Budding lilacs hooded with snow. Photo: Dale Hobson
I’ve written about my poetry “junk drawer” before, how it is sometimes possible to weld pieces together into something good (or good enough, anyway). But no matter how often those unlikely mashups occur, the junk drawer seems to stay as full as ever.
False Starts
Yesterday, snowdrops pearled the bulb bed and daffodils raised up their green spears. The maples were russet with tiny leaflets, the lilacs freckled with yellow-green buds.
But now it’s gone back to black and white, each bud and bloom hooded with snow, all the limbs like chalk on a blackboard of cedar, the grass a white map drawn in rabbit tracks.
This cruelest month, season of dashed hope, is, ironically, Poetry Month. Think about it. It’s as if someone could see in my desk drawer all those promising openings now abandoned.
Photo: Ben Osteen, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
There is a cruel streak in American culture that recognizes the utility of keeping people insecure, that wields power by making sure that the bottom is as far down as possible, and that there is no sure way to avoid winding up there. This is one of the reasons so many are reluctant to engage with the homeless, as if misfortune were a contagious disease.
Gratitude
“Never give your money to bums and winos,” Mom taught me, “they’ll just go spend it on another bottle.” True enough, often enough, but then she had been raised up in ungenerous times, the Great Depression.
“There but for the grace of God…” never occurred to me even though, ironically, I was an alcoholic myself. But I was torn by my Puritan upbringing, which taught me I should give to the “deserving,” but pass others by.
How can I tell? Which one huddled in which doorway deserved a handout? I wondered, just as if I deserved every middle-class advantage of American culture–and which deserved nothing, just as if my own sins were less.
Some years ago, I visited David, living then in Manhattan. His idea of a walk around the neighborhood was chatting with all the homeless, most of whom he knew by name, and giving each, unasked, a little cash before he walked on.
I was dumfounded. This was not how the world worked. I asked him “Why give to all? He asked me if I liked to ask for help. “Well, no,” I replied. “Neither do they,” he said. “I see the need; why make them ask when I know it’s hard?”
It was kind of a conversion experience. Afterward, I would keep a little cash on my person, stopped feigning interest in something across the street as I passed beggars by. I made my living in public radio, paid by tin cup, mostly.
I recently learned that David had to be nudged toward epiphany, too. His mom, refugee from pogrom, world war and Holocaust, once rebuked him for passing a beggar by. “What,” she said, “are you crazy?” and turned back to give.
In catalogs, we find the garden raised up to the Platonic Ideal. I could no doubt achieve such a work of wonder, had I unlimited funds and if didn’t waste my time writing or sleeping, cooking, cleaning, reading, etc. Or else had in my employ a head gardener with three full-time assistants. As it is, it will have to be whatever it is, again this year.
The Next Garden
The waxing Sugar Moon hangs like a lamp in my living room window. Just enough light to cast dim shadows, specters of rustling limbs.
Waiting for dawn to break on the first morning of spring, there’s no hope that winter is done. By noon flurries will cover the ground again.
But no matter. Gardening catalogs have arrived in the mail. Within, rosy-cheeked outdoor types realize a vision of Eden amid piles of pricey gear.
Raised cedar beds sprout from weedless mulch connected by a trellis over which morning glory has run riot. The bugless rows teem with green.
The next garden is always pure as the driven snow that prevents it from being planted at the moment. It is awesome as an imagined but unwritten book.
Nowhere is there sweat or mud, blisters or blood. No bad back or sunburn, ravening rabbits or deer. Only the recollected deliciousness of plump tomato.
“…skimming the top of a shining white cloudscape…” Photo: Dale Hobson
Flying is often a misery these days: huge, unnavigable terminals, long waits, flights jammed with the annoying and the malodorous. But flying home from Boston this week was pretty sweet. Ten folks in a little turboprop, flying home to a flyspeck of an airport tucked between the mountains.
Flying into Lake Clear
As we fly at ten thousand feet over New England skimming the top of a shining white cloudscape, the sun, invisible to those below, blares out from the southwest as it falls slowly down to evening.
We are only a handful, including the pilot, like riding a family station wagon across the sky. All white below, all blue above: a simpler world than the one behind us or the one before us.
For the moment, we float above all that, bobbing on a cotton sea, carrying no cares, having left them below. We are flying in between our lives and will only take them up again once we land.
No one talks above the roar of the turboprops, but lean cheeks against the plexiglass instead, eyeing swells and troughs, rifts and cliffs of cloud. We could be anywhere, be heading anywhere.
Until the clouds flatten, thin, and break into shreds, revealing Whiteface trailing a veil of fog, Lake Placid shining in the last of the sun, the Adirondacks, bristling with pine below granite summits, ringed by dark water.
This is the way we come back, dropping down the air onto a single runway at Lake Clear, taxiing the tarmac toward a tiny rustic terminal with one lone gate. There, we take up our baggage and go home our separate ways.
The Raquette River at Sugar Island Reservoir. Photo: Dale Hobson
This past summer was the first in a long time where I spent a lot of time out in the fresh air, raising a sweat and putting things in shape. I really wanted to reach the river, having been cut off from a direct path for many years. By the time my zigzagging trail was done, it was more like six hundred paces.
Breaking Trail
For weeks I try to reach the river less than two hundred paces away, beyond a pasture gone to ruin where fallen trees crisscrossed an old path.
It’s embarrassing to live so close but be unable to get there, to have to walk down to the penstock road and climb up above Sugar Island Dam.
So, I chop knotweed canes, dig out roots and rocks, raking and leveling, sowing with grass. A few feet each day until I reach a sandstone foundation.
I make an eight-foot hole, piling stone to the side, digging out below ground into farm midden: a boot, wires, shards, an unbroken Whistle bottle from 1926.
I take time, wanting a trail that will last, wide to avoid ticks, smooth and level. Twenty feet beyond the wall, knotweed finally gives out, ceding me the ground.
Not on through to meadow grass though, but to a dense cat’s-cradle of dead sumac, grape, honeysuckle, burdock and raspberry. I sit, wipe my brow, and work on a Plan B.
Being late in September, I could call it quits until spring, do a little more yard work instead. But the mild sun and cool breeze mock my hidden agenda to just bunk off.
So I tack north, parallel to the river, sawing, limbing blowdown as I go, whacking down phlox and goldenrod, nipping off grapevine, clearing trail over to the edge of the pines.
From there the work goes more easily; it opens out under the trees. Just clearing deadfall, cutting a few limbs, raking leaves and needles, back to the old pasture wall.
The tumbled stone runs across a bluff that drops steeply to the river. I can see water, twinkling between second growth. I widen a gap where the cow gate was.
The old trail ran straight down the bluff, and I would run straight up it, decades ago. But I’m short of wind and have old knees, so now it’ll have to be three switchbacks.
As dusk falls, I pack up for work tomorrow. But that glimpse of sunlit water haunts me. Dreaming that night, I am deep in the forest breaking new trail into some far, fair country.
I don’t often sweat the big picture. I’m more focused on the small and nearby. But some nights I don’t sleep well and then night thoughts connect the dots for me and I hear the voice of Afrofuturist poet and jazzman Sun Ra say it in his outside voice: “This Planet is Doomed.” All I can say is “Hope not.”
Open Winter
All night the wind worked its way, transforming snow into snowmelt, showing here a patch of muddy soil and there a broken limb of pine.
The tracks that deer left in the yard grow wide as if Sasquatch roamed here. Ice fell from eaves, unremarked, as icebergs calve off from Greenland.
I would say winter gives way, had it ever really taken hold. I worry when the weather goes strange, when the wind chime bells all through the night.
And they say I’m right to worry, not just for this winter in this place, but for all the winters in all the world. Our powers might grow Biblical, but we are no angels.
The West and the North burn each year; in the South what doesn’t drown flies off on the wind. Some say pay no mind–it’s natural, or it’s Jesus, or just in your head.
Assholes. I feel an awful future coming, like an asteroid that dogs Earth’s orbit. It’s more a matter of we know not when, and but a slim chance that we know not if.
A change from the usual–a little short fiction that arose as a prolonged daydream I had while I should have been counting my breaths as a novice meditator during my first three-day sesshin at the zen center.
The Tenzo Teaches Baka to Sit
Baka had come to the monastery as a promising young man, recommended to the abbot by his village priest, and within a few years he had progressed well along the dharma path, quickly memorizing all the daily sutras and meal chants, always showing proper respect for his elders and demonstrating compassion for the least of beings. He carefully carried spiders out of the dormitory and he kept a keen eye out for ants and bugs when sweeping the walkways. He chanted the morning service with great nen and was able to sit still for long periods in the zendo with a quiet mind.
But as his practice developed, he began to notice the behavior of others, that they would become fidgety, that they relied on the sutra book to get through morning service, that they sometimes bunked off from work practice to look at girls. Some snuck food into the dormitory; some drank sake late at night.
It seemed to Baka that he was the best of the lot–the most sincere, the most dedicated of all his brothers. The jikijitsu never had to hit himwith a stick. Baka would return to the zendo for extra zazen after the day’s schedule was complete. He would sit sometimes for half the night alone in the hall, not moving a muscle.
Baka began to take over the heaviest jobs, digging out boulders to expand the garden plot, hauling firewood from halfway up the mountain. His brothers seemed pale and puny in comparison.
One day the tenzo came out of the kitchen as Baka was rolling yet another boulder off from the edge of the garden. Baka was happy that one as venerable and respected as the abbot’s friend, the man responsible for the community’s physical well-being, was observing the quality of his work practice. But the tenzo just smiled and shook his head, then returned to chop vegetables for dinner.
Another time, as Baka struggled under a huge load of hardwood he had cut up in the high forest, the tenzo again came out, smiled and shook his head as Baka went by.
The tenzo was old, near to ninety. He walked with a stick. He grunted when he sat down and he farted when he stood up. It was said he had a weakness for shōchū, which made him sing and then fall asleep. So, who was he to shake his head at Baka’s efforts?
Nursing his grievance, Baka’s mind wandered so much during the abbot’s teisho on the koan ” Nansen Kills the Cat,” that he failed to answer “hai” when called on by name. The tenzo, sitting on the other side of the dharma hall, smiled and shook his head.
Baka sat again late in the zendo, but found no peace. He had watched two visiting Tibetan monks once as they engaged in dharma combat, a ritual debate on the meaning and import of the sutras. Inside Baka’s mind he and the tenzo argued like that for half the night.
Finally, Baka went to the tenzo to ask him why he was so dismissive of his sincere and strenuous effort. The tenzo pointed out that a little more garden space had been needed, but Baka had dug up more land than they would ever plant. And he pointed out that the woodshed had been filled weeks ago, and that the wood Baka was cutting now would sit out in the rain and rot before it could be used. “Do just what is needed. Maybe work less, maybe do nothing sometimes,” the tenzo suggested.
Thinking of his many extra hours in the zendo, Baka considered that he might be the best at doing nothing, too. So, he challenged the tenzo to see which of them could sit zazzen the longest without getting up from the zafu. To Baka’s surprise, the tenzo accepted, and set the contest to begin the next day after morning service.
That morning they remained in the zendo while everyone else went on to breakfast, served for once by the tenzo’s assistant. They walked to facing places. The tenzo laid his walking stick by his zafu and they both turned to bow to the Buddha on the altar, then turned and bowed to their zafus, then turned again and bowed to each.
Baka dropped into a perfect half-lotus position in one smooth move onto his cushion. The tenzo grunted and slowly ratcheted himself down to his cushion, cracked his neck from side to side, rolled his shoulders, shifted his head back on his neck, went still, and then broke into a smile.
For the first hour nothing happened, same for the second, same for the third. Every now and then, a curious face would peek around the edge of the zendo doorway. The tenzo never moved, only kept up a serene smile.
In the fourth hour, Baka began to feel a little discomfort in his knees. After a while that began to fade, but in the fifth hour he began to feel some itching. He refused to scratch.
The tenzo just breathed in and out, unmoving except for that slight rise and fall, holding up his small smile like a flower. Hour by hour the day passed as the two sat and sat and sat. Baka’s bladder was complaining, but he would not listen. Little daggers of pain poked the small of his back. He could no longer feel his feet.
He kept his face stony and still as darkness fell, but his mind was jumping like a flea, responding to alarms from one part of his body or another, feeling resentment at the effortless stillness of the tenzo, feeling anger at his unbroken smile.
In the feeble flicker of the altar candle, the tenzo’s face appeared old one moment, young the next, plain as a fart one moment, an ethereal beauty the next. Baka blinked and suffered on through the endless night.
When the monks came in just before dawn, panting from running a fast kinhin around and around the outside of the zendo, they found the pair still sitting. Baka croaked that he couldn’t get up, couldn’t unbend his legs. He asked the jikijitsu to push him over onto his side to rest until feeling returned to his lower body.
The jikijitsu then pronounced that his old mentor, the tenzo, was the victor, and asked if he needed any help in rising. The tenzo’s smile was sweeter than ever, but he made no answer, having returned to the wheel of rebirth sometime in the middle of the night.
The abbot came in to pay respects to his old friend and told the monks, “Yes, I knew he was dying. He said he wouldn’t last much into spring. But he said he still had some teaching to do. He said Baka was sincere and hardworking, but that he couldn’t get out of his own way. But who knows? In 20 or 30 years, he told me, Baka might be fit to make the soup.”
Photo: Austin Kirk, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
You know how it is when you are going along a road you drive every day and you top a rise just as late golden light floods the long valley ahead. Sometimes a glamor is cast over the ordinary world, and in that moment, the light shines right through you. You might cling to such a moment, if only you could.
Freezing Rain Satori
It makes no sound in the night, the freezing rain, as it thickens on twig and needle the way you dip a wick over and over ’til it waxes into a candle.
Then, when morning breaks clear, all the candles are set ablaze. The lilacs that bow to the ground shimmer; look how the bent pine boughs shine.
Such a profligate abundance of light I blink to see. Just this yard, just the world, but all transformed, if only for a little moment before the rain returns.
Snow on cedars. Photo: Greg Marks, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
I profess to not be a fan of winter, dreading its coming all fall. But I forget its allure, its beguiling purity and clarity until one morning it suddenly transforms everything.
Epiphany Snow
The first real snow falls on Epiphany, late, after a dry fall and cool December. Six inches, no big deal, but an epiphany nonetheless.
Snow boots are still in the closet, the shovel and salt tucked behind stuff on the back porch. The inevitable finds me unprepared as usual.
I purged from memory the scraping of the plow, forgot the way snow shines on sagging cedars, how all things dull and dim can now be shining.
Out of the old year’s ending, this new beginning, when what could be wrestles with what will be. Who can say what may befall once the snow begins to fall?
