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.