"then when you're quite dressed

you'll stand in the window for everyone to see

and how they'll stare!

oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands

and looking up at our beautiful tree

we'll dance and sing

"Noel Noel" "

 

       From [little tree]

        E.E. CUMMINGS

 

 

From my family to yours all the best for the holidays.

 

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

 

 

The Oxen

                       Thomas Hardy

 

"I dream an inescapable dream
in which I take away from the country
the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,
ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,
our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

     I restore then the wide-branching trees.
I see growing over the land and shading it
the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.
I am aware of the rattling of their branches,
the lichened channels of their bark, the saps
of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.
Like the afterimage of a light that only by not
looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.
All its beings belong wholly to it.  They flourish
in dying as in being born.  It is the life of its deaths."

                                                                              from The Dream
                                                                                    Wendell Berry

As often happens when bad weather and lassitude

combine to keep me in, I fall back on the denizens of 

my backyard feeders for my photographic subjects. 

The Downy woodpecker was a nice change as all to often

I am left with a few native birds and a host of introduced species.

I felt the poetry fragment from Berry and my own poem make

nice bookends for this themecontrast. While I would like to see the 

world of the Plains Grizzly, the vast herds of Bison and Pronghorn 

or even further back the Dire Wolf, Sabretooth and 

Short Faced Bear I am not sure that world would like me.

So sparrows it is.

 

Eye, Fly, Awry in this Landscape of Words,


They say don’t feed the birds, you encourage
dependence, promote non-native species.
who knew, it seemed such a harmless lark.

And what is the result of my two week vacation,
starvation throughout Brentwood stretching to
Dalhousie and Charlewood, or is it more widespread.

They do fly after all and we go through a lot of seed,
will they be dropping in Shanghai and Topeka,
and if not mass starvation, perhaps delinquency.

The whole of bird society breaking down, begging,
sexual license, belling cats, downing power lines
pushing each other into the air intakes of jets.

Or could it be positive, native species returning
Bluebirds, Martins sundry Warblers all jostling
wildly for the vacant nesting boxes and bird baths.

Maybe we should think big, Passenger Pigeons,
Carolina Parakeets, Labrador Ducks, who knows
what these misplaced Weaver Birds were up to.
 
Maybe we will see the great brown spurts of Bison
moving out of the river valleys with their attendant
packs of Grey Wolves and lumbering Plains Grizzlies.

And if I stop feeding the sleek Black Squirrels
that hang like misshapen fruit from my feeders,
what can I get for that?

                                                     Guy

"Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.

My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave.

I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe,

Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark."

                         from Beyond the Red River

                                      Thomas McGrath

We have had a cold week,  for much of the time the 

temperature was in the high minus 20 Celsius range 

with a wind chill some 10 degrees colder. As bit warmer 

today, but for most of the week the view out the window

showed puffed up birds and frost wrapped trees. I did put

up some Christmas lights today. The show must go on.

 "Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold."

                  from Winter Trees

                              William Carlos Williams

"I thought of you in the sweet 

South; and the wind at the window was only

A warm breeze to melt the icicles of sleep."

from A Window on the North

R. A. D. Ford

Yesterday as expected we got our blizzard

not a huge amount of snow, but high wind 

chills with lots of drifting snow, mayhem 

and confusion. Today it was still cold -14 c 

at lunch with the sun showing blue and red 

thru a cloudy sky. I saw only one magpie and 

two jackrabbits that wanted no part of photos.

"Else winter reigns throughout the self

                            and we become

more barren than the nest

that sways within a winter wind."

from Winterkill

      D. G. Jones

       "snow

the day shut down like Napoleon

at Moscow

a day for art

the marvel of flight and of stillness

commotion and silence"

                                    War and Peace

                                                D. G. Jones

I have combined a bit of travel for work and the winter 

blahs as an excuse for no taking many photos or blogging.

We currently have a blizzard warning here so I thought

I would offer some photos of the flames of October and a 

poem I wrote some years ago while on a another work 

related bus trip through a winter landscape.

On a Bus Headed North

20 below, everything fades to white,

fields stretch to a white horizon

each tree, woodlot is rimmed in frost

and the white non-light still holds

against an unseen dawn.

On the snow mantled farm the

red buildings bleed to rose,

the yard light shines like a grounded star,

and if I could stop and walk

up the long path, pass the granaries,

the black on white piano key

repetition of fence posts,

would I be a mysterious guest

a magi, or merely home?

But we continue north to a grey,

shuttered city, waiting for spring to come

and open it like a can.

         Guy

"Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars 

of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond 

the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers 

whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names 

we long remember and passing acquaintances whose
names and faces we take in like a breath and soon

breathe away."

from Local Wonders

Ted Kooser

When I decided to use the Kooser quote above I had intended

to end with another quote from one of his poems. However while

flipping through the The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English

Verse Chosen by Philip Larkin I found The Ice by Gibson and loved 

the  poem so much I decided to use it instead. Kooser's strength is 

always metaphor and the image of life as a walk through the cars of a 

moving train really spoke to me. I could not resist complimenting it

with Gibson's poems dealing with the stages of life where the elderly

women has attained the wisdom to ignore the jeers of others and 

experience the pure joy of childhood. I love the ability of literature to

allow us to share the experience of others or view the world from a 

different perspective. We all use a variety of sources and mechanisms

to guide our lives and make sense of the world whether it is personal 

experience,  family, community, religion, political ideology, science or 

art etc. I really enjoy using science, nature, literature and paintings 

to inform my world view and colour my experience. And of course

pets and science fiction.

In winter we tend to hibernate here we are going for it.

Saturday I had hoped to go to an Ivan Eyre show but the 

weather took a real turn for the worse so I took some photos

of the usual suspects enjoying the heated bird bath. Today

we started with -20 celsius and have warmed up to -11 so

I am watching the CFL playoffs and thinking about vacuuming. 

"HER day out from the workhouse-ward, she stands,

A grey-haired woman, decent and precise,

With prim black bonnet and neat paisley shawl,

Among the other children by the stall;

And with grave relish eats a penny ice.

To wizened toothless gums, with quaking hands

She holds it, shuddering with deliscious cold;

Nor heeds the jeering laughter of young men --

The happiest, in her innocense, of all:

For, while their insolent youth must soon grow old,

She, who's been old, is now a child again."

The Ice

Wilfred Gibson

You are here, alive in this place,

touching with sight

things that are smoke tomorrow

from Alive in the World

John Haines

I could not capture the motion but all day the vent on 

the neighbors garage has spun round beneath its little

cap of snow.

Two days of snow and the feeders and heated  bird bath

have been the centre of attention in a cold and windy world.

And for me this is always a welcome site seeing that they

are here and things are, in this moment as they should be.

So the song is becoming as the world

becomes, and it can never leave us;

 because we are the notice in its passages,

from Song of the Ocean of the World Becoming

Pattiann Rogers

"Throughout this long flow of the seasons,

life in an infinite variety of forms. life dormant in bur
and bud, in burrow and pupa-case, life biding its time,

would respond to the increasing warmth."

Wandering Through Winter

Edwin Way Teale

But today our winter chapter begins.

"Now as I stand 

Before the the window and attend

The sailing, flurrying flakes, the whitening land

I seek again in vain some clue or key

To liberate the guarded mystery.

This much, no more I know:

That science,  fixed to finite laws

Is helpless to unveil 

The supervening cause

And so, once more, I fail.

Now in my eighth decade, no wiser now 

Than the spellbound child
who first beheld beguiled, 
Long seventy years ago
Enchanted snow."

                                               Enchanted Snow 
                                          Melville Cane