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.