In Writing: Dale Hobson

Nobody starts college without going through freshman orientation and getting a student handbook. But anyone can move up north from Florida and dive straight into a North Country winter with no preparation whatsoever. What could possibly go wrong?

A Newcomer’s Guide to North Country Winter

It’s Darwin pure and simple: walking across thin ice,
driving on bald tires, making snow angels after drinking
tequila—can get you tossed right out of the gene pool.

You have to do math in winter. There’s an optimum speed 
for any road conditions that will keep your car between
the ditches. Any faster keeps the wrecker’s kids in college funds.

If you don’t watch where you put your feet while also watching
what’s coming down the road, you’ll either break a hip or be
lost beneath a beer truck. It’s called situational awareness.

The right amount of snow shoveling allows your car to blast 
out the drive onto the road. Miscalculate by 10% and you’re
a foot short of the pavement with all four tires off the ground.

And if you shovel too much too fast, there’s the cardiac arrest.
So, take your time and cultivate good relations with your neighbors.
If you do something stupid, they’ll help you out–laugh, but help.

Sugar season: when one of my old Listening Post essays can be boiled down into 31 syllables, it tastes sweeter.

Spring Morning

One daffodil in a vase 
on the kitchen table 
in a pool of sunlight.
Coffee in shirtsleeves
before an open window.

There is a qualitative difference between grace and its near relative, luck. Luck, for good or for ill, is bestowed randomly by an indifferent universe. Grace feels like a personal gift from one who knows your inmost desire.

Grace

Sometimes while a storm still rages
the sun shouts out from the horizon.
Sometimes the locked door pounded on
a hundred times before is found ajar.

There is no way to make it so. So,
wait for it, wait more, and love life.
A long season runs between planting
and harvest. Anything could happen.

People, and poets in particular, easily fall into thinking that the beaty of the world is created just for their pleasure. Yeah, but no.

Flowers Dress to Please the Bees

Few regard the sundew deep in the marsh
or delight in the night-blooming datura. Pity.
Even deep in undergrowth, tiny florets may
be discovered by one who bends the knee.

Flowers – we imagine their allure is meant for us,
the way men imagine women dress to please them.
But flowers dress to please the bees, the midwives
of their love lives. Our great hulks just block the way.

Just ran across a draft of this written back when I was doing an April poem-a-s-day challenge. I think it cleans up nicely.

Fluid Dynamics

The whirlpool behind Sugar Island dam
where snowmelt drops to the penstock
sends ripples back across the flow,
breaking up the reflection of clouds
trying to move east against the current.

The vortex runs white for a moment,
shredding cumulus, then resumes draining
the sky of blue. The penstock runs north
to the powerhouse, to wring the water’s
watts. What does it wring from the sky?

I once read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Heavy sledding, but there was this one bright moment when it all became perfectly clear. My hair stood on end for about five seconds, and then it all fell apart again. I am a big-time science wienie and was struck by an article in this morning’s EarthSky e-newsletter. My abstract that follows explains how 95% of everything is beyond our ken.

An English Major Explains the Universe

Astrophysicists tell us that everything we perceive,
from the end of our noses to the edge of the universe,
using all of our senses and all our high technology–
that’s five percent of what there is. All the matter 
and the light by which we see it, is less than the tip
of the iceberg. We might have suspected this all along.

Twenty-seven percent they say is made of dark matter, 
about which we know nothing except that it has mass.
And all the rest, sixty-eight percent, that’s dark energy.
And we know nothing about that except that it pushes
everything apart better than gravity holds it together.
If you think about it, we could have suspected that, too.

The astrophysicists think dark energy comes from
supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies,
is dark light that shines from dark stars, one might say.
Easy to believe come nightfall that darkness outweighs
the light; it pours out thick and heavy from shadowed woods.
But the dawn still comes to chase all the darkness away.