It is evening now . . .

From the ducks in snow time. I have always loved the way this is nearly

a black and white photo, and only when I upped the saturation,

could I see the red bills and a little other color.

Home from Duck Marsh

All day in the rain and sour reek
of the marsh, in the fluttering grass of killdeer,
all day I have been speaking\
in the tongues of duck---squalling in joy
of smartweed, watershield, salt hay,
as the green flash of mallards rode
in the high winds.

It is evening now, it is weariness,
it is the weight of the body deepening 
into pools of rain,
into the clear dark eyes of birds.
Around me the cities are stoking up for
the night, the furnaces singing of death
until the old are stunned with it
and the young, before their banked altars of sound,
hum like wires in the wastes of Kansas.

But it is evening now, it is weariness.
The bittern descends for the last time
and the egret closes its whiteness in the tall grass.
And in this quiet house of rain
I am the last sane man on earth,
sleep settling on my brow
like a great crown.

Peter Everwine

from the meadow; selected and new poems,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004, page 22.

I found the work of Peter Everwine quite by chance, when I stumbled on one of his translations from the Aztec in an anthology. (He also translates poems from the Hebrew.) And I have found someone who has a rich language and a poetic gift that pleases me so much!

Praise: The day the deer danced in a circle

September 22, 2013, 5:22 a.m. (Camera date and time.)

I must have written about this before, but cannot find the blog post if I did.

I know I wished the light had been better. (That's the first bit of sunrise

glowing from the left, and the dance was over by then.) Some of the deer

have already returned to the forest beyond. These three are browsing

slowly in that direction and in a minute or two will disappear into the wood. 

This dance took place eight days after my birthday in 2013. I had just

turned 78 years old. I was up early and may have come downstairs to take

some pictures of the dawn. On the west side of the house, six deer were dancing

in a circle. Honestly! Some of the young ones jumped about, and did some

playful head-butting. The dance went on for a long time. I almost held my breath 

and was very careful not to make any noise.

Most of the pictures I had to take through the windowscreen since the dance 

was taking place in the West Meadow of our home in Emmet County, Michigan.

Later, I found a reference to a scientific paper on this sort of group-play 

that deer have been observed to do, but it was on a scientific site I did not have access to.

I could tell from the abstract that this behavior had been observed and studied.

In less than two months, I will observe my 80th birthday; it's a little scary.

And this was one of the very most unexpected and interesting things I have ever seen!

PRAISE

Knee-deep
  in the ferns
    springing up
      at the edge of the whistling swamp,

I watch the owl
  with its satisfied,
    heart-shaped face
      as it flies over the water--

back and forth--
  as it flutters down
    like a hellish moth
      wherever the reeds twitch--
      
whenever, in the muddy cover,
  some little life sighs
    before it slides into moonlight
      and becomes a shadow.

In the distance,
  awful and infallible,
    the old swamp belches.
      Of course

It stabs my heart
  whenever something cries out
    like a teardrop.
      But isn't it wonderful,

What is happening
  in the branches of the pines:
    the owl's young,
      dressed in snowflakes,

are starting to fatten--
  they beat their muscular wings,
    they dream of flying
      for another million years

over the water,
  over the ferns,
    over the world's roughage
      as it bleeds and deepens.

Mary Oliver

House of Light; poems by Mary Oliver, 

Beacon, 1990, pages 46-47.

Nature's Blues and Greens.

View of the sky over the park on today's Daily Walk. 

It was still hot today, but not too hot--as it has been--to take a walk.

Now it is 10:30 at night and someone just began setting off firecrackers

across the creek. But our old dog is deaf and continues to nap.

We had another of those brief and violent wind-and-rain events late this afternoon.

And many families of ducklings visited for a cracked corn snack before that.

We Netflixed the movie Champs at our son's place. It was very interesting

and very depressing, too, to think about the lives of ghetto boys
 and incarcerated young men. There has to be a better system.

WATERCOLORING
The sky began to tilt,
a shift of light toward the higher clouds,
so I seized my brush
and dipped my little cup in the stream,

but once I streaked the paper gray
with a hint of green,
water began to slide down the page,
rivulets looking for a river.

And again, I was too late -
then the sky made another turn,
this time as if to face a mirror
held in the outstretched arm of a god.

Billy Collins

  

Aimless Love; new and selected poems,

Random House, 2014.

When words were like magic

This week Ms. Mallard rests under the willow with her rapidly growing children.

That is she facing away in the duck-clump on the right. One of her children

stretches his neck in the center. In the wood ducks, it is often the male who raises

up and looks around like this, but I cannot tell the males from the females yet

in this batch. There is a larger group that are beginning to put on adult feathering now.

And it has only been a couple of weeks since I saw another mother with only two:

one completely yellow and one black-brown, and not more than a week or so old.

I love the way the willow turns the sunlight on the water green.

MAGIC WORDS

In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal
could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was.

ESKIMO (ANONYMOUS)

translated from the Inuit by Edward Field

A BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS; 
an international anthology of poetry. 
Edited and with an introduction 
by Czeslaw Milosz, Harcourt, 1996, page 268.

Something Infinite

I'm still thrilled over the rain yesterday! I keep playing with the photos.

The Other Side of the River

                                                 (one unnumbered section, dated 2004)

*  *  *

It's linkage I'm talking about

                         and harmonies and structures

And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

Something infinite behind everything appears,

                                                             and then disappears.

It's all a matter of how

                                    you narrow the surfaces.

It's all a matter of how you fit in the sky.

*  *  *

Charles Wright

The Oxford Book of American Poetry, edited by David Lehman, Oxford University Press, 2006. page 921.

The layout of this poem on the page supports the text meaningfully. Wright is very good at this.

It is a technique I love. Try reading this short passage aloud. Sleep tight.

When it rains, sometimes it pours

I don't suppose summer hear is gone forever after this first week in July,

but today's heavy afternoon shower was a huge relief to my garden.

The pale soft landscape across the creek reminds me 

of an English landscape painting by Constable.

All it needs is a cathedral in the distance.

A while later, I noticed that the creek was running deeper.

Is it showering?

A muddy cat is asleep

on a Buddhist sutra.

Natsume Soseki
(1867-1916)

This author is regarded as one 
of the greatest Japanese modern writers. 
His novel I Am a Cat has been translated and is delightful!
His face was on the 1000 yen bill from 1984-2004; 
I brought one back with me from Japan.
How I wish we had writers on some of our currency!


Modern Japanese Haiku; An Anthology,
compiled, translated and with an introduction by Makoto Ueda, 
page 39.

so much surprising . . .

My two youngest grandchildren during their visit last month;

being modern children, they are looking at an electronic device.

I never ask them to smile for the camera, so I get images like this one!

butterflies

leaving their cocoons

open their eyes

to so much surprising 

newness

--Ed Bremson

from The Best of the Five Line Poems 2012,

edited by Ed Bremson, Kindle location 17.

This is a small book of  selected 5-line poems 

which were posted

on the Facebook Groups

"Five Line Poems" and 

"Tanka Poets on Site" in 2012, and offered 

as an Amazon Kindle Book for 99 cents.

If you like short form poems and enjoy writing haiku

or other examples, you might like tanka, too.

This small collection makes a good introduction,

and may inspire you to write some of your own.