'A Distant City': Moving is done

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The view from Brian & Lesley's new apartment in Michigan;

that's a corn field on the horizon;

see the brown grass, the need for rain;

rain was light while we unloaded the truck,

then it let loose in a full-clapping thunderstorm welcome

when the helpers had gone home

I want to thank you for your kind wishes, thoughts and prayers for the Big Move. They bore fruit. The immense heat broke in a gentle rain Sunday night in NYC, before we packed the truck to the gills Monday. Then the rain held off while we loaded, letting loose again while we drove out of the city that afternoon. The drive through five states, including Pennsylvania, where veils of gauzy mist demurely covered the shoulders of the Poconos, was uneventful and easy. (I fell in love with Lesley & Brian’s VW Jetta, hardly letting Lesley drive; the guys drove the moving truck.) Yesterday, unloading with family in Michigan into their roomy apartment was exquisitely sweaty and leg-aching (third floor, no elevator).

Now the four of us (five with Poppy Seed, who is now the size of an apple; imagine, trading one Apple for another in one day!) are resting and recuperating at the lake for a few days. It is raining on this cottage’s tin roof in the early morning dark. I hear it patting oak leaves that surround us, insisting we stay indoors and sleep: Don’t move unless you absolutely have to. Moving is done.

 Their balcony is more like a porch, deep and partially covered.

Lesley's plants emigrated safely from a NYC windowsill

and now sit bookended by potted herbs and a tomato plant

we grew on the farm. Rain. The plants revel, as we do.

The Queens kitchen they left behind, with its street view;

that's the windowsill where the plants lived

(this photo was taken last year)

In my glad hours, I will make a city of your smile, 
a distant city that shines and lives.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from "In My Glad Hours"

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Poem: This Tired Body

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We rode with 3,000 or so people in the Zoo-de-Mack from Boyne Highlands to Mackinaw City Saturday. Mackinaw City is where the Mackinaw Bridge crosses from the Lower Peninsula of Michigan into the Upper Peninsula. It was wonderful to ride and play with our son Peter and his girlfriend for the weekend, one of the last times before they move to Los Angeles in a couple of weeks. (I am trying not to think about that.)

This Tired Body

This tired body settles into stillness
as if it is trillium floating
on the forest floor that I biked past for hours
two days ago. It did not appear to be reaching

for sun, the layered white spread
of it lying in repose under hemlocks like tossed
handkerchiefs waiting to be picked
up and returned to the fainting ladies
who dropped them.

Today the memory of climbing, of coasting, of steadying on,
coalesces with the bed of silence inside,
gently tugging me back to myself, to the rest
only I can grant, the surrender to age,
to the uphill bodily climb
of what remains of my life.

If only the mind, and the heart
were all of what it takes to live
and this tired body
were as light as tissue
petals reaching, finding pockets of light
even in deepest shadow.

I pedaled 51 miles, a triumph,
and now I languish, a weary kind of human
who could coast toward a finish line, but I want instead
to find sun at the leafy edges of my fingernails, wind
in my gnatty eyelashes, to keep finding a heart in
steady, pedaling thumps, pushing on,
pointing toward the light inside this life.

trillium for miles

coasting downhill, ahhhh

 trillium covered the forest floor

Mackinaw Bridge

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Where a mind of winter resides

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The woods near Arcadia, Michigan; that blue haze at the horizon is Lake Michigan

I hope you can put up with winter a little longer.

I loved being with my raven sister on the weekend, up in our part of the world, the place we went as kids on vacation in the northwest finger of the mitt of Michigan. We took down Christmas ornaments and lights in the lodge. It’s her hobby to decorate, and I helped her de-decorate. I wound thousands of white lights into balls, for hours while she wrapped 1,500 glass ornaments into boxes. I don’t care about decorating any more, but I got to be with her and watch her in her glorious element. And we watched the Oscars in her cozy condo in the hundred-year-old lodge.

 The Anniversary Ball in November at the Inn

Beach Lodge, one of the buildings at Portage Point Inn

Outdoors I got to breathe, walk and listen to the "nothing" of winter in that great north country, among spruces, pines, and birches on the hills around frozen Portage Lake and up on the bluff at Arcadia looking out over Lake Michigan. In winter, these contoured hills, coned trees, and white and green clapboard buildings of the lodge are quiet, unlike in summer when tourists swarm to the aqua waters of northwest Michigan. Only a few lodgers spent the night under neighboring roofs. Hardly a vehicle passed as we parked on the shoulder of M-22 and crossed to climb the lookout over Lake Michigan. Snow quiets and slows everything, even up the road where skiers were shushing down the hills.

Across Lake Michigan, to the right, is Wisconsin, about 60 miles away;
elsewhere Lake Michigan gets to 118 miles across

I claim this quiet northern winter, though I have never lived there. I spent two weeks of summer vacation with my family at a cottage up the road for just a few years, half of which are prior to my memory. A few weeks’ making, and this terrain is mine. I don’t know if I will ever move to another state. (I have done so previously, even to another country.) I drove four and a half hours to be there Saturday and four and a half hours back again Monday. It was worth it, but how could I move even farther away?

Before winter is over, I have to post the winter poem: The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; . . .

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter . . .

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves, . . .

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place . . .

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Portage Point Inn

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Lake Michigan: lines and curves, with Beat poet William Everson

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I hope you enjoyed a beautiful Christmas and are resting warmly in the afterglow, as I am. Stay snug and comfortable while I share some scenes of winter here.

In our world that is filled with straight and rigid lines constructed by men, it is needful to find balance in the feminine, curving complement of Nature. In their rectangular New York apartment my daughter and her husband grow a pot of basil, its mouth-leaves open to the sun on a wide kitchen windowsill. Nearly all the concrete streets of our towns and cities are softened by trees, their round domes curling up and down curb-shores as if avenues are rivers. Trees grow straight, like roads and buildings, yet they are simultaneously round in girth and leaves.

Nowhere could the contrast between Man’s straight architecture and Nature’s roundness be more evident than at Lake Michigan a week ago. I walked the woods and beaches of Grand Haven and Hoffmaster, up and down hilly dunes that rise like a woman’s hips (and I felt the strain in mine). At Grand Haven (photos below), the yardstick-straight concrete pier with its iron catwalk reaches out into the teal water with a cherry red light tower in the middle and lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the end. The pier withstands violent storms, and sadly people have been swept away while walking there. (I posted photos of a more dramatic winter scene three years ago here.) Even on the man-made pier, Nature festoons circular knobs and curlicues on the steel. Waves curl around metal. Sand, water, wind and freezing temperatures wrinkle and pile circular sculptures on the beach.  I find man-made structures more intriguingly beautiful when Nature has weathered them with her own patina.

There is a poet of the Pacific Northwest who respected Nature and tried to live in its rhythms as much as a person can.  William Everson (1912-1994) spent three lifetimes writing about Nature's seasons and the tension between man and Nature -- three lifetimes because he dramatically changed his circumstances twice, leaving a secular life to become a Dominican monk – “Brother Antoninus” -- and then returning to secular life again. He was haunted by the violence we are susceptible to in the world of Nature, and in our own hearts; he was a conscientious objector in WWII. After becoming a monk and one of the original Renaissance Poets – which came to be known as the Beat poets (he was “the Beat friar”) -- he began the third part of his life when just after taking vows for the priesthood, he publicly read his love poem to a woman “Tendril in the Mesh,” threw off his monk’s robe, and chose Nature's dance with her as his spiritual practice. William Everson, aka Brother Antoninus, was a farmer, a fine-press printer, and the only monk among the Beat poets. Everson’s poems remained often erotic and mystical throughout the phases of his life, including the period in the Dominican order. (He famously and controversially wrote erotic poems about his soul's relationship with God, as shown in Dark god of Eros.) There is a very nice bio of him at the Poetry Foundation site here. A few of Everson's poems that can be found online are here.

I'll post one lovely poem of Everson's.

San Joaquin

by William Everson

This valley after the storms can be beautiful beyond the telling,

Though our city-folk scorn it, cursing heat in the summer and drabness in winter,

And flee it—Yosemite and the sea.

They seek splendor, who would touch them must stun them;

The nerve that is dying needs thunder to rouse it.

I in the vineyard, in green-time and dead-time, come to it dearly,

And take nature neither freaked nor amazing,

But the secret shining, the soft unutterable sundowns;

And love as the leaf does the bough.

Accompanying Lake Michigan photos from last week I'd like to share a further peek into Everson’s mind-heart, from a book transcription of his “meditations” presented in his year-long course on the poet’s call he taught at Kresge College (UCSC) in the 1970s. The book is titled Birth of a Poet, and these quote-meditations are from Chapter two: Identity. At the foundation of my writing life in the early 1990s, this book helped give shape to my own poet identity, as well as my perspective of Nature and its rhythms.

I would be remiss if I did not mention how very present George's images of beauty in unexpected places were in my mind this day at the beach. If you have not yet visited George's blog Transit Notes, I highly recommend it for more along these lines (and curves) of living in rhythm with Nature.

 

“Cyclical time is very jealous of itself. When you enter its world of myth and dream, of ritual and wonder, there is an innate revulsion from the processes of linear time.”

“Often, the most profound signature of cyclical time, the spoken voice, simply won’t communicate into linear pattern of print. . . . The page simply can’t register what the voice is saying.”

“When your whole life is structured around winning and losing as key to identity it becomes, literally, a crucifixion.”

“Emily Dickinson wasn’t mad, because she possessed her vocation. It enabled her to skate on the brink of insanity, yet retain her complete integrity. All the hell the Victorians were trying to deny through the accumulation of wealth, she lived out in her beautifully skeptical intelligence. She took nothing for granted, but possessed the sovereign right to see everything to its essential core.”

“Even after eighteen years in a monastery, I can’t claim to be an angelic man. I don’t have the particular kind of vision called the angelic intelligence. I am a sensual man, and my sensual needs become the law of my being. I live out the physical vibration as the impulse of my life, and through its exercise, rather than its denial, I fulfill what I am. That’s a terrible thing. And a terrible beauty.”

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“All great art is gauged on that dimension, and, setting aside the collective liturgies, and the detachment of contemplation, it is the most direct means we have of bringing us back into harmony. Art is the aperture through which we slip inside the threshold, momentarily at least, to gain a vision of the two points of view as they come together.”

"I am trembling a bit just going through all of this in my head. I'm like an escapee who trembles when he reapproaches the Iron Curtain, with all its barb wire, electrical charges, and hidden explosives. But the Iron Curtain is really only a symbol of that threshold. We must penetrate it in order to obtain our wholeness, our beatitude. You possess both worlds within you, they are each yours by right. You must not let that outside world, with its emphasis on the linear, deny you your deeper self, which is of the cyclical mode. Your course in life must always be to hold both realms in your being. Your vocation is the process by which you bring them together."

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Giving thanks for the greatest days of our lives

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     Thanksgiving weekend we wound through towns with names from my childhood on the road to the old family cottage – Betsie, Beulah, Benzie, Mesick -- on our drive north to “the Cape Cod of the Midwest": northwest Michigan. The childhood cottage was the lake place my great grandfather and great-uncle built, of the hoity toities from Chicago, the ones with money who I was sure I should have been born among. Had there been some mistake? I was the youngest of the born-again Baptist minister’s family, all ten of us. We must have been a visual diversion when descending upon the Congregational Assembly at Crystal Lake just a mile from Lake Michigan, tumbling out of the old fifties Woody wagon, carrying brown paper bags from the trailer bursting with clothes and groceries, then changing into hand-me-down cotton bathing suits and running to the beach. How I loved the smell of fusty leaves around the white painted porch and its slamming wood screen door, then the hot asphalt road I skimmed across barefoot to the fine white sand edging the lapis blue lake, and at last digging my fingers down beneath hot sand to cool clay, clawing it into my fist, then sculpting bowls to be lined up to dry in the sun in preparation for some imagined feast.

     So when we drove up this Thanksgiving weekend to a lake inn down the road from that old glory of a place, with foot-thick birches and old wooden porches, I was five again, smelling lake water lapping the firm white beach. I was walking the lane through deep oak woods and a tunnel of white cottages to Lake Michigan where we’d watch the sun set. Back at the cottage before bed, with sore sunburned skin, I’d sit on my fifteen-year-old sister’s lap during family devotions in warm lamp light and learn to read by following her fingertip guiding my eyes over the black print on thin Bible paper in passages Dad picked. We ten sat in wicker sofas and chairs around the unlit fireplace, my long-legged sisters and brothers shifting and rearranging the cushions, while they imagined the other cottage teenagers dancing at the rec hall.

     This year’s Thanksgiving weekend was an anniversary ball to celebrate my nephew’s wedding to a brilliant woman who survived breast cancer last year. In a little black dress and heels I sat on the edge of the dance floor watching two dozen kids dance with abandon. Others joined me sitting there between dances, observing the Bacchanalia of movement, sweat and wildness of the three-to-twenty-year-olds. We reminisced back to our own quiet and sober wedding celebrations, utterly devoid of wine, song or dance in the basements of Baptist churches. How far we’ve come, we said, how free we are now, sculpting memories of dance and lining them up like clay vessels to be filled with the wine of wedding after wedding, then dashing them to pieces in the fireplace with joyful abandon, until the next wild-heart celebration.

     Just then four-year-old Greta hoofed by yelling, “This is the greatest day of my life . . .” above the speakers blaring Cake’s “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” as her cousins pulled her back into their line dance.

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The Bridge

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This is Farwell. I don't know if that's his name there on the motorcycle, but that's the name of the little town whose population doubled when these bikers stopped for breakfast. Three years ago this weekend I was on my way north for a solo weekend away, because it was the 50th anniversary of the construction of one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The Mackinac Bridge spans the Straits of Mackinac between the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan. The anniversary was an excuse for my Aveo, my camera and me to run off together and cross that 50-year-old bridge, one year after I'd turned 50 myself. We ladies have to support each other (nyuck nyuck). (Did you know that bridge is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish?) I left home (southeast of the star on the map at the capitol, Lansing) and a couple hours later drove into Farwell (not too far from Midland on the map), a town where you don't have to stop since there are no traffic lights or stop signs going through town. But I did stop, to check out this caravan of motorcycles. I sat down on a bench across the street from the diner where these bikes were parked, and waited with my camera. After reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college, I always wanted to take a cross-country motorcycle trip (I'd love this pre-1916 Cannonball Coast to Coast Vintage Motorcycle race). Maybe this was my chance?

When the bikers came out of the diner, they took their time, chatting about where they'd stop next. The gentleman with the Harley-burly beard in the foreground of the photo at the top of the post sauntered across to his bike parked in front of me on my bench and immediately asked if I'd like to go for a ride? Hmm. Here was my long-awaited opportunity to ride in the open air, hair flying from under a helmet, bugs on my teeth. Route 66, here I come!

I declined, however, with all the courtesy I would give the President of the United States. If I think about it too much, traveling alone as a woman can be a little creepy. So I don't think about it too much. (I admit that once or twice in motels I have gotten pretty weirded out if the Psycho shower scene sneaks past the doorlock in my head.) I have found that if I treat people with respect, they treat me the same way. When I'm in Chicago or NYC, and I'm lost? I'm going to ask a construction worker for directions, even though they sometimes come off as being, well, aggressive, toward women (or has this changed?). Something in me really likes to confront assumptions in myself, and in others about me. I have never experienced anything but the most genteel behavior in these encounters (except a few times from whoever is with me, who thinks I've lost my mind). I have approached the thuggiest looking people (I don't mean construction workers are thuggy-looking), and while they may look surprised at first (aren't we all surprised when a stranger comes up to us?), they are always helpful. Something gets bridged between you. If you've never tried approaching the least likely person on the street for help, try it, it is liberating.

I'm careful and don't put myself in dangerous situations. I get a sense if a person is not the kind I want to approach, maybe it's a sixth sense. I always have a cell phone. I only explore in public places, and always in daylight. But I love to travel, and I love to do it alone sometimes, which Don graciously understands, if for some reason he can't join me. He says he doesn't worry about me, although there is one artistic neighborhood project in Detroit I am eager to explore, and he won't let me go alone, even in the daytime. Being vulnerable, because I'm a woman, can be very frustrating in its limitations.

Perhaps my trust in strangers began on my first day of school in kindergarten, when I lost my way home and was crying on the sidewalk. A strange man in a truck stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. No matter that everyone had told me not to get into vehicles with strangers. I said, Sure. He drove me two blocks home. To this day, I don't know how he recognized me, but I didn't know him.

Have you ever traveled overnight alone, just for fun, not business?

my Aveo parked in front of the motel in St. Ignace, Michigan in October 2007

where I was the only guest for the night;
St. Ignace is the first town over the bridge in the Upper Peninsula

state park beach along Lake Huron

northern Michigan farm

Harbor Springs, Michigan

Five Mile Creek, a one room school

wild turkeys in northern Michigan 

(by "northern Michigan" I mean the northern part of the Lower Peninsula)

Mackinac Bridge, between the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan
from the upper peninsula in St. Ignace

Mackinac Bridge, from the Upper Peninsula
in its 50th year, 2007

Mackinac Bridge, on my way to morning coffee and breakfast at a diner

rustic boat on a rustic beach

wild beach yarrow
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The turquoises and blues of the Great Lakes are better in autumn

I am severely disappointed that we did not get up north this summer, and our plans for going this fall have also fallen through. That's why I'm posting three-year-old photos, because of my wanderlust for that magical part of the world just a few hours away.

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