Merry Christmas Every One!!!

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all 

the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. 

The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut 

out the lessons that they teach!” 

                from  The Christmas Carol

 

"He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls."

 

The Eagle

  Tennyson

 

This eagle was was far from crags and oceans, actually it was

asleep in a pasture when we first saw it. Once I started siddling

up it gave me the fish eye. Then a huge flock of hundreds of starlings

appeared they did not mob it they just watched but the eagle had seen

enough and flew away.

 

 

 

"No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you."

 

from Lost

By Mary Oliver

"Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake."

                                 from Writing

                                    by Howard Nemerov

Some photos of a fellow traveler I meet one morning as

I strolled along the lane at our cabin. Reptiles and Amphibians

have always had a fascination for me and in this area of

Saskatchewan the Garter Snake, the Plains Toad and the

Tiger Salamander are the species I am most likely to

encounter. I have meet Tiger Salamanders in some fairly 
dry windy areas of Alberta, which quite surprised me
and I am very happy to see them here. Hopefully I can get
to know them better when I can spend more time at the cabin.

"When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? "

                                     From The Tyger

                                       By William Blake

"I remember you. You're the one
who lifted your ancient bones
of fossil rock, pulled yourself free
of the strata like a plaster figure
rising from its own mold, became
flesh and feather, took wing,
arrested the sky."

 

from Stone Bird

by Patttiann Rogers

 

 

"here is nine o'clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning's the size of heaven.

What will you do with it? "          

 

from Long Point Light

Mark Doty                

When I hear them call

in the morning, before

I am quite awake,

my bed is already traveling

the daily rainbow,

the arc toward evening;

and the birds, leading

their own discreet lives

of hunger and watchfulness,

are with me all the way,

always a little ahead of me

in the long-practiced manner

of unobtrusive guides.

from Why I Need Birds

 by Lisel Mueller

        

      

Enchanted is what they were

in the old stories, or if not that,

they were guides and rescuers of the lost,

the lonely, needy young men and women

in the forest we call the world.

That was back in a time

when we all had a common language.    

from   Animals Are Entering Our Lives

 by Lisel Mueller

"Every morning
the world
is created. 
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---"

from Morning Poem

Mary Oliver

"Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.

How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe."

from Song of the Builders

by Mary Oliver

William Stafford

from Youth

“Remember when shadows played

because there were leaves in the wind?

And people came to our door from a land

where stories were real?

Barefood we traveled the roads

all summer. At night we drew pictures

of home with smoke from the chimney.

And we frowned when we read,

so we could understand.”

A few nights ago paging between the Poems of William Stafford’s 

 the Way It Is;  Graywolf Press ( Stories That Could be True; 

Harpercollins is also excellent, there is some overlap of poems) 

and John Koethe’s North Point North; Harpercollins, some poems 

I love. some not so much, I found two the two accounts of childhood 

I have used in this post. I have been asked why I like poetry so much 

and while reflecting on these choices I came up with the following.

I enjoy the brevity of poems. the beautiful language and imagery, 

their ability to change direction, the freedom from the restrictions 

of (good) fiction like plot, continuity, characterization, point of view. 

Poetry on the other hand easily weaves together memory, sensory 

experience, moods, descriptions, sounds, disparate phrases, points 

of view, changes in tone, dialogue into an instrument that closely 

mimics the way our mind interacts with the world around it, with 

all our changing moods, flashes of memory or nostalgia, moments 

of despair or of epiphany. I see the best poems not as fictional 

narratives but as vessels in which the feelings, the memories, 

the observations and experiences of both the poet and the reader 

combine to allow the reader to examine the world and their

 experiences  within it with fresh insights and understanding.

from From the Porch

by John Koethe

“As though one’s childhood were a small midwestern town

Some forty years ago, before the elm trees died.

September was a modern classroom and the latest cars,

That made a sort of futuristic dream, circa 1955.

The earth was still uncircled. You could set your course

On the day after tomorrow. And children fell asleep

To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen,

While a breeze rustled the pages of Life magazine,

And the wicker chairs stood empty on the screened-in porch.”

"not half a mile from the nearest road,

a spot so hard to reach that no one comes–

a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies

and nesting jays, a sign that there is still

one piece of property that won't be owned."

from Rough Country

by Dana Gioia 

I have been out of touch for some time. a lost internet connection

some work travel etc. I had hoped to share some photos of our big

Sept. snowstorm but they seem to be misplaced somewhere on the 

computer. So I  will start offering some thoughts and photos from 

our trip to  the cabin in Mid August. A trip across the prairie took 

use past some old farm buildings and a beautiful slough. 

When we finally left the grid road it was a steamy 30 plus Celsius and a
moose came out of the tiny slough next to our lane. 

"A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather,

in the middle of the road.

It approaches; it sniffs at

the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,

high as a church,

homely as a house

(or, safe as houses).

A man's voice assures us

"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers

exclaim in whispers,

childishly, softly,

"Sure are big creatures."

"It's awful plain."

"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,

she looks the bus over,

grand, otherworldly.

Why, why do we feel

(we all feel) this sweet

sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"

says our quiet driver,

rolling his r's.

"Look at that, would you."

Then he shifts gears.

For a moment longer,

by craning backward,

the moose can be seen

on the moonlit macadam;

then there's a dim

smell of moose, an acrid

smell of gasoline. "

from The Moose

Elizabeth Bishop

"Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate from the bridge it covers."

from Monet Refuses the Operation

by Lisel Mueller

   We arrived at the cabin a couple of days ago. 
These photos were taken by the trail camera attached
to the post by the porch steps. The bear appears for
several days after we left then nothing.

“ ...If there is to be a poet in these modern times,

he must go out for himself and must gain much

wisdom. He must look deeply into the world,

and far into time, even though he sees both the

world and time from some little microcosm like

Sheep Rock Spring.”

                                                from Sheep Rock

                                                        by  George R. Stewart,

  

   "I love the way the light falls over the suburbs
Late on these summer evenings, as the buried minds
Stir in their graves, the hearts swell in the warm earth
And the soul settles from the air into its human home.
This is where the prodigal began, and now his day is ending
In a great dream of contentment, where all night long
The children sleep within tomorrow’s peaceful arms
And the past is still,"

from  In The Park

by John Koethe

Walking the dogs thru the neighborhood or cutting

roses in the garden in the summer reminds me of

childhood summers with their green lawns, gentle

breezes and almost endless twilight. 

The passages in these poems spoke to those feelings and if

Koethe later changes the mood of his poem with the

habitual, pessimistic, qualifications I find frustrating in

his work, for me the (lovely) damage was already done

and I chose to focus on the evening light, the stillness and

the children asleep in tomorrow's peaceful arms.

the Garden

the Pond

As someone nearing 60 who still has my childhood

copy of Black Beauty. how could I not include this stanza

from Stafford's poem.

"Animals that knew the way to Heaven

wagged at the back doors of every house

when I was young, and horses told fences

the story of Black Beauty, and smelled of the good manger."

from When I Was Young

by William Stafford

 

1

Sometimes in the open you look up

where birds go by, or just nothing,

and wait. A dim feeling comes 

you were like this once, there was air,

and quiet; it was by a lake, or

maybe a river you were alert

as an otter and were suddenly born

like the evening star into wide

still worlds like this one you have found

again, for a moment, in the open.

2

Something is being told in the woods: aisles of

shadow lead away; a branch waves;

a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its

path. A withheld presence almost

speaks, but then retreats, rustles

a patch of brush. You can feel

the centuries ripple generations

of wandering, discovering, being lost

and found, eating, dying, being born.

A walk through the forest strokes your fur,

the fur you no longer have. And your gaze

down a forest aisle is a strange, long

plunge, dark eyes looking for home.

For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers

wider than your mind, away out over everything. 

Atavism by 

William Stafford

My first photos of one of the beavers that are

denuding our property of aspen. Also as a species

an animal which played an enormous role in shaping 

our country. The photos were taken from our screened 

in porch and therefore a bit fuzzy.

Shaun and Whateley prepare for the long journey home.

Traveling thru parkland and prairie we meet fellow travelers. 

  

"There are rooms in a life, apart from the others, rich

with whatever happens, a glimpse of moon, a breeze.

You who come years from now to this brief spell 

of nothing that was mine: the open, slow passing

of time was a gift going by. I have put my hand out

on the mane of the wind, like this, to give it to you."

                                        

 from Little Rooms

                         by William Stafford