Photo: Jo Zimmy, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
After the busy-ness of summer and the sweet but fleeting glory of fall, the first snow of the season is a time to take a beat and to shift gears into a slower and sometimes claustrophobic time of year. The closed-in feeling will come later when the snow is dirtied by sand and salt, freeze and thaw, and has long outstayed its welcome. However, the first snowfall?—ahhh!
First Snow Meditation
Watching the first snow of the season, (well before Thanksgiving) waxing into sleet, it’s time to hit pause, to cancel the usual Sunday labors and offices and to cook up a mess of bacon and eggs.
Watching the field change its clothing from brown to white, watching the great down arrow of snow falling from sky, it’s time to break from morning routine and brew a third cup of coffee.
The way everything seems to slowly disappear within the snow, how it somehow settles out even regardless of what’s below, reminds me of the first time I really found a still point in mind.
The memory makes me want to stay, stay silent, unmoving, just sitting at my window with a coffee mug steaming in hand and to feel the nothingness of the snow mirrored within me.
But ahhh—if only moments of grace outlasted their moment. The furnace fan kicks on again, a semi-truck gears down for the hill, and an old song begins to play over and over inside my head.
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Bayside Cemetery, Potsdam, NY. Photo: Jenica, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
The title poem from my collection, “The Other Village” uses Potsdam’s Bayside Cemetery as a stand-in for the Potsdam I grew up in. All the characters from my childhood: teachers, grocers, barbers, neighbors, paper route customers. I could find all their names among the stones.
I was back in Bayside yesterday for the inurnment ceremony for an old friend, Steve Easter. Now Bayside is becoming home to my friends and contemporaries and it’s causing me to look at it with a different eye.
The “other village” reconsidered
It used to be that the “other village” was reserved for my father’s generation, parents of friends, older acquaintances from this sleepy college town on the river.
Art and Mary Ellen were family friends, George and Anne just downstream, too. But they were old as well, seemed old to me even in the days of childhood.
Since you and I have given up on Plan A – living forever — and have made our wills, we walk these paths with a different eye, looking not for names, but for a shady plot.
As more of our own flock here along the water under the flaming maples, I hear their voices echoed in peregrinating geese marshaled among the islets of the river’s impoundment.
I hear Julie, young enough to give one pause. I hear Steven, newly interred. And now Jim will join that chorus. It’s good to know, I suppose, that those we love are breaking trail for us.
But for now we must walk these paths in their stead, stopping by from time to time to share gossip, must paddle the backwater, drive the backroads, leaf-peeping. We must hasten to love the world.
I pick up my guitar and play “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” and “I’ll Fly Away.” I play “Now the Green Blade Rises” and “Winter’s Come and Gone,” I pick my way through “Urge for Going.”
I’m sorry that they are missing this cool sunshine, this lambent October which capstones the year. I will miss it too, just as I will miss you, and them. In the meantime, I will see you all in dreamtime.
For years I have been working at beating back the aggressive invasive species that have taken over much of my property. I thought of it as gardening by subtraction. Get rid of all the crap and then see what I might have to work with. But this year the sun could finally reach down to ground level, and I am finding that there is a whole ecosystem already there in utero, buried in the soil, ready to re-emerge. It makes me wonder what is ever really lost.
Chainsaw Sunday
Back then Allen was always slipping chainsaws into his poems. It might have been an early love for David Budbill’s first book, “Chainsaw Dance,” but I think it was mostly Hemingway– the romance of so-called manly arts–blood sports, boxing, fly fishing, general mayhem—being no one to mess with.
But it could have been the sheer Zen of it, the impossibility of thinking while steel teeth shriek through the heartwood. Or it could have made him feel he should wear cape and cowl, superhuman feller of giants, ash-butcher and oak-splitter. Whatever a chainsaw was to him, it somehow passed me by.
I preferred trees standing, wearing their Joseph-coats of autumn splendor, or naked when winter looms, their mantles cast off to flutter at their feet. I liked to put hands on them–lopping shears, pruners, brush saws– to groom, not ruin. Allen filled up the woodshed; I piled up brush.
Now, near 50 years later, my views have changed a little. Looking at the old pasture I barely dented in a full season of hand labor, I was out of my depth, old and short-winded. Knotweed and grapevine, shrub honeysuckle and poison ivy, on the other hand, somehow retained all the vigor of youth.
I had to call upon a higher power, (electricity, in this case,) and bought a little 6-inch chainsaw and a weed whacker. That season I broke through to the river, leaving behind piles of debris everywhere, working the chainsaw to death, and burning out the weed whacker. Time to go bigger.
Twice as big, and heavy duty. This season I cleared the field, at least the half-acre the knotweed had claimed, then began peeling back the grape that smothered the honeysuckle that hid the long-fallen sumac and hornbeam and boxelder trunks. All cut and stacked in neat rows now, Allen would approve.
But it was not tabula rasa. Phlox and raspberry I let be, morning glory, and in the shade a thick thatch of periwinkle. Some sumac survived under vines. And new discoveries– surprise lilies popped up, a pear-leaf crab apple emerged, black cherry, white oak, dogwood, a few big-tooth aspen.
And there, where the knotweed insured nothing else grew for 40 years, the long-patient seeds and spores of the old cow pasture began to emerge, resurrected by sun and rain– marginal wood fern, evening primrose, burnweed, soapwort, white clover, great mullein, dwarf mallow, purple foxglove.
Not all native, but abundant, diverse, once tumorous growth was cut from the field. Though I have no need to graze cattle, the wild whitetails will be glad of the browse. And windrows of slash and twig will hide hare from owl, give shelter and shade. There should be enough raspberries to share with bear and bird.
All through my long life, nature has cared for me, body and soul. Well past time to begin taking care of her. The chainsaw sings out as I work back toward the stone wall in the shadow of the pines. This Sunday, I cut away the dead so that the light might fall upon the quickening soil. I pour out my sweat into the offering plate.
Each year, a few weeks after school let out, we would overpack one of a succession of enormous station wagons and drive a thousand miles west to Indiana. Hobson relations were liberally salted across the state, and we would manage to see most of them while doing the rounds. Corydon, Freelandville, South Bend, Indianapolis, Vincennes. From the decades of distance, they meld together–Indiana, where it was always July.
July in Indiana
It’s 85 degrees at midnight. I lean out the window seeking a breeze. Peepers sing to the dark, to the corn, and the blacktop, and the rising moon.
In town a dog is barking at nothing. Farther off a hundred freight cars racket the rails, the engine blaring through each deserted crossing.
I find my Dad here in this pile pranking around with his brothers. In the curled photos he’s dashing and spruce in Army Air Corps khaki.
And there’s Mom, war bride-to-be, reclining as Odalisque, adorning a field of alfalfa, with a shy smile for the man behind the camera.
Here’s my brother being bathed in the sink of a 12-foot trailer– what married students lived in in Bloomington on the G.I. Bill.
Skip ahead and there’s sister in a cowgirl dress and there’s me, sporting droopy shorts and a look of toddler anxiety.
Then three generations: grandma and grandpa, seated, backed by a wall of sons and daughters-in-law. A moat of grandkids surrounding.
An odd lot of memory remains of those summers, a few weeks each year of Midwest swelter. They blur together now into one:
Bare feet burning on blacktop, swimming, drive-in movies, endless fried chicken, corn smothered in butter, homemade ice cream.
Every evening, thunderstorms boiled up out of the west. We’d rock back and forth on the porch as the wind turned damp and cool.
That America was easy to love. A thousand miles west of my life, it could have been another world. But I had to run away into the Sixties.
After, I rarely returned to Indiana. Once to take Dad to his 50th reunion just before he died, once to take our daughter to great-grandma’s 90th.
But on a sweltering night I will find myself back there, when trees flash vivid, lightning-lit, and the heat yields ten degrees in five minutes.
I’m back there when the night train wails for mile after mile. We meet again in mind, quick and dead alike, and the long years since come undone.
Photo: Ahmet Polat, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
This is a second stab at this scenario: me, insomniac at a window imagining my fellow insomniacs awake with me, near me on a moonlit night. Only a few lines remain of the first take: Light in Other Windows. I’m not quite where I want to be with it be even yet.
NightOwls
A hazy half-moon hangs upon the wee hours, a lone lamp beckoning at the edge of the village. Everyone’s asleep but the sleepless, who gaze out from dark rooms as late freights rumble by.
As for me, past my three-score-and-ten, I sleep little and lightly, as if saving up for eternal rest. But each inhabits a different village from each as long as the rest of the village lies asleep.
One is wondering why the dead keep calling him, why even in dreams he can’t be done with them. Another wonders where she lost her way, if the way things are is the way they will always be.
One studies his reflection in the window, as if he were twins, one in darkness and one in the light. In another a naked man smokes until a sleepy murmur sounds and moon-pale flesh reaches out.
A calico cat blankets a windowsill, still but for her blinking eyes which track mice in the moonlight. A vet startled out of nightmare keeps moonlit watch, cleans his sidearm, reassembles it by touch alone.
A pregnant woman moons out her kitchen window, rubs her sore back, spoons ice cream from the carton. And a bookish man stays up staring at a blank page, clutching a fruitless pen beneath a stingy moon.
All these in just one square mile of night. Watching over them, I feel I must leave some benediction: “May the night train carry you to dreamless sleep; may daybreak burn off what lurks in the deep.”
This feels like the first real North Country winter we’ve had in years. Five or six falls of powder without a thaw. Temperatures below zero at night. Not just coat weather, but scarf and mittens and boots. I prefer to observe it out the upstairs window, from behind my desk, wearing a cardigan and drinking coffee. It’s a good perch from which to consider the outlines of my next book.
All the work of last summer is purified now, deep in snow. Game trails pierce the once claustrophobic honeysuckle. Fox and rabbit make dens in stacks of brush and deadfall.
The back yard opens out towards the river, back to trees whose growth has tumbled the stones of the old pasture wall. Morning sun floods between their limbs into my back room.
At least one more season of clearing work remains, or three– who can say–but it is good work, the results plain to see. In a world full of pointless and invisible toil, this is not nothing.
The open field is only a beginning, the way a blank page is necessary to beginning a new book. Fresh, unstained, it is fit to hold anything imaginable, anything at all.
Photo: Ricardo Montero, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
My resolution for the NewYear is to get together with other poets and artists more. I’ve been having a dry spell since I finished my manuscript “The Other Village.” Before I retired, I had a weekly writing assignment to keep me engaged with writing. Then through COVIID and beyond, the new book manuscript went through its several versions. The last time I dried up happened after finishing my first book, “A Drop of Ink,” and casting it adrift among the small publishers who obstruct the sea lanes of contemporary literature.
At that time, 2010 and 2011, I joined up with SLAP ( St. Lawrence Area Poets) and that helped get my juices going again, or at least accompanied me through my rejection slips. Well, SLAP is still around, which proves that the world keeps turning regardless of whether I am working the crank or not. So I’m going back to their monthly gatherings at the SLC Arts Council. I looked back through some of the poetry I wrote to fulfill SLAP assignments and found the following from 2011, which holds up pretty well, I think.
Clouds
First, the ancestor cloud, stratus, the lattice of DNA, recording each previous incarnation back to the amoeba. Here remain mother and father, instructing the body to grow. Here is Aunt Anne’s eye and Grandpa’s jaw.
Second, cumulonimbus, the thunderhead of memory, each impulse, each sensation of the body, every turn of thought a mote of condensation, a nexus of charge that accumulates tension, building up to lightning that twitches out in action.
Third, the cirrus cloud of culture, wispy memes of attitude and style, the ghost of every book ever read, the music and images, flat phantasms, instructional manuals, interviews with the dead, this collective upload to eternity.
This is the way the water circulates, rising and falling, and rising again. This is how we distinguish ourselves, becoming one thing and not another, a discrete chunk awash in anonymous stew. Any shape can arise when watching clouds.
If you have watched the progress of the laborious construction of an intricate Tibetan sand mandala, seeing it be swept away can be a little traumatic. “No! Wait! Oh well–so it goes.”
I. The Mandala
Grain by grain the monks sift down a dwelling place for Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
Its walls, pierced by four doorways, are made of faith, effort, memory, meditation and wisdom.
Its doors are comprised of four precious jewels: of love, of compassion, of joy, and of equanimity.
To the east of the Enlightened One rages hatred. To the south moans misery. In the west, ignorance.
To the north, a green distillation of jealousy seethes. But the vajra fence of the Dharma hems them in.
After weeks of painstaking labor, the monks chant prayers, burn incense, and clang bells.
They break out cheap foam rubber paintbrushes and sweep all the colored sands together in a jug.
Leading scores of us across town, they offer the sand up to the river, send up prayers among the honking geese.
The undoing done, the long snake of the procession dismantles itself into ones and twos to wander home.
II. Ephemera
Ironically, I was given a glassine bag of mandala sand so I might forever recall my lesson in impermanence.
I placed it on my home altar, under the benevolent gaze of my white porcelain Guanyin, next to my sutra book.
A poet friend of mine had given me another tiny glassine bag. In it was a bit of soil filched from Allen Ginsberg’s garden.
But the best thing was, Ginsberg’s ashes had been spaded into the plot. So, the dirt held a little soupçon of poet.
I mix them together, the Buddha in the sand, the beatnik in the dirt. A little bit of them will go a long way, I pray.
Now the ash of my white pine incense falls into it, too. How it all mingles together, an olio of awakening mind.
There’s something about trillium. They are a near obsession with me and I return to them over and over in my writing. It may just be the physical and emotional constraints of winter being lifted from the shoulders. But I think it might be something more, too. Just what that might be may take a few more poems to flesh out.
Early in May
First warm, sunny day of May, a bumblebee hovers over blooming rhododendron. Bluets and clover dot the yard, and dogwood flowers shine white against the pine trees.
I search the riverbanks for trillium, as I’ve done each year since I was a teenager and came to discover them here while playing hooky from school with my first girlfriend.
Today, early blooms pop out along the beaver slide down to Sugar Island reservoir– tiny as a periwinkle, but white as moonlight. The full-furled flowers are yet to come.
The sweetest beauty is in the birth of something new, the promise of what could be, rather than in fulfillment, which is tempered by knowing, regret, salted with grief.
Trillium time is fleeting, a week or two and then no more, the way a first romance fires the blood so fiercely it burns itself to ashes before one can learn how to take good care.
But no matter, we learn better each year as spring returns to rekindle even so timeworn a heart as mine, making light my steps as I clamber up the bluff again to our back door.
