Enchantments

I have been seeing quite a few turkey families lately. Most of the young of the year are teenagers, quite adult looking, feathered out, and nearly as tall as the attendant parents. But today in light rain, this mother brought her nine poults foraging back and forth across our meadow.  These poults were quite small. She was takng good care of them; we wondered, though, if they would be able to get the bulk they will need before winter. This is the largest hatch I have ever seen. It was lovely to watch them; they move about freely, yet together.

Here they all are; one had to look closely to see the two at the left and the moving one at the right. This is the only group shot that is at all sharp.

This shows what they looked like somewhat more clearly. 

Just a bit earlier, this handsome fellow was back. He has polished his antlers!

AUTUMN

Cathedral of my enchantments, autumn wind, I grew old giving      thanks.

This one-sentence poem appears on page 650 of Milosz's New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001.

I want to write something on this model. 

Something that doesn't need anything else.

A Buck-Filled Morning

No does, no fawns this morning, just six bucks, munching their way across the meadow. 

I had never seen the like. They weren't close enough together that I could get a group portrait. 

The rest were younger than this guy. I think I got his portrait a week or two ago, when his antlers were still in velvet. I remember reading about this process as a child (is it in Bambi?) how a buck had to rip the velvet off by rubbing it against trees. You can see from this photo what a violent process it must be, and long, and bloody.

Here is one of the younger bucks. In almost every picture I took of him, his tail is active.

I like the small sprinkle of white blossoms in this photo.

MOUNTAIN DIALOGUE

You ask why I've settled in

these emerald mountains,

and so I smile, mind at ease of 

itself, and say nothing.

Peach      blossoms     drift

streamwater away deep in mystery:

it's another heaven and earth,

nowhere among people.

Li Bai (Li Po) translated by David Hinton.

Here is another of those quietly lovely ancient Chinese poems, 

suitable for all nature-filled occasions. And so goodnight.

The Processes

Since this grows along the fence line of the Daily Walk, 

I often stop to see what subtle beauty it has made. 

Today, I particularly noticed the lichen on all the slender, dying branches. 

The soft colors and patterns of lichen are lovely, and often seen here in our local woodlands.

For those of us who will never be able to live in a cabin in Alaska, John Haines is a writer who can assist us in thinking about what that would be like, and what results being alone in this way might have on our person, soul and attitudes. I have rarely hoped to do anything that adventurous, but am drawn to these books as if they were the best chocolate candies. Haines was the poet laureate of Alaska, and his books are widely available in libraries and bookstores, although most are not yet available electronically, which is a crying shame.

THE MOLE

Sometimes I envy those

who spring out like great black-

and-gold butterflies

before the crowded feet 

of summer --

                      brief, intense,

like pieces of the sun,

they are remembered and celebrated

long after night has fallen.

But I believe also in one

who in the dead of winter

tunnels through a damp,

clinging darkness,

nosing the soil of old gardens.

He lives unnoticed, but

deep within him there is a dream

of the surface one day

breaking and crumbling:

and a small, brown-furred

figure stands there,

blinking at the sky,

as the rising sun slowly dries

his strange, unruly wings.

John Haines (1924-2011)

from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer; collected poems, 

Graywolf, 1993, page 11.

The mole, like the lichen, is one of those small things the contemplation of which makes for

a very satisfying relation to walking-about-in-the-world. Of course we are attracted to the tigers and to the great unfolded peonies, and those mighty rewoods. I've only seen moles twice, one was being played with by a cat. I could see why it was called the Star-nosed Mole. And a few years later, when we were having a crabapple tree planted; the digging of the hole was uncovered a nest of tiny pink mole babies. 

Autumn deepens.

                           

Headlights on the Grass

What I was trying to get through the windshield was the black cloud, and then I saw how the headlights lit the late summer drying grasses by our two-track.

Then we got home and the house was glowing at us, 

because we leave the light on so we can get in safely.

We had driven all the way to Indian River for one of those Mediterranian pizzas with marinated artichoke hearts, a specialty of Vivio's. On the way we passed this colorful symphony at Ginop's the Tractor store.

But even though the "summer people" have gone home, there are enough residents left on Saturday night that we might have to wait an hour at Vivio's-- the whole outdoor eating area was full of the waiting people, just gabbling and waiting, nothing to drink, nothing to eat.
I didn't seeany vacant chairs, either/ Sigh. We drove away.

Then down by the Surgeon River we saw this sign:

And pulled into the parking lot on the steep back above the river, and had a nice meal with an old-fashioned soup and salad bar.and a glass of wine.

And when we came out, the moon was rising above the pines.

The End

Today has been insanely busy, but I did find some good things to write about tomorrow. This post has been brought to you courtesy of iPhone photogaphy. Good Night!

The red, red maple

Not yet; this was last year's October. I saw this tree growing with another when it wasn't as tall as I was. Because it was such a beautiful color, I cut the other one away years ago. Now this red beauty is really shooting up and will soon be taller than the Scotch pine it grew up under. The young maple sprouted at the edge of a large cobble, which now rests on its foot-root.

How the Late Autumn Night Novel Begins

The ferry-boat smells of oil and something rattles all the time like an obsession. The spotlight's turned on. We're pulling in to the jetty. I'm the only one who wants off here. "Need the gangway?" No. I take a long tottering stride right into the night and stand on the jetty, on the island. I feel wet and unwieldy, a butterfly just crept out of its cocoon, the plastic bags in each hand are misshapen wings. I turn round and see the boat gliding away with its shining windows, then grope my way towards the familiar house which has been empty for so long. There's no one in any of the houses round about... It's good to fall asleep here. I lie on my back and don't know if I'm asleep or awake. Some books I've read pass by like old sailing ships on their way to the Bermuda triangle to vanish without a trace... .I hear a hollow sound, an absentminded drumming. An object the wind keeps knocking against something the earth holds still. If the night is not just an absence of light, if the night really is something, then it's that sound. Stethoscope noises from a slow heart, it beats, goes silent for a time, comes back. As if the creature were moving in a zigzag across the Frontier. Or someone knocking in a wall, someone who belongs to the other world but was left behind here, knocking, wanting back. Too late. Couldn't get down there, couldn't get up there, couldn't get aboard... The other world is this world too. Next morning I see a sizzling golden-brown branch. A crawling stack of roots. Stones with faces. The forest is full of abandoned monsters which I love.

Tomas Transtromer

The Great Enigma; new collected poems, 

translated by Robin Fulton, New Directions, 2006

I can still remember the night Robert Hass brought the poems of Tomas Transtromer to the evening poetry seminar at San Jose State. Knocked, as they say, my socks off! I've been nuts about Transtromer ever since; just nuts!

And afterward I wrote a prose poem for class, which, since it took place on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk in the daytime I called: "How the Late Autumn Novel Begins." I just found a copy of this poem, which I had stored in "the cloud" and I still like it enough to send it out. Although I ought to just post it here and not wait for the Sixth Extinction. But I am too tired to decide, having just finished preliminary work on our haiku anthology--so proud of myself.

Heavenly Blues

This is the way it looks now across the field toward one part of Hymas Woods Nature Preserve; we see this or some version of it on the Daily Walk. Cassie, the dachshund, has become addicted to this walk and starts whining around if we are late getting started.

I have been reading  Dieterich Buxtehude; organist in Lubeck, Schirmer, 1987, by Kerala J. Snyder. I found an available used copy of the older edition (the new one, which music scholars will need, is quite costly) the last week after listening to the Public Radio Program, Pipe Dreams,which is on every Sunday night here. They played a whole program of Buxtehude's organ music (great stuff!) and told many stories, like the one about the walk that Johann Sebastian Bach took in 1705,  "J.S. Bach, then a young man of twenty, walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck, a distance of more than 400 kilometres (250 mi), and stayed nearly three months to hear the Abendmusik, meet the pre-eminent Lübeck organist, hear him play, and, as Bach explained, "to comprehend one thing and another about his art". Quotation from the Wikipedia article on Buxtehude. The whole matter of the transition to Protestant thought and thought-control (Martin Luther nailed up his 95 These in the year 1517.) in Germany is very interesting.

The quote from the book I want to share tonight is from a letter that William Carr, the English consul in Amsterdam wrote after his visit to Lubeck in the mid-1670s.

And so I have been thinking a lot about Europe and European civilization. geography, economics, literature, art and music and chivalry, religion and war and so forth. Reading this book has shown me again how limited much of my education has been. It is a fascinating book, as often a book can be if written by someone who has been deeply soaked in the material. Snyder explains about the development of organ tuning and tempering. It is really tricky and hard to understand and she seems to have mastered it.

"In former times this city was the place, where the deputies of all the Hansiatick towns assembled [A reference to the Hanseatic League, an economic and political alliance of towns in the areas around the Baltic Sea that had been a very powerful engine for the economic growth of the area. My note.] and was once so powerful as to make war against Denmark and Sweden, and to conquer severall places and Islands belonging to those two crowns, nay and to lend ships to England and other Potentates, without any prejudice to their own trade, wherein they vied in all parts with their neighbours; but it is now exceedingly run into decay not onely in territories, but in wealth and trade also. And the reason of that was chiefely the inconsiderate zeal of their Lutheran Ministers, who perswaded the Magistrates to banish all Roman Catholicks, Calvinists, Jews and all that dissented from them in matter of Religion, even the English Company too, who all went and settled in Hambourg to the great advantage of that city and almost ruine of Lubeck, which hath not now above 200 Ships belonging to it, nor more territories to the State; than the city it self and a small part called Termond [Travemunde] about eight miles distant from it. The rest of there territories are now in the possession of the Danes and Swedes, by whom the burghers are so continually allarmed that they are quite tired out with keeping guard and paying of Taxes." 
Snyder, page 39.

I had read plenty about the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, but never so much about the economic consequences of some of these Draconian policies. Oh, Government! Oh, Religions! Oh, Human Beings! It's enough to make one want to write a poem. . . .    Good night!

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

The second page of this letter from 1966 is not shown to protect the privacy of the writer. 

It is one of the most treasured letters in my digital collection.

In the recent New Yorker, August 25, 2014, on pages 54-55, there is a poem by Eavan Boland the title of which I stole for this post. I have been thinking about letter-writing for the past few days. On my table are the photo cards I plan to send: sympathy for an injury; congratulations on your retirement, and I-thought-you-might-like-this-photo of your young daughter and her violin from the early 1990s. I often think to send notes; I make cards with my photos and I recently bought a passel of bird stamps to send them with, but somehow, I get fewer written and sent than I plan.


THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING

The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.

The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers

Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,

Always performing—even when a shadow
Fell across the page and they knew the answer
Was not forthcoming—the same action:

First the leaning down, the pen becoming
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory. Then the letting up,

The lighter stroke, which brought back
Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel
Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass

Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn
Again just in time for the May Novenas
Recited in sweet air on a road leading

To another road, then another one, widening
To a motorway with four lanes, ending in
A new town on the edge of a city

They will never see. And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see

The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became

Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew

By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?

Eavan Boland

It always pleases me to see a poem by Eavan Boland. Many years ago she came to San Jose under the auspices of the Poetry Center and someone funded a reading, at the library I managed, as part of her visit. She couldn't have been nicer and gave a beautiful reading to a small group in this library in one of the poorer neighborhoods. I've always been grateful for the chance to present a truly great poet in one of my special places, the Alum Rock Library. 

Boland's poetry manifests the spirit of someone who has been paying attention to things that matter to human beings. This particular poem is beautifully constructed of 3-line stanzas, which is one of my favorite forms. It is not a simple poem, but a rich one which brings in much related material in an economical way. I particularly call your attention to the fifth and sixth stanzas which are so interesting about the physical act of writing with a pen and the use of related images (cranesbill, bicycle wheel, rust that relate to writing with dip pen and ink.

I am reminded again that I need to scan the letters my father's father sent to my aunt/ He wasn't particularly happy at the time, but he expresses it in the most beautiful 19th century handwriting.

The rainstorm going on right now has just intensified. But if the internet is still working, I will post this now.