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.