook a Wolf," a collection of food writing from the very lean years of WWII, in which food sampling, of course, could not be perceived quite as the luxury of recreation as we see it today, but something quite other, some of necessity and harkening back to our deeper tremblings of human nature. In a word, it was vital. Now I have to ask my self how exactly one resuscitates the vitality and necessity of cooking by oneself? That is the essence of "How to be a Good Ghost." I dare say, if it takes the conjuring of ghosts to cook for, then let it be. Pick up the culinary knives, and draw out the French recipes.

Talked about Guatama

"She had asked him to talk about Guatama and she could not hear enough about him: how pure his eyes, how still and lovely his lips, how kind his smile, how peaceful his gain..." – Hesse, from Siddhartha











The North is the honest thing. For it keeps repeating
all your life the same stuff – whispering, in full volume,
in the life dragged on, in all kinds of voices;" – Brodsky


And Buddha, of the cessation of all worldly things,
of finding the volume dial that loops like gears
along the tiles of the brain; electrodes, synapse,
the dendrites dance all day along inside against
the white flashing of the cold that covers the bay.
So we have unknowingly learned to live, not pray,

and in its absence I have always waited for snow,
snow of mind, that comes down in soft contours,
pulls in like the sick the noises of the day
then lands not ever lonely but lively blankets
born to show us something of thanks as fisherman
bow down to a gleeful stance and to a line yank.

Without its Innocence

"Something like a field in Hungary, but without
its innocence. Something like a long river, short
of its bridges..."  – Brodsky, from "Ex Voto"












A glimpse of your heaven is all you get;
oak savannah, I suspect, a restored island
in among the tangled eddies of highways
where bird might still sing if you let it,
the mind's eye temporarily satisfied
that we once used to pray to a prairie,
that in long treks would not have to set aside
grievous tasks, handhelds, pixels that lie
to wander among the fencepost hickories,
the fractals of oak scrub, the nests of hawks
which froze us so our feet weren't lost,
our eyes of the oceans and pupils held
a millennia in their pure black void.
As I drive by I know nothing of my toil.
Someone out there will ask something of me,
a transaction squared, while that oak sings
and your new gods may watch over soil.

Solitude is a Stern Mother

"When one is trifling, even the beauty of the solitary life becomes implacable. Solitude is a stern mother who brooks no nonsense."
– Merton, from "Solitude is a Stern Mother"











Cold is gliding from the sky on a parachute – Brodsky

                                                      V
A few months by encroaching silence
spreads out like clouds over the lake;
those transmitters that once bided their time
inside the hippocampus waiting for escape
now slow to sluggish eels and learn
to live in a lost waters of cold dreams, sleep

a solitude not always friendly to creativity.
She comes in first unawares. Places
a hood over the promise of a wan face.
I'd prefer to love her but don't know how to be.
By deep February I crave the gold limbs
of any tree. I crave sun's contributions.

Five Mountains

"Inspired, each stroke of my brush shakes the five mountains.
The poem done, I laugh proudly over the hermit's land."
   – Li Po, from 'River Song'











Dreams in the frozen season are longer, keener. – Brodsky


Cafe across town late February to teach of Buddha.
The Branch woods across the street that charcoal hue
as if a wash across the canvas lit by streetlamps,
themselves probing ochre streaks across
to paint the window where I sit waiting with books;
music in the corner, a stage where nobody looks

as all the miles of this world have slowed down,
the slow motion dreams that skip and dance
by such ferocity across the inner cerebellum crown
such theater, by months, and screen sends silence,
we may or may not walk those candid grotesque woods
to find the second self would in winter be misunderstood.

Marble Hero

"....But, as with a marble hero,
one's eye rolls up rather than runs in winter..."
    –Brodsky, from "Eclogue IV, Winter"










                                                       iv

Up Miller Bluff, a faux forest, suburban,
as anywhere you look, up to false horizon,
there stood the trademark white vast walls
of four-story houses built to see all seasons;
the trail had become nothing but rivulets
melting, undecided snow through a winter net;

I'd just as soon bed down here in the limestone;
trees bare, homeless to all but a shadow stand
of what was, but the rocks are never alone
and once you take the clothing off the forest
it's vertebrae of ridge spine you know, ancient
dreams set under our microscopic DNA.

Dusty in the Garret

"A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet–..." – Thoreau, "Economy"










In great cold, pavements glaze like a sugar candy,
steam from the mouth suggests a dragon,
if you dream of a door, you tend to slam it.
My life has dragged on... –Brodsky


Old town, home, the river a long sheet of white glass;
over it the bridge as our blue and icy symbol
as it is the form of a clasp between two shores
and as I return the soul in two is caught in a past
of scenes of trees of the great emigration from these streets
littered by slumped taverns and creaky signs like shields

which will always protect the men soiled inside.
I slither back and forth past the arterials
and wonder whether to stop or go at every light.
Was it a cluster of love or of a fading fear
that I come in as winter does all agleam in white.
I gather my mind again, a shirt torn to seams.

Where I Was Better Known

"Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known." – Thoreau, from "Economy"











In February, lilac retreats to osiers.
Imperative to a snowman's profile,
carrots get more expensive...  – Brodsky



A fine veneer set out by car window;
as the sun bulb becomes an untouchable
image as it shifts from across windshield,
the curbs crisp, even the pine bough unable
to do its favored exchange from frozen roots
as another vortex teaches us new tools,

not the simple undirected attention
that soothes us by the formation of coming summer
where memories ease and the mind
synapses no longer prey upon self-reflections.
If a wish were but living as hours.
If the earth a newfound Lord to power.

Adventure on Life Now

"My life has dragged on. In the recitative of a blizzard
a keen ear picks up the tune of the Ice Age."
    –Brodsky, from "Eclogue IV: Winter"










                                 II

Truth is: a bifurcation of life by cold.
Not all choose to witness the masks by day
as anyone can enter a dream yet to unfold
brought on by the veneer of what sunlight says
and it's easier to consider adventures to come
pen in hand, letters by fingers, a stranger to love,

than to live like the DNA had always foretold:
who could have known the Amazon by Brazil
would have touched to fire for a thousand acres,
while here in the midwest we melt in stifled offices,
the vital heat within expunged since high school,
the anthropocene turned us to blank fools.

Dare Again Thoreau

"In winter it darkens the moment lunch is over.
It's hard then to tell starving men from sated.
A yawn keeps a phrase from leaving its cozy lair."
       – Brodsky, "Eclogue IV: Winter"









                                                                     I

In the bridge by winter I can find a light.
It might not be the glacial lake to the south,
all a broad desert of white diadem and snow flight
or an urban river snaking through apartment growth,
but a vision of passing from one life overcome
then onto the next as if a banded and magical sum,

by mid-day, along the same street, fluffed snow
building its powdery enamel does remind me
of our own midwestern version of a Jeta Grove.
There Buddha learned to sit and expunge grief;
where my mind disattaches from me, this gift
that is a bridge to peace, my soul-toward shift.

Dare Again Thoreau

"But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof." – Thoreau, from "Economy"












Goodbye February. The forgotten child of the litter.
You yell out by snow and never cease to accumulate.
A road plow, green grinned, jaws always bitter,
has paused across the scene of my path like bully truth.
Sleepy rooftops of white trucks shed more white mist.
I know who is passing by the sounds of the wheels insist.
All along the beltway highway, as it circles on ramps,
off ramps, four lanes, two, all seeing by auto head lamps,
I don't know the difference between my life and the road.
Sometimes I pick it up and pack it and wind a throw.
Have you noticed that the dead of winter passes unknown?
That we lose a year by the day and tomorrow is already afraid.

Dare Again Thoreau

"You've forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows
of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows
ever stand in orchards: the crops aren't worth it,
and the roads are also just ditches and brushwood surface."
– Brodsky, from "A Part of Speech"









The ice of February remembers too the hours;
a bright white, replenished, amplified, by blue
is as of an old photograph washed gray azure
and those faces are of course by now not towers.
I see something of Thoreau in the scene of houses,
all cuddled huts, strung along by electric wires,
as the dormancy of mind he might have escaped.
I enter the mind of the photograph and listen close
to only mumblings under the breath not just
the masterpieces of the woods and as a crow
falls like ash from the corner of the photo
I know vapid soul does rush out of the squashed
hazard of these conveniences. Strike a thousand
fires to the hippocampus. Delight. Fear the washed
here among the world's dead walkers lost.

In the Open

"Those summer nights when the planes came over
it seemed it was every night that summer
after the still days of perfect weather
I kept telling myself what it was not..." – Merwin, from "In the Open"










There is enough light here
a certain radiance that signals
from somewhere behind the eyes
they tell us not to crave
here the feet enter the time
of the last receding of ice
here is the easy fire planted
by the bank of the originals
no mystery in keeping hands
warm or the far off cry of baby
same eyes delight in the incalculable
radiance of first snow
how the flakes the size of thumbnails
cling the sounds of things
and leave a formed hush
and I alone stand still along
the modern bridge creek in sound
creek in love as it should
creek to bound up its hips
along the banks to seek help
When young I came to know
the edges of everything
where the yacking tongues of the city
dimmed and retreated
to its own silly halls of streets
and where my dog and I's
voice sung silent to the forest
There's a creek in the sky
it is all around us
the white of the innovation
of mind sends its signals

Postcards from Grand Marais Bay

"By dusk the snow is already partially melted. There are dark patches where the grass shows through, like islands in the sea seen from an airplane. Which one is home?"  – Jenkins, from "First Snow"






A tour through cliffside lighthouse up along the edges near Duluth sold the couple to move. "So vast, so real," they both thought and said outloud as they looked up to see that monument to history standing so tall among the guarding stones. Moved to Grand Marais to become a fisherman and boatbuilder, no tools, only a touch of experience, but they changed their clothes to woodsy and grew out their hair to foil the landscape. He fell in love with what he began to call the sea; her her new tools, crochet needles, a tightly spread drum. Seagulls flew and drifted in and out of the sky like new ideas in white clothing. Neighbors they loved but saw only at night when they decided to extract themselves from their disciplines. Two beers and he knew they should have stayed in the city; for her, a wine, and she considered she might let him.

Post Cards from the
Angry Trout Cafe

"I have come to understand my love for you. I came to you like a ma, world-weary, looking for a quiet place. The gas station and grocery store, the church...the river with its cool shady spots...good fishing." Jenkins, from "A Quiet Place"








Those old photos of me out there on the Grand Marais Bay ice don't really do me justice. That square jaw and engineer cap, all in black in white, of course, make me look pre-modern, like the second generation fellow whose family strolled over from Devonshire. No, there's was a lot more too. The days at the bay were anything but gray hues. The whole bay was a white fire, really, and there was always something inside, a similar fire, that didn't particularly like school and I might have played hooky to help Inky and Bjorn chop ice and haul it off the 'house' a block away. I lived my days according to cold calls of the wind, that's true; I might have been driven by the images of old towns along the old Brit coastline, where, if you were a good one, and cared about the mackerel, you caught only your limit with fair hooks, felt that fish, every inch, and understood its muscly miracle. How it had just minutes ago slipped up through that world you and I had planted in us night by night.

Postcards from
the Angry Trout Cafe

"I don't love the woods it occurs to me, the leafless, brushy, November pope trees that stand around, stand around crowding the peripheral vision, each waiting to take its place in my consciousness and each falling back to become a part of the line that divides gray earth from gray sky, as undistinguished as gray hair." Louise Jenkins, from "November"







Stay for Awhile


You don't spend every waking hour reconsidering why you didn't build that great cafe that stands out on its jutty into the Grand Marais Bay so close to the border of Canada you could leap up into a tossed handful of wind, float a mile, then land on the other side. You don't wonder what it might be like to wake with a cold smile in February, pole in hand, kid in toe, bucket looped over an elbow, as you tip toe across the disheveled beach that now is a floe unalterable frozen beach. You have all day to walk the trail that curls around the Coast Guard headquarters which stands against the northern elements just waiting, itself, for the next big mistake that the fisherman takes in the open floe out across the breakers where, once you reach the end and look out over the Lake, the biggest of big, you know nothing of yourself, mind so full of ants and hiccups back home, laced to the city gears, postcards in hand of the hundred lives you could have taken. Sit down, have a cup of coffee at the Angry Trout Cafe. Stay for awhile. Live inside yourself for a minute.

Three Songs

"My dogs perk their ears, and bound from the path. Instead of opening their dark wings the hens swirl and rush away under the trees, like little ostriches." – Oliver, "Three Songs"











We cross the highway by clicking away at the crosswalk for a light. Gas stations, print shops, a veterinarian line the road from left to right and hustle as best we can across, my dog somehow sensing we want to quickly escape the snare of turning traffic. My ear buds are still in, for who wants to hear the raw crash of such noise in the morning. I see the library, folded in by a hollow and trees, upcoming, the highschool set up upon a hill, the coming park a respite against the silliness of the world we continue to create and, sensing that truck brakes can no longer be heard, take out my music, and there it is, a crisp February wind slipping through the pine limbs. It might be a swingset, abandoned now by cold chrome winter, squeaking at the links and latches. My eyes are the same as when I twelve. There I lived the two same lives. Did they ever write a song about me: he escaped through to the wind on the other side.

On the Yahara

"In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a postwar Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel's 'Bolero' the way I did
in 1945..."  – Gerald Stern, from "The Dancing"



A Time To Come


The molecules have shifted now, here in the Midwest,
here in a city that is known for its motion forward,
and fledgling industry which surely models for ages to come,
in along this pocket of five lakes,
normally, in July, at least, so beautiful that the mystery
of its native origin takes no imagination whatsoever,
shifts to the permanent drapery of thick cloud;
and our eye knows it deserves better as it wakes up,
it's partner, the first five fingers,
slip along the rod the brown curtain to see if it possible
sun, your mind's winter god, has awoken
from its time under the Boy tree of the horizon,
or if instead the fires of Galapagos
and the dwindling centuries old ice at top of Greenland
has been pierced to slow your favorite patterns
of jet stream;
plight, you know, will come by a love of your earth;
a love swells up but you wonder if its the sign of the dead.
You turn the soft jazz on in the walls,
cuddle of a cup of wake up,
forget about the hemisphere for a minute.

Sangha Cafe
A Bed and Breakfast

"You will notice, as you flit through these reminiscences of mine, that from time to time the scene of action is laid in and around the city of New York; and it is just possible that this many occasion the puzzled look and the start surprise. 'What,' it is possible that you ask yourselves, 'is Bertram doing so far from his beloved native land.' – PG Wodehouse, from "The Artistic Career of Corky"





Much preparation still had to be done. A morning may begin slow like this, with a long look to the river to see if portions had frozen over or if it was still open at the mouth, and whether the ducks were flopping up against the sides of the crusted ice, perhaps a good fifteen minutes sitting to get rid of the electricity in the mind of worries and plans and all the little things that could, of course, go wrong; by the end of these two stages, enhanced by just enough coffee to keep him bright but not ecstatic, it now time to get ready for the daily kitchen and go through the reservation list and begin to match the menu to the wishes of the visitors. The Sangha Cafe was still in its prototype stage, there was really little doubt about that, although there had been many small successes, and so he gave himself the luxury of creating virtually every stage of the preparation as he went along, no real rules, just an inherent conscientiousness for what was to come; in how many places had he been in his lifetime in which the so called 'service' was either overbearing or negligent; the falsity of overwrought service would be one of the very quickest ways to ensure that he would never return to your diligent property; and yet, even recently, he had also been restaurants in which he might very well be completely forgotten at a table in the back corner despite an emphatic attempt at making eye contact with the lingering server. His would be, as he liked to call it, a service of perceived benevolence. He began to wash over what that would be exactly and concluded that would be quite similar to raising children well – there was always the inherent care, of course, otherwise why in the world get into such a racket (parenting or the bed and breakfast), and it would be present but not clingy. There would be offerings that were available but not forced. My god! Had he been overthinking already! He fingered through his notes on sweet appetizers that would sitting out onto the granite counter on arrival. There would be good coffee, decaf and regular, plus a quality cream; this was the first impression, was it not? The coffee and French cookie as the newcomers were able to just peer through the hallway through the dining room and out the living room windows to see that same very sight that he had just witnessed, a calm river moving past, and suddenly, the stressors of the drive they had just completed would hopefully flit away like a morning bird and then he would quickly show them to their rooms, assure all was well for the rest of the day, and then offer a tour of any number of options. Could he help himself, he thought, now as he had begun the flour, sugar and egg base for his madelines, that he was tickled to be conceiving of such a fine day! He was fifty now. It had taken him five decades on this very earth to get the physical space and the mental pace figured out. As he rolled out the flour and looked at the relatively blasé photo of what he was about to create, the simple French cookie, he looked up into the courtyard and the magic of the sun mural on the backside of the garage. And there, later, he would offer to lead a short session of Chinese poetry. Oh my oh my. The tickle. The sun. The home had risen and took off like a very pleasant ship and began to float down the river along the waves that felt like clouds and the rest of the world, it was true, floated away.

I wonder if anyone knows
how much I enjoy old age

"The Eighth Month in the mountains
the perennial fruits are at hand." – Stonehouse, 69














Snow so cold it has become stone
it litters every city terrace and alley
piles along the sidewalk turn to icy pillows
they tighten spaces to bedroom comfort
Some days I walk along the hallway
of these gifts of hours as if in a cloud of dreams
when I was young I felt the motion
of a wooded creek as silent poetry

Why Should I Cater to Gods

"Lunch in my mountain kitchen
the spring provides the perfect sauce...

but why should I cater to gods." – Stonehouse 67











2


We speak of mindfulness at Lakeside
Coffeehouse as the winter sun dims early
the world around us could dissipate
and march off by shadows the lake
It would not matter; inside the flute
plays from the old wooden walls
the espresso machine screams one last drink
our words like thoughts escape

I Always Go to Sea
as a Sailor

"With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts."
 – Melville, from Moby Dick











Day 3


You would not have done well a whaleman, Ishmael of today.
Not well at all.
Sense of adventure, you say? Does that mean
staving off the robocalls even on a sunday night?
Apps, new and old, pulse some days
along the shorelines of the phone, that is for sure,
but the basement camaraderie
doesn't engender quick action of the human kind.
And anyway, a whale? There are documentaries, of course.
Your most recent, of two fellows who took a year away
to kayak from grizzly country north
down along river banks
across bulbous shores as the fog shrouds increasingly engulfed them.
That drama quickened.
It became modern because the two men formed moods.
Over time we witness ridiculousness of choosing our dangers.
See the difference?
You would have walked along the potholed streets of New Bedford
as wiseass. Had to of.
Mind a swarm of buzzing fears.
Those ladies, formal dress, bonnets up, severe eyes,
broom by hands, might have watched you
with pack over your shoulder
and wondered what you were up to.
Mother.
Adventure.
Starts somewhere else.
Far off lands, mornings when young forced to chores
wherein dreams of islands of appear.
The space between the shovel in your hand
and what to become in years is adventure, vast mist of that dream,
propels you as ocean current
into worlds.
Look away from the eyes of any whale.
Pinpoint your finger on the car dash.
Hope it didn't snow too much and that the roads are clear.