I have not blogged for some time and the winter ice and cold  has limited my 

taking photographs. A few weeks ago I came across some cards based on 

Nick Bantocks's Griffin & Sabine Trilogy. If you have not read it it is the story

 of a couple who have never meet exchanging cards and letters when they

 discover they have a "magical connection" They basically tell each other 

the story of their  lives and then begin to share the stories of their current 

travels. The stories are accompanied by postcards, letters and stamps with 

striking images. I have to admit I liked the third book the least when an 

antagonist was introduced and a more conventional plot was introduced. 

I preferred just hearing their personal histories and the narratives of their 

travels.  I had not been rereading them  long before I began to sense a 

connection, at least for me to the works of W.G. Sebald and I reread my 

copy of Austerlitz, his works largely avoid conventional plot, consisting 

instead of personal histories, chance encounters, descriptions of places seen 

while traveling or snippets from his reading and he includes B&W photos 

in the books.

Both authors dealt with personal history, art, conversation, descriptions, 

memory and I think convey a sense of what I, at least, feel in the internal 

mental dialogue we conduct with ourselves.

For my quotes I have chosen one from Sebald's Austerlitz about how the things

 that comprise our mental landscape will fade with time and the second a quote 

by the astronomer Martin Rees about how much our memories mean in the great 
scheme of things.

“...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as 

I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly 

lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as 

it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects 

which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never 

described or passed on.” 

Austerlitz

"Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans 

who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist 

will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.” 

Martin J. Rees

"White faced cattle lowing, sagebrush everywhere

Granite spires are standing all around

I'll tell you folks it's heaven to go ridin' down the trail

Just to watch the desert sun go down"

from Riding Down the Canyon

   as performed by Arlo Guthrie

As always when on the farm I went out to marvel

at the mismatched horns and coat palettes that

constitute Ralph's herd I did notice the Angus Black

seems to be disapperaing. 

Again with a tip of my hat to Roy 

(at roynaturelogbook see my  links )

I have declared a Cow Day.

Dreams of Disarmament

Harry the great polled Charolais

swollen as the sin of pride,

heavy with muscle and vitality

counts his kingdom of one

way out in the far field.

He spares us only one baleful glare

for his thoughts are far away

down to the main corral where

Morely the half-pint Hereford

flashes his horns for an admiring throng.

Guy

" It is a winter's tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told. "

from A Winter's Tale

Dylan Thomas

More from the farm.

                                       

"When for too long I don't go deep enough
into the woods to see them, they begin to
enter my dreams. Yes, there they are, in the
pinewoods of my inner life. I want to live a life
full of modesty and praise. Each hoof of each
animal makes the sign of a heart as it touches
then lifts away from the ground. Unless you
believe that heaven is very near, how will you

find it?"

from The Faces of Deer

Mary Oliver

" Now do U understand what heaven is

it is the surround of the living"

                                             The Changing Light at Sandover

                                                          James Merrill

"In the small beauty of the forest

The wild deer bedding down—

That they are there!

                              Their eyes

Effortless, the soft lips

Nuzzle and the alien small teeth

Tear at the grass

                              The roots of it

Dangle from their mouths

Scattering earth in the strange woods.

They who are there."

from George Oppen

           Psalm

We were able to get out to the farm over 

Christmas but a mixture of lots of snow, very 

cold temperature and the colds we brought 

with us meant we did not drop by the cabin and 

I did not get as many good photos as I had hoped.

However we did get in lots of visiting and  saw

the family so that was good.

Deer were abundant  this year their trails running

thru the garden across the lane and over to where

Ralph has stacked his bails. They were making great

headway in ripping them apart and you could see 

deer passing back and forth from the windows.

"Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon."

from The Gift

                                  William Stafford

"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