mass in the mudroom

The ritual of coming inside from the cold.

 

We unzip the outer jacket- it’s like a prayer. The ratcheting sound tickling my ear drums, the slide-click-slide-click reveal between finger and thumb. To feel the rush of warmth escaping, like some secret flock of doves taking to the air. 

 

This overcoat, this shell person, and its patient hanger waiting. Smooth feel of wood, sleek metal hook. Made so exactly for what it does. How perfectly it rests on that round bar, how it sits! See how these things sit. They are not nothing, these things, they so profoundly be.

 

Those angled corners of the hanger, that slide with such satisfaction into the arms. Just the right balance. I adjust the collar, like I am tucking it into bed, hanging up the robe, the costume, the piece that makes the play. And the clink as hook meets bar, how neatly it sits with all the other characters, waiting their turn. The right weather, the right activity. Alert, ready.

 

This doffing is like a mass, the turning, bending, grasping, placing.

 

All these resting things, all of them. 

 

The kettle, the lamp, the scissors in the jar. The faucet, the railing, and oh the shoes (who become feet with simple lacing).

 

Oh these humble objects, see them radiate beneficence. See them lean in as they wait. 

a crow

A crow, flying across the true-blue sky,
   has paint-brush wing tips
      wet with ink.

 

With each deliberate beat

   a cool, wet line is left.

      Not on the sky,

 

but under the skin of my 

   chest- the gasping benediction-

      flight’s calligraphy.

tokens in my path

I find tokens along my path,

Almost any time I ask for them.

Feathers, pretty stones, 

The wing of a luna moth.

I had always thought of them as 

Affirmations, a thumbs-up 

From the universe, reassurance

Of Big Magic.

But here, walking with a tender

Spine and raw hip, fearful

Of what they mean: Lyme,

neutropenia, some bizarre recurrence-

I realize: these tokens, perhaps

They are not gifts themselves

But signposts, pointing 

To the act which made them.

A feather in the path came

From a molt, perhaps, a letting go.

Or, something more painful – a crow’s

Feather, maybe, ripped out while being mobbed.

The luna moth wing is no pretty present,

But tearing death.

The loosing of the body, the

Release of form. 

The tokens in my path are not 

Gifts – the gift is the work they point to.

It has been said so many times:

That which keeps us from God,

Is also our path back.

when you are grieving

When you are grieving do not search for four-leaf clovers, little charms that might staunch the flow and ease the pain. Little grass-strewn stars that might say, ‘we’ve made a mistake; your fate was meant for another.’ When you are grieving you have to drag your chains, scrape your knuckles, sit in the biting ants. 

No one wants to do this.

Sit and the sting will pull the wretched out of you. Seek no shade and the beating sun will burn your hope, and your fear of losing it. 

Do not chatter or explain, speak with the heart to someone who also knows about the clovers.

Someone who won’t offer you a cool drink or a key or salve or saving, someone who will look you in the eyes while your heart bleeds.

If it is only you abide in what comes, and weep perhaps to the hidden clovers.

siren thrush

This morning the thrush's song
beckoned me into the woods,
my own kindly siren.

I knew Circe's warning,
the coming destruction. But
I went gladly, without
lashing or waxed ears.

Her voice pulled me along
the path,
to my demise. And indeed

I was thrashed against the
rocks of my grief, wrecked
on the sharp edges of my sorrow.

The hull of my Self was torn
apart- there was I lost,
among reeds and mud and
willows.

That which rose to leave
   (for rise it did)
the woods was Nothing. A
resonant casing, a blessed ship
of sound-

the leaves, the brook, the robin.

Over the path back bent
hemlocks, their knowing
arms, feathery fingers nodding
   softly-
      home,

home.

haiku from martin's brook

meltwater rushing,
the roaring din of its voice.
still, how still the rocks.

the crabapple

How do I explain,

when I watch the branch of a crabapple

nodding in the gentle breeze,

that I feel it through the window.

Her twigs and leathery leaves

play across my cheek, just here.

Please, this is no metaphor;

understand that the air is my

body, and also the tree.

The eyes of myself are watching

my thin, branching arm

bob in the wind, my own breath.

By understand I mean 

stand under, which 

only your body can do.

If your fingers are (and they are) 

the wind, tell me- whose

cheek? whose feathers?

What craggy mountaintop

would you feel, suddenly,

like iron on your lips?

this and that

There is a desk before me.

On it are piles of paperclips, 

a highlighter bouquet in a baby food jar.

Small stacks of paper, a box of beads,

a turtle shell filled with drill bits, twist ties.

A stapler,

this and that.

These things consume me,

their correct configuration.

I slide them first here, these with those,

then there, each thing alone. 

I rearrange, and rearrange, and rearrange. 

Above the desk there is a window. 

Outside it is a craggy tree,

a jay, a rose-colored mountain, 

falling snow, a red squirrel hurrying by.

 A chickadee,

this and that.

about the houseplants

At least, when they whither,

There are crumpled leaves to pick off.

I only notice them when there is nothing else to do.

My nurturing is an after thought, almost a mistake.

Others are, I imagine, cooing gentle angels of growth.

Their fingertips are like root-endings.

What is it, that I can cull, instead of encourage?

The dry, crinkled leaves remind me of crepe,

Or my winter-lips.

I understand the pulling off, the picking, the paring down.

I can feel the rough paper veins shatter

In my own dry palms.

New growth, that is a mystery, and I think

Bother, I shall probably drown you too.

I will worry you to browning.

At least, then, I’ll heed the call.

There must be undertakers, who in

brown and broken leaves

find purpose.

things that i do*

I pay my taxes, I meet Reindeer.

I stroll through the garden of (literally) Eden and turn to gold under an Aspen.

I drink too much wine.

I write a poem to the sunrise, to the hurricane, to the chickadee whose fluff is tousled, who must have met the blackberry.

I grind my teeth, the hangnail is infected again, I stub my toe. I see black ink dripping between my fingers, I spin the red base wheel of spirit.

I plant metaphorical seeds, I ignore the compost and toss the banana peel.

I smudge the corners and forget myself.

I paint a goldfinch, neglect the voicemail, and fall asleep early.

I meet my God in the grout.

*sometime in 2013

lilacs gone wild

I like our old and wild lilacs. No one has hummingly tended them, no gloved gardener in pleated work shorts has cinched her wide-brimmed hat and knelt or stretched for the dead brown sprays. They are ropey old broads, a collective of them. They’ve dispensed with show and gone for height. They are too wicked and busy to clear the unproductive suckers. Perhaps that’s where they hang their potions.

It’s the old turn-about. At first the scraggy shrubs sat on my chest like another chore, a should just about last in line behind getting the garden in and weeding the blueberries. I interpreted it according to me. My lilacs, my house, my judgment. What might people think of us, new-neighbors-with-their-abandoned-lilacs?

Now I couldn’t care less. I freaking love those goddamn winners. If I stop thinking about myself for one hot second they explode in wild, exquisite singularity. I don’t think anyone planted them – or someone planted one a good long time ago and they’ve spread by suckers ever since. No one can really see them, anyway. They have their own agenda. They are twisted with ragged bark, like old grape or laurel. They reach away from the shade of the oak, into my shaggy lawn. Neighboring alpacas nibble their backsides.

I suppose they are cultivars, and as such might be happy with some attention and care and coaxing. But I’m not eating them any time soon – I’ll diligently prune the apples and raspberries. I don’t even care if they stop flowering. I want to see what those gnarly old birds can do. 

sensory time, late summer

“August” doesn’t mean a thing, not really. Or “July” or “September,” for that matter. Summer says something, and late summer even more, but still it makes one wonder whether you are referring to Chronos’ clock or the content of the year. Tell me where we are, when the shadows fall, and what the light is doing, and on whom it’s falling.

Are we at dandelion, after bud but before bedstraw? Are the hemlocks still two-toned with their fresh new growth? Tell me about the jewelweed – cotyledon stage, those two first juicy sprouts? Or is its gooey stem yet the size of your thumb? Are we after its orange upside-down cornucopia flowers, in the midst of springing seed pods? Then the sunchokes must be out, taking the place of the black-eyed susans. Have the acorns fallen? And the milkweed! Tell me about the milkweed. Leaf, bud, purplish-pink flower? Green pod or brown? This will tell me if I need a sweater.

If the fields are covered in milkweed flowers, here is summer’s height. Past the fervor of solstice, warmer languid days, with autumn still far off. I know how quickly to walk, I know to still expect a warbler here and there, I know there are still plenty of swimming days left. If the flowers are gone and the pods are green, then perhaps the nights are chilly. There may be back-to-school sales, and the Virginia creeper might be flushing scarlet, and the sumac too, just at their tips. An errant leaf aflame. But the days are still warm and slow. Brown pods, though, and the crows are calling more insistently. The thrushes have probably left, with most of the warblers. It’s still robins, and the goldfinches will dominate.

Use your ears, too, they can tell time. Stand under a silver maple or a cottonwood. Do they whisper? Rustle? Rattle? Your chosen onomatopoeia will let me know. If the cottonwood downright clacks I I’ll be eating macouns. When the crickets slow to a stop, and the robins are absent in the lengthening evening, it’s time for vests, maybe a hat, and I ought to remember to put the scraper in the car, because there’s certainly morning frost. The full moons have names that situate one in place in addition to time, but so could every individual crescent or new moon or waning gibbous.

un-knowing, and putting the guidebooks down

Last night I mistook buttercups for fireflies, in the gray twilight in the meadow. Bright despite approaching dark, my mind drew an unexpected map. This error was error not in being, but only in light and unmattering category. Mistaken sight is sight, and often illuminating (this is the work of metaphor, to complicate or cross the assumptions of regularly worn pathways, to undo habit and inspire seeing).  In early May I took up my field guides and binoculars again, and for a week or so I did not go anywhere without them. There is so much to find and file, to seek and name. Quickly, though, I started to leave them behind.

The paradox of knowing and understanding is cloudy. This past year I’ve read and written less than I have in a very long time. Perhaps it’s simple dormancy, but there’s something inside that wishes to shed instead of add. The arc of learning is long, and the stages are hard to see except from a distance.

Some of the best birding advice I’ve read was, interestingly, to put down the books and just keep looking. There are times on walks that I wish I knew less, despite the relative little I know. To sink into presence, to still the wheeling of mental classification, which requires distance from the current phenomenon in order to plumb my memory stores.

Like the Christmas tree. Glasses on, the details of the ornaments and individual lights are clear, each readily identifiable. Glasses off, it becomes a radiating whole, boundaries are let go and the whole merry thing sings to you at once.

Besides the bliss ignorance of, say, invasive species would bring, I often wish I could blur the scenes I walk through in order to see more clearly. To stand like the cottonwood, who cannot name a warbler, its toes in the riverbank and arms in the sun. To have the wind empty me of what is inconsequential. Leaving space, becoming the reed who sings not of beauty but is sung through, without name.

going to parties in spring with birds

This morning is the first gray, stormy morning of the year – humid wind turning new kelly leaves upside-down, tiny songbirds with ruffled feathers surfing on wild branches. It’s an electric exhilaration I didn’t know I missed so much.

There are a whole host of things – words, experiences, memories, feelings – I haven’t realized I’ve missed while in the depths of winter’s dormancy. The months of this long, cold winter and late spring have left both the internal and external sap slow to rise. There are, of course, lessons to be learned in the wait of winter, including the understanding that to a tree or hibernating woodchuck the very experience of waiting depends upon a conception of future itself (what would it be like to live entirely in the present? To unfold daily, to simply respond accordingly to one’s surroundings?).

But now everything is springing, and soon will all have sprung. I wrote before that fall is a verb, and so is spring. The action is fast, cascading, accelerating every single day. The world changes before our eyes. We are on the inhale of the year. In a week we went from bud to leaf (days in the high seventies were a help), in two days the purple dame’s rocket took over the trailsides. The fruit trees blossomed and went to leaf, the nettles are up, and succulent little jewelweed cotyledons are out just this morning. And the birds!

All these somersaulting changes lead me to understand that the only way one could possibly witness this rapid unfolding is by looking. In the same place. Every day. The past decade or so has been mind-bogglingly peripatetic for me, as it is for many people in their twenties, especially people engaged in seasonal work.  There is value to breadth of experience, but more and more I’m appreciating depth, the clearer understanding that comes with staying. We’ve been in the same place now for a whopping seventeen months, the longest I’ve lived anywhere. But you can learn a lot in that time, especially if you happen to have a dog.

Daily, repeated walks are a gift and a tutor. Every day, at the same time, we walk the trail by the brook that runs into the Winooski, bordered by boxelder, dogwood, and willow (as well as the invasive goutweed and knotweed). While somewhat suburban, it’s also thriving bird habitat. Here is where I get to experience the rush of spring at its height. For the past month, every two days or so I get to welcome a new resident. First the robins, then the grackles and blackbirds, next the ever-present song sparrow, with its song that sounds like dial-up internet. Next came the flycatchers, the phoebe and the peewee, timed, of course, to the explosion of flying insects. A week and a half ago I started hearing the ‘tsee-tsee-TSEE-o!’ of the American redstart (a showy bird I can almost never see). Finally, four days ago, the yellow warbler showed up (sweet sweet sweet little more sweet), and, yesterday, the common yellowthroat, with its smashing black mask and witchity-witchity song. It feels like a crescendo - one I would not be able to experience if I hadn't been present throughout the entirety of the song so far. I feel like a hostess as some great gathering, whose doorbell keeps ringing with new arrivals. It’s a lovely feeling, and one that brings celebration and great relief. 

Because, I mean, after that winter, I think we do deserve a party. And birds are very entertaining guests.

along the reservoir in winter

Sometimes you can only walk alone.

Even when, at the point of the path that in the winter meets the frozen water, the ravens croak, as if to you. And the way is so clear, and the sun is obliging, making the whole set sparkle (the dry goldenrod are of course encased in ice), and when you stop there is no sound. Not even your breath.

Even then, you cannot turn to anyone else to say ‘look, look at this! Look at this place I have come, look how the world has swelled around me.’ No one can stand behind your eyes. (Please do not take a picture; where is your heartbeat? The groaning ice? The stillness?)

And because, also, this would not happen. Footsteps in the crusty snow are so loud, they are a wild racket, and when you stop the other who has come with you generally won’t stop exactly then, the ravens' croaks will be off, muffled by another’s crunching walk. (Someone with four paws can come, perhaps, who senses before even you when you will stop, who in fact lives in sense and so cannot interrupt it).

And there is a world between people, especially the ones you love the most, and it cannot be set aside. Ribbons of life infused with care and history and hope circle between you, color the space surrounding you, divide your loving attention (this is nothing terrible, but lovely and its own Thing). A living, breathing inter-life comes with you, and in the still strung winter it is as raucous as an orchestra. Here you can marvel, only differently.

Sometimes you can only walk alone, and you must sharply, sweetly understand that no one else can stand behind your eyes. 

fall is a verb

The height of a season has passed, and there was no stand still. The fall, the season that is also a verb, like spring, seems to have more constant movement than summer or winter. The year’s made of fullness and stillness, respectively, with movement in between. At the end of August things seem to be holding at crescendo, a great earthly fermata.

Fall then, is a glissade, the most joyful and active letting go I know. You can watch it happening, watch a tree go bare, in the right wind, in an hour. The daylight changes palpably – it’s getting dark at four and the stars are twinkling by six.

I try not to play favorites, but it seems fall suits my constitution best. For that reason, my first instinct is to put my hands up, for everything to stand still, for just a moment. It’s all gone so quickly. Now we have snow and frost. But then, it’s a relief. It is a beautiful thing indeed that it is all out of our hands. It’s not my timeline. The green that turns gold and then mahogany on a beech has nothing to do with me. The squirrels get fatter on their own accord, I do not have to tell the geese to fly south (or to stay, for that matter), and the crows and jays know their own cues.

I am not unlike the leaf of a streamside alder, who lets go, or is let go, depending on how you anthropomorphize things, and tumbles down and floats along the river’s back. The river, too, millions of droplets, who flow according to their friends, and gravity, who yield to obstacles. Who seek their final outlet without effort. 

early september

The world is speaking loudly now, raucous and sibilant and joyful. It isn’t shouting and roaring, like it will in October, when exclamations bring showers of red and gold, but it is somewhere above a stage whisper. When I walk past the drying grasses their rustling makes me look twice – I imagine only a clumsy, scuffling woodchuck could make such a racket. But there’s no waddling round body, just the shushing grasses declaring fall.

The trees, too, are speaking – the maples are becoming stiff and dry, while the willows are lightening with age, almost silver in the sun. Corn husks are beginning to whisper in the fields, and even the sumacs have a voice.

This is the special time of year, too, when late summer layers on early fall, and all things happen at once. The grasses whisper while the cartbirds mew and the waxwings squeak in the tree tops. The crickets are noisy, and the bumblebees hum about the goldenrod. The jays are squawking with the crows, and the river continues to babble. Now leaves, too, are crunching underfoot.

It’s more than the sounds, too. The greatest variety of texture and color, I think, happens now. Because of all the rain we are still lush, the soft grass underfoot and the beeches and apples and birch keep their deep green. But the Virginia creeper has started to burn red, with the sumac, and the maples are beginning to become sere and gold and orange. The still-green apples have yellow and pink baubles on their branches. The goldenrod is still is powdery yellow, while the very first of it has begun to petrify in crispy browns. The sun is warm where it hits, but the breeze is chilly and bare fingers search for pockets on a walk.

There is abundance everywhere, and warmth, which brings a slow relaxation. But there is also the morning and evening chill that suggests a happy urgency, and a coziness. September is the most luxurious month of the year, here in Vermont, anyway.

summer morning in the cemetery

At twenty after eight the sun is already strong. Walking up the gravel path, eighteen twenty through eighteen eighty-nine, eighteen seventy-three through nineteen oh-one, the shadows are still long enough and forgiving. Junipers stand straight, whose roots do not up-end the stones. The light old flat ones are cool, the new dark shiny ones are already taking on the day’s heat. Summer comes, too, to the cemetery.

     (Q: Can I forgive these narrow thoughts?

            A: Does the world forgive the sunset?)

The crow scolds. I want to be him, inky feathers folded, head cocked, at home on a tombstone. Here in the heat autumn auditions, at once I see the corner oak turning copper, the maples scarlet and blowing. Without invitation snow settles and the sun arcs low. Something in me stays, with the crow, while the seasons swiftly ebb. Thank goodness for the prism, the sight that sees two sides. Small things fall away.  And we are (gladly) left like living stones.

spring, suddenly

I don’t know how it happened. I must have been thinking too much, navel-gazing as it were, or maybe just eating a delicious snack, but somehow, suddenly, everything is green and we are halfway to summer. It happens every year – every year! The quiet wonder and reverence of winter fades come February, and I start wondering what leaves look like, and who the heck warblers are, and why do I have to wear so many coats, anyway? And then I’m walking at night, and look up to the miraculous sight of a moon shining through, get this, leaves. And the firsts come streaming, with hardly any time to gape: the first phoebe insistent by the river; the grape in leaf, with all its tiny fruits already in miniature, pinky-red; the first breeze which is turned sibilant by new leaves, instead of its wintry, creaking whistle; the dandelions, turning pastures sun-fuzzy; the roadside coltsfoot already gone to fluffy seed.

I consider myself average-to-slightly-above in my level of awareness of the seasons, and yet I’m humbled every year. Spring is in process in February, and well on its way in March, but with snow and sleet and harsh winds I always grapple with my faith. Its an invisible turning, for a while there, and the long-lasting chill numbs my senses a bit. The upside, though, is an awakening so fast and opulent that it nearly blows me away. Walking on one of the first warm days quite literally raises my pulse, quickens my step, and I’m sure increases all kinds of good brain juice. I feel dual urges to thank the world and apologize for my doubt.

But here we are, whether we doubted or not, and there is new ease around us. I forget the way we brace in the cold, and the loveliness of letting go, letting out, breathing easy. Life comes quickly now, it seems to rush in streams of red admirals and oven birds and Johnny-jump-ups. I must remember not to forget.

tapestry

Now we have a fourth dimension, with the onset of spring. The birds and their songs have grown from the singular, the pointed, the individual crow or jay or chickadee to a thing so consistent it becomes a layer. A quality of our surroundings that provides information, perspective, orientation. What has it been called? A choir of song – it is also a blanket, a ceiling, a shower. The other cliché is a tapestry, but we’d have to parce it out to see how it fits.

At first thought, it doesn’t seem quite right, a tapestry of birdsong. A tapestry is a still thing, a decorative thing, which the springing of birds is not. But it has the weaving right. Yesterday morning two cardinals perfectly timed their whoit-whoiting to make me imagine them carrying threads in their beaks, flitting over, under, over, under to the end of the loom. What would a tapestry of cardinal song look like? Some great, crimson, textured herringbone, perhaps. But like an illustrative tapestry, individual pictures arise amidst patterns, colors. Chickadees interrupt the tea-kettling song sparrows, and hairy woodpeckers drum underneath phoebes. It is a many-textured but constant endeavor, to weave the morning.

I think to gain the full effect of song-tapestry, we have to go beyond the ordinary. Birdsong in spring becomes a geographical story, an audible map, an unrolling scroll as you stroll through microclimates. We start in the upland, with chickadees and nuthatch (yes, usually just one of them), and move to the rolling lawn twenty yards away, with briar thickets that hold the song sparrows. Then to river’s edge, and dogwood and big decaying cottonwoods, to hear the woodpeckers. Further along, come floodplain, the phoebes, the same every morning with their raspy two-note song. I know I’m moving again to the small hardwood stand in the park when I hear cardinals, and chickadees again. The robins scatter, shouting their woodpeckerish chatter as they fly from the baseball field, and I know I’ve made it to the juniper stand by the old cemetery when it’s grackles and starlings, all squawking and hollering. 

The only tapestry I can think of that displays this kind of color, texture, story, and knowledge is the great one in Bayeux, holding history and conquest.  As you walk its length a world unfolds. But even that is faded, which today’s songs are not. There are no metaphors, really, not for spring.