Poem: Nostalgia at the intersection of the teacup

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Nostalgia at the intersection of the teacup

I
My friend warned me he would die someday
soon and I thought
but I don’t even know you
yet.

II
On the same leaf
the fly with wings
shining silvery in the mouth
of sunlight
faced the butterfly with threadbare wings.
Together they equaled
atonement.

III
If I were clever enough
I would teach my tongue
to curl through hoops of fire
unscathed.
Only cleaner.

IV
We are victims
of life, uninformed in
moony fogs without
compassion
for what is possible.
Life needs amnesty.

V
The way heads of grasses
hang over the path
in the meadow is
more beautiful
than flowers.
In my humble opinion.
(I hang my head shamefully
to compare anything of beauty.)

VI
Sadly, I don’t like tea,
because the luster
of a teacup
makes me want to drink it
sitting in a room with happiness,
shadows, and a window.

VII
I am either the mother
of becoming or
the becoming of mother
or I may have it all wrong
and I’m really the skeleton
sphere
of a new world.
Don’t you love Plato, and Blake?

VIII
I do not think
the cosmos is a symphony
where the spirit sings
accompaniment.
I think you are a symphony
and the cosmos backs
you up.

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Poem: Battle over the Meadow

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Battle over the Meadow

You wouldn’t know it
but there is a battle
over the meadow

and if you have
emperor eyes
from thirty feet

you can see a spark
of red iridescently, and green
the color of a mallard’s

cravat, flashing
like tiny, distant epaulettes
of a Russian

officer under the almost
melancholy gaze
of Napoleon

across a field
assessing numbers, the
morning, the sun’s saber,

the black locust tree’s strategic
conversation with
robin about the worm,

the bottle-green line
of spider silk
crossed and recrossed

in the attack of the dragonflies
whose wings pulse and quiver
in the sun, shuttling

and defending their snatch
of gnats
and mosquitoes

whose air belongs to them
fleetingly
but deliciously, the morning

being so frangible
with almost
immortality

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Turkey Vulture

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My leather clogs are soaked with dew and yesterday's rainfall through to my socks, and my backside is damp from the roughhewn rain-sodden bench, which is unsteady on the soft ground of the meadow. Low sun shines on my back and on the path’s thick wet grass that needs mowing. In October, the mower forgets his way through goldenrod that have lost their stars. White and yellow moths have flown away. Bees have no flowers to woo and have disappeared. The fire of sumac is flickering out, flame by flame. Yellow leaves on the tallest poplars around the pond applaud the parade of clouds marching past. Oh look! They have never done that step and roll before. Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap. Some in the meadow are falling asleep, unimpressed, while the chickadees keep fee-beeing and squeaking their high pitchpoints, and tree swallows treet their trits then swallow them in gurgles.

What have I come here for? Where is my place? A tippy bench at the center of things. So like a human. It takes long to quiet, shoulders hunched, hands warming under my thighs. Ah, just relax, kid. You think too much.

I don’t hear him coming, no treets, sqawks or screeches, but a shadow betrays him, like my brother’s thumb-hooked hand silhouette on the projector screen. I’ve seen them for days, since the neighbor bow-shot a deer and gutted him, leaving the entrails for wild animals in the field. I have seen them from the kitchen window, perched in the highest poplar branches like hunters in blinds, patient. But this morning, they are six-foot kites crisscrossing a gentle sky, scouting. Silent as arrows. He, my personal turkey vulture, could be scoping me, in my black crow hooded jacket, still as death. But I do not imagine this is so. Instead, I am certain that he is showing me how to scout, scope and scavenge. Why else does he arc over the pines and back under the sun, like a slow motion boomerang? Why tip and turn just there where the cloud parade ends, showing off the flourish of his wing-tip baton? What possible reason could he have for spreading his wing feathers like a sumac branch directly above me, floating down so close I swear I can feel him tap a message of longing on the wind’s drum? If he does not mean to demonstrate the silent way of seeking sustenance, why are we here?

You can listen to a podcast reading of this piece here.

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a mind of winter

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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.

"The Snow Man"
- by Wallace Stevens

NOTE: About Bishop, the barn cat in the photo, above. Several of you left comments that you are worried about her. She lives outdoors. She has a very, very thick coat of fur. She has an ever-heated cozy bed in the garage where she can go when she wishes. In the shot above, she is doing what she loves to do on a sunny winter day - squirm around in the snow so I will pet her. Believe me, she loves her outdoor life and romps out there all winter long. On the very coldest days, she stays in her warm bed perch in the garage.

I really feel very sorry, and even a little afraid, for my poor friends who live in the South of the U.S. and in parts of Europe who are unused to a cold winter and have had many days of freezing temperatures. I hope you will be feeling warmer in the next few days. If your house isn't warm, please layer on lots and lots of clothes, and wear a hat and gloves indoors if you have them. Weather.com says the next couple of days will see temperatures start to moderate for you in the South.

I don't know how long my love of winter will keep me in Michigan, if it will last until the end of my life, if the end of my life is another twenty or thirty years as my parents lived. Even if I bundle up and feel toasty, my fingers turn into icicles before the rest of me gets cold. I think they must have had minor frost bite one of those nights ice skating in Grand Ledge under the bridge. When I went out yesterday to shoot these photos, every bit of me was warm, especially my heart. Except for my fingers. Even with good warm gloves and sticking them in my pockets between shots, they froze. But regardless of my aching fingers, I will always have a mind of winter, in the sense of Wallace Stevens' poem.

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these meadowsounds: sumac

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. . . We are here again with the beloved. This air,
a shout. These meadowsounds, an astonishing myth . . .

- read the whole short poem: Ode 3079 - Meadowsounds, by Rumi


beloved Sumac:

(please click to enlarge)

For Julia, who after a long hot summer in Texas especially requested a post with warm autumn colors in cool Michigan.
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spiderwebs in the meadow

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The vocabulary of spiderwebs:

Silk. Gossamer. Ballooning. Dragline. Anchor. Spiral. Funnel. Orb. Dome.

And on dewy September mornings: Beadwork. Rainbow. Jewel. Necklace.






























From wiki: "The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity."

Last spring I found a forsythia petal swinging by a gossamer strand in the middle of the orchard far away from its anchor:



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