Taking Down the Tree

"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it's dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother's childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it's darkness
we're having, let it be extravagant.

-Jane Kenyon

Happy Christmas!

A Christmas Song

Christmas is coming. The goose is getting fat
---------------Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.
---------------If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do.
---------------If you haven’t got a ha’penny, Gold bless you.

Tonight the wide, wet flakes of snow
Drift down like Christmas suicides,
Layering the eaves and boughs until
The landscape seems transformed, as from
A night of talk or love. I’ve come
From cankered ports and railroad hubs
To winter in a northern state:
Three months of wind and little light.
Wood split, flue cleaned, and ashes hauled,
I am now proof against the cold
And make a place before the stove.
Mired fast in middle age, possessed
Of staved-in barn and brambled lot,
I think of that fierce-minded woman
Whom I loved, painting in a small,
Unheated room, or of a friend,
Sharp-ribbed from poverty, who framed
And fitted out his house by hand
And writes each night by kerosene.
I think, that is, of others who
Withdrew from commerce and the world
To work for joy instead of gain.
O would that I could gather them
This Yuletide, and shower them with coins.

-Norman Williams, 2003

As Real As Life

Say to the mild melancholy of regret
That seizes the Sunday afternoon,
I will not let your charm be sullied
By those tears that wet
The first ten years from June.
June was my birthday, likely from then
Until I can remember, Sunday was slow
Like a praying mantis climbing an oak
And tears, like tea, had formal cause to flow.
I will not regret the stereoptic world
Seen through Sunday windows
Baffled by depths that overlapped dismay.
But I will say, I have seen many a photograph
As real as life, and I have saved
A clipping about mountaineers who froze.

-Ruth Stone, 1955

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry, 1968

This is my last week in Saskatoon before I go home for winter break, which means I have the dubious pleasure of wrapping up a semester's worth of academics this week, with one exam, one poster presentation, and one thesis proposal. Not terrible, but vaguely intimidating.

This poem has long been a touchstone for me--I used to have the text of it in a virtual sticky note that I kept on my desktop at all times--but especially at times like this. I once read it repeatedly in preparation for a presentation instead of preparing for the presentation in any tangible way, and since then it's something I've come back to, time and again, when resting in the grace of the world would serve me better than clutching at the stones of my worries and turning them over and over in my mind.

And, on the topic of wild things, an update on the cranelings of yore: this photostream on flickr has several pictures of 'my' chicks. Any bird numbered 18 through 28-10 is one of ours.

It's the second Sunday of Advent, and Christmas is Happening, the musical advent calendar I linked last year, is happening again. 'Tis the season.

Another Poem of the Gifts

I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe,
For Reason, that will never give up its dream
Of a map of the labyrinth,
For Helen's face and the perseverance of Ulysses,
For love, which lets us see others
As God sees them,
For the solid diamond and the flowing water,
For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,
For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,
For Schopenhauer,
Who perhaps deciphered the universe,
For the blazing of fire,
That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,
For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,
For bread and salt,
For the mystery of the rose
That spends all its colour and can not see it,
For certain eves and days of 1955,
For the hard riders who, on the plains,
Drive on the cattle and the dawn,
For mornings in Montevideo,
For the art of friendship,
For Socrates' last day,
For the words spoken one twilight
From one cross to another,
For that dream of Islam that embraced
A thousand nights and a night,
For that other dream of Hell,
Of the tower of cleansing fire
And of the celestial spheres,
For Swedenborg,
Who talked with the angels in London streets,
For the secret and immemorial rivers
That converge in me,
For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,
For the sword and harp of the Saxons,
For the sea, which is a shining desert
And a secret code for things we do not know
And an epitaph for the Norsemen,
For the word music of England,
For the word music of Germany,
For gold, that shines in verses,
For epic winter,
For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,
For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,
For crystal prisms and bronze weights,
For the tiger's stripes,
For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,
For mornings in Texas,
For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle
And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,
For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,
Who, before there was Spanish, had written
All Spanish literature,
For gallant, noble, geometric chess,
For Zeno's tortoise and Royce's map,
For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,
For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,
For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,
For habits,
Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,
For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,
For night, its darkness and its astronomy,
For the bravery and happiness of others,
For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers
Or in an old sword,
For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,
For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible
And becomes one with the sum of all created things
And will never reach its last verse
And varies according to its writers
For Frances Haslam, who begged her children's pardon
For dying so slowly,
For the minutes that precede sleep,
For sleep and death,
Those two hidden treasures,
For the intimate gifts I do not mention,
For music, that mysterious form of time.

-Jorge Luis Borges, 1963

Happy Thanksgiving.
(video/music recommendation from Katerina.)

When the Frost is on the Punkin

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,
And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,
And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,
With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees;
But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover over-head!—
O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin’ ’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too! ...
I don’t know how to tell it—but ef sich a thing could be
As the Angels wantin’ boardin’, and they’d call around on me—
I’d want to ’commodate ’em—all the whole-indurin’ flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

-James Whitcomb Riley, 1916

As If

 

How do you explain why elephants

appear to move their unwieldy hulks

with greater dignity than most humans do

in their finest moments,

as if they had evolved beyond wanting

anything but what they have?

Why does the field begin to ripple

before the wind arrives in whispers,

as if there were a communication,

as if the landscape were poorly dubbed,

and we weren’t expected to notice?

What butterfly does not dart away from us

as if it could sense our latent cruelties,

and yet return to check and double-check?

Has the night not gotten recently darker,

as if to insinuate that we have squandered

the light that was there?

Have we made too much of our own?

And did you notice afterward the dawn

opening up with a tentative eagerness

as if there were something crucial to illumine,

as if we would wake up early just to see it?

I imagine you reading this now

with an expression of quiet trouble

itself troubled by currents of hope,

as if you imagined me here with you,

as if I might be able to see your expression,

and at least answer it with mine.

 

-J. Allyn Rosser, 2011

I may as well fess up: I have a twitter. I have had one for well over a year, I've just never quite worked out what to use it for (other than bugging the brother). But the thing is still there, lurking, and I figured--why not make a proper go of it? I still don't know what I'll tweet about. I'll try to make less of them @jackamick, though. If I really get into the swing of things, maybe I'll even add the twit-thing to the sidebar. But for now:

@amickari

(postscript: if you're on twitter, any recommendations about people to follow?)

In my memories, the summer of 2008--the first summer I was living and cooking on my own, away from home and without the college safeguard of a dining hall--is marked by my mother repeatedly asking what I was eating. It was a question that came out of some mixture of concern and curiosity: I had declared myself a vegetarian somewhere in there, and although I ostensibly knew how to cook the real question was whether I could cook for myself, day in and day out. Did I have the wherewithal? Grocery shopping only once every two weeks, would I be able to gauge what I needed, and how much? Or would I end up anemic, or otherwise malnourished?

The good news: I made it through that summer, and more after, with little to no significant changes in health. But the question still manifests itself occasionally, though: what are you eating? What am I eating?

Soup, mostly. And other things, but I like food that I can toss in one big pot and store in one big tupperware, so if it's not soup it's something that's true to the spirit: a pot of black beans jumbled with sauteed vegetables and maybe some cheddar cheese, served on top of rice, or shepherd's pie with lentils replacing the ground beef. Right now, though, at this precise moment: I'm eating pho.

I'm mentioning this because making my own pho is something that's new to me, and it's been an inroad into making my own vegetable stock, which I'd never done before. That in and of itself is kind of strange, because most of my soups use water in place of stock, and so I'm effectively making a stock over the course of making a soup. But these broths are, for lack of a better word, thin--the broth doesn't carry the soup.

Pho is traditionally a beef noodle soup, and the first time I tried to make a vegetarian version the lack was pretty apparent: it was just noodles and broth, and while the broth was good it wasn't good enough--it needed a lot of salt, and I ate giant bowls of it because it wasn't particularly filling. It's probably my own fault for not liking tofu particularly, but here we are, second time around.

I used this recipe as a base and expounded from there. Start with a pot of decent size: add onion (1, quartered with skin), shallots (2, halved with skin), garlic (8 cloves, halved), ginger (~1 inch piece, sliced), star anise (2 pods), cinnamon (2 sticks) and carrots (chopped). Dry roast until vegetables begin to char, and then add white mushrooms (~10, coarsely chopped), and celery (2 stalks, coarsely chopped). I used some rice wine vinegar here to help get the brown bits off the bottom, and then add water (10 cups) and soy sauce (3 tablespoons).

Bring that to a boil, then reduce it to a simmer and cook for an hour at least. I tasted the broth along the way until I thought the flavor was strong enough--there may have been a compromise here because I was hungry, but when it was done it had a nice rich color and was fairly flavorful. Then I removed the aromatics, onions, etc. but left some of the mushrooms and carrots in and added vermicelli rice noodles (200g--though you could use less, mine basically took over the pot, which rice noodles tend to do), and some fish sauce. This where it starts to veer a little from traditional pho (if you didn't guess it would when I left some vegetables in the broth): I also added an entire head of chopped bok choy, the juice of one lime, and cilantro and basil (a loose half a cup of each). The last three are normally added to the bowl at the table; this way I can store all my pho in the fridge and reheat without worrying about lime wedges and herb garnishes (though I did add the srichacha by the bowl, because I always go overboard with that stuff at least once).

There you go, then: what I'm eating.

First Snow, Kerhonkson

--(for Alan) 
 

This, then, is the gift the world has given me

(you have given me)

softly the snow

cupped in hollows

lying on the surface of the pond

matching my long white candles

which stand at the window

which will burn at dusk while the snow

fills up our valley

this hollow

no friend will wander down

no one arriving brown from Mexico

from the sunfields of California, bearing pot

they are scattered now, dead or silent

or blasted to madness

by the howling brightness of our once common vision

and this gift of yours—

white silence filling the contours of my life.

-Diane di Prima, 1990

Haymaking

After night’s thunder far away had rolled
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,
Like the first gods before they made the world
And misery, swimming the stormless sea
In beauty and in divine gaiety.
The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn
With leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June—
And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.
The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit
With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd
Of children pouring out of school aloud.
And in the little thickets where a sleeper
For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper
And garden warbler sang unceasingly;
While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee
The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.
Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown
Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,
Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,
Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook
Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood
Without its team, it seemed it never would
Move from the shadow of that single yew.
The team, as still, until their task was due,
Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade
That three squat oaks mid-field together made
Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,
And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but
Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.
The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,
But still. And all were silent. All was old,
This morning time, with a great age untold,
Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,
Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under the heavens that know not what years be
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered even what they will in times far hence—
All of us gone out of the reach of change—
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

-Edward Thomas, 1917

Madly Singing in the Mountains

There is no one among men that has not a special failing;
And my failing consists in writing verses.
I have broken away from the thousand ties of life;
But this infirmity still remains behind.
Each time that I look at a fine landscape,
Each time I meet a loved friend,
I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry
And marvel as though God has crossed my path.
Ever since the day I was banished to Hsün-yang
Half my time I have lived among the hills.
And often, when I have finished a new poem,
Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.
I lean my body on the banks of white Stone;
I pull down with my hands a white cassia branch.
My mad singing startles the valleys and hills;
The apes and birds all come to peep.
Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,
I choose a place unfrequented by men.

-Po Chü-I

Driving

You never say anything in your letters. You say,
I drove all night long through the snow
in someone else's car
and the heater wouldn't work and I nearly froze.
But I know that. I live in this country too.
I know how beautiful it is at night
with the white snow banked in the moonlight.

Around black trees and tangled bushes,
how lonely and lovely that driving is,
how deadly. You become the country.
You are by yourself in that channel of snow
and pines and pines,
whether the pines and snow flow backwards smoothly,
whether you drive or you stop or you walk or you sit.

This land waits. It watches. How beautifully desolate
our country is, out of the snug cities,
and how it fits a human. You say you drove.
It doesn't matter to me.
All I can see is the silent cold car gliding,
walled in, your face smooth, your mind empty,
cold foot on the pedal, cold hands on the wheel.

-John Newlove, 1993

In the Lake District

In those days, in a place where dentists thrive
(their daughters order fancy clothes from London;
their painted forceps hold aloft on signboards
a common and abstracted Wisdom Tooth),
there I--whose mouth held ruins more abject
than any Parthenon--a spy, a spearhead
for some fifth column of a rotting culture
(my cover was lit. professorship),
was living at a college near the most
renowned of the fresh-water lakes; the function
to which I'd been appointed was to wear out
the patience of the ingenuous local youth.

Whatever I wrote then was incomplete:
my lines expired in strings of dots. Collapsing,
I dropped, still fully dressed, upon my bed.
At night I stared up at the darkened ceiling
until I saw a shooting star, which then, conforming to the laws of self-combustion
would flash--before I'd even made a wish--
across my cheek and down onto my pillow.

-Joseph Brodsky, 1980

I just flipped through some photographs from Colleen Plumb's new book Animals Are Outside Today on the NYT website, paused for a moment, thought I should be doing something else, thought maybe this merited a blog post. The blog post won out, because these are the sort of images of animals that avoid sentimentality and say something, though don't ask me what, about the relationship we have with the Things That Are Outside Today.

In other news, Tomas Transtromer won the Nobel prize.

For the Chipmunk in My Yard

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

-Robert Gibb, 2009

The Night Clerk at L. L. Bean
   (for Huey Crisp)

His phone rings almost all night,
as measured and intense
as somebody smoking a cigarette.
Taking an order for a monogrammed dog bed,
he remembers the time
a fox watched him, motionless,
from the edge of a field.

This is sometimes how grace comes to us,
sharp and fleeting as a paper cut.


Why I Get Up Each Day

Tomorrow, maybe, or today
sunlight will discover one red leaf.
The sound will shatter crystal. 

 -Jo McDougall, 2001

Pitch

Lay it down, the shimmering glass.
The hooded flickering of the flat is for you, the
--------------------------hooded flame of the hole.
Way out there, don't tell.
You can see winter's limp and unshavedness
----------------moving on the hills; it doesn't
-------------------------know where to put its body.
Dark shifts of cranes in the valley.
Be quiet. Move up along the coyote edge, come up
-------------------along the left-hand bank to the best geese place
----------------------------------near the Métis winter camp graves.
Experienced light cruises the clay banks.
You must be this without knowing you are.
The river is gleaming with falling down,
-----------------------gold scar of current on its back.
Sandhill cranes on the dock scruffed islands.
A bigger dark comes in from a further place.

-Tim Lilburn, 2007

Last summer I made a post about making apple butter; it was my first foray into canning, and I would go on to make and can another batch of apple butter, huckleberry jam, blackberry jam, cranberry sauce and tomato sauce (that was before I was warned about the dangers of botulism when canning tomato sauce; I didn't have a problem, but I probably won't be doing that in the future). I lugged the jars with me cross-country and doled them out as gifts; as my stockpile slowly dwindled away I didn't quite forget about canning, but I didn't feel compelled to can anything--mom made dilly beans and strawberry jam, and I wished we had picked enough wild blueberries for jam, but that was about it.

Then summer started winding down. Then I found a recipe for peach butter, which I made (peaches were on sale for a dollar a pound), which reminded me how good apple butter had been in oatmeal and on bread. And I finished the jar of dilly beans I brought from home and got  the idea of zucchini dill pickles stuck in my head, so it was like if-you-give-a-moose-a-muffin on several levels. The short version, here, is that I've been canning: two quarts of pickles, three pints of apple butter, about the same of peach butter. I'm wondering about adding bread-and-butter pickles and pickled beets to the store as well; it's hard to explain how satisfying it is to have things in jars, to know that I can keep this indefinitely. Those apples that were spilling out of my backpack when I got home from the farmers' market yesterday will now stay with me over winter, no worries. I have strawberry jam from home as well, made from berries mom and I picked in the Berkshire hills, and it tastes like summer. I'm glad I'll be able to keep summer around for the long Saskatchewan winter, which maybe explains why I'm suddenly stockpiling like a squirrel. I think Greg Brown has a song about this. (And The Gourds have a song about pickles.)

Harvest

A six-cylinder car and two Fords in the middle of
------the fields
In every direction as far as the horizon the slightly
------slanting swaths crisscross in a wavering
------diamond-shaped checkerboard pattern
Not a tree
From the North comes down the rumble and rattle of the
------automotive thrasher and forage wagon
And from the south come twelve empty trains to
------pick up the wheat

-Blaise Cendrars

Childhood Stories

They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium
and we all rose into the air,
the same room where they demonstrated
pow-wows and prestidigitation.

But not everyone believed it.
That was the most important lesson
I learned—that a truck driven by a dog
could roll down a hill at dusk
and roll right off a dock into a lake
and sink, and if no one believes you
then what is the point
of telling them wonderful things?

I walked home from the pow-wow
on an early winter night in amazement:
they let me buy the toy tomahawk!
As soon as I got home I was going
to hit my sister with it, but I didn’t know this.

-Matthew Rohrer, 2001

Well, I made it. Here are some pictures from the journey, which can be loosely sketched as running from Massachusetts to Chicago, Chicago to North Dakota, and North Dakota to, finally, Saskatoon.

More to come as I gather my bearings and settle in for the long haul, two years of actually living here.

Seafarer

And learn O voyager to walk
The roll of earth, the pitch and fall
That swings across these trees those stars:
That swings the sunlight up the wall.

And learn upon these narrow beds
To sleep in spite of sea, in spite
Of sound the rushing planet makes:
And learn to sleep against this ground.

-Archibald MacLeish, 1933

Tonight I packed my bags, packed my car, with everything I'll need for the next year and a half, two years. Skis, snowshoes, bike. Coats, scarves, pants. Shoes, boots, shoes. Pots, pans, muffin tins. The list: it goes on. I also packed my spare iPod with books on tape and podcasts, and mom mixed up a bag of gorp (good old raisins and peanuts, plus m&ms, which don't make the acronym) for me, and all told, it looks like I'm ready for this road trip thing.

This blog was started at the end of 2008, in preparation for my first adventure in studying abroad--a five month stint at the University of Otago in New Zealand. I posted a Walt Whitman excerpt in my last post before leaving the states, and although there's another poem scheduled for Wednesday, I thought I'd throw this one up again in light of the journey I'm about to undertake (my alarm is set for 5:30 tomorrow morning). It's fitting, I like a little repetition in my life, if the shoe fits, wear it, etc., etc. Here we go:

from Song of the Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well for where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)

-Walt Whitman, 1860

Remember this post? Here's another for the anuran series. (Except the horned toad isn't an anuran, or even an amphib--I know, but I don't really know how to deal with that right now.)

To Whom it May Concern
---for Harry Cobb

Soon I’ll move to Norway.
If that’s a bitter pill,

well, swill, swallow. I’m going,
and I won’t wallow, not in Norway,

where they’re so beyond
slave labor, with laws that say

a clerk must work within five
meters of a window through

which she can see a tree
and by that tree be seen.

My mind’s made up.
I will be Norwegian with Norwegian

trees. I’ll be seer and be seen.
It’s a scenic scene, it’s

how it goes, I’m going.
Tell the top brass, if

they ask, I don’t give
a damn about their asses.

But I will miss the beeches and the ashes.
It’s not their fault I’m leaving.

They’re only trees, and
leaving, I’m Norwegian.

-Andrea Cohen, 2010

County fair time again.

If you don't know what this is, you haven't been to nearly enough fairs. (Here's a hint, if you need it.)

So yesterday after work I stopped by a stump on the property and picked up some mushrooms. Picked some mushrooms, actually--Chicken of the Woods, which I ate for dinner. Sauteed to a crisp in a pan with garlic, it did taste a lot like chicken.

As you can see in the picture below, I also cooked an egg. I sliced it up and put it in the bowl with the mushrooms, actually.

(A caveat, for my parents and potential mushroom hunters: Chicken of the Woods is one of the easiest edible mushrooms to identify, and this was my first time collecting them, but someone had confirmed the identity of these particular mushrooms for me already. Also, I washed the mushrooms and threw the attendant beetles out the window, and so far I seem to be fine.)

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

-Gary Snyder, 2003

Sent to Ch'ao, the Palace Reviser

You polish words in rue-scented libraries,
and I live in bamboo-leaf gardens, a recluse

wandering each day the same winding path
home to rest in the quiet, no noise anywhere.

A bird soaring the heights chooses its tree,
but the hedge soon tangles impetuous goats.

Today, things seen becoming thoughts felt:
this is where you start forgetting the words.

-Meng Hao-jan

Homing

That things should happen
twice, and place
share the burden of remembering. Home,
the first cliché. We say it
with aspiration as the breath
opens to a room of its own (a bed,
a closet for the secret self), then closes
on a hum. Home. Which is the sound of time
breaking a little, growing slow and thick as the soup
that simmers on the stove. Abide,
abode. Pass me that plate,
the one with the hand-painted habitant
sitting on a log. My parents bought it
on their honeymoon – see? Dated on the bottom,
1937. He has paused to smoke his pipe, the tree
half-cut and leaning. Is he thinking where
to build his cabin or just idling his mind
while his pipe smoke mingles with the air? A bird,
or something (it is hard to tell), hangs overhead.
Now it’s covered by your grilled cheese sandwich.

Part two, my interpretation. The leaning tree
points home, then
past home into real estate and its innumerable
Kodak moments: kittens, uncles,
barbecues. And behind those scenes the heavy
footstep on the stair, the face locked
in the window frame, things that happen
and keep happening, reruns
of family romance. And the smudged bird? I say it’s
a Yellow Warbler who has flown
from winter habitat in South America to nest here
in the clearing. If we catch it, band it,
let it go a thousand miles away it will be back
within a week. How?
Home is what we know
and know we know, the intricately
feathered nest. Homing
asks the question.

-Don McKay, 2004

My life has a funny way of finding its way to me, and I tend to just roll with the punches. Less than a week ago I received some news, and in the past six days I've made a decision that in some ways felt already decided. What I mean to say is that a question I've now posed twice (via poem) in this here illustrious blog has been answered.

The little ouzel bird has spoken: I'm going back to the university. Although perhaps I shan't call it back, because this fall I'll be bound for someplace entirely new. I hear it's cold in Saskatchewan.

The Signature of All Things

1
My head and shoulders, and my book
In the cool shade, and my body
Stretched bathing in the sun, I lie
Reading beside the waterfall —
Boehme’s “Signature of all Things.”
Through the deep July day the leaves
Of the laurel, all the colors
Of gold, spin down through the moving
Deep laurel shade all day. They float
On the mirrored sky and forest
For a while, and then, still slowly
Spinning, sink through the crystal deep
Of the pool to its leaf gold floor.
The saint saw the world as streaming
In the electrolysis of love.
I put him by and gaze through shade
Folded into shade of slender
Laurel trunks and leaves filled with sun.
The wren broods in her moss domed nest.
A newt struggles with a white moth
Drowning in the pool. The hawks scream,
Playing together on the ceiling
Of heaven. The long hours go by.
I think of those who have loved me,
Of all the mountains I have climbed,
Of all the seas I have swum in.
The evil of the world sinks.
My own sin and trouble fall away
Like Christian’s bundle, and I watch
My forty summers fall like falling
Leaves and falling water held
Eternally in summer air.

2
Deer are stamping in the glades,
Under the full July moon.
There is a smell of dry grass
In the air, and more faintly,
The scent of a far off skunk.
As I stand at the wood’s edge,
Watching the darkness, listening
To the stillness, a small owl
Comes to the branch above me,
On wings more still than my breath.
When I turn my light on him,
His eyes glow like drops of iron,
And he perks his head at me,
Like a curious kitten.
The meadow is bright as snow.
My dog prowls the grass, a dark
Blur in the blur of brightness.
I walk to the oak grove where
The Indian village was once.
There, in blotched and cobwebbed light
And dark, dim in the blue haze,
Are twenty Holstein heifers,
Black and white, all lying down,
Quietly together, under
The huge trees rooted in the graves.

3
When I dragged the rotten log
From the bottom of the pool,
It seemed heavy as stone.
I let it lie in the sun
For a month; and then chopped it
Into sections, and split them
For kindling, and spread them out
To dry some more. Late that night,
After reading for hours,
While moths rattled at the lamp —
The saints and the philosophers
On the destiny of man —
I went out on my cabin porch,
And looked up through the black forest
At the swaying islands of stars.
Suddenly I saw at my feet,
Spread on the floor of night, ingots
Of quivering phosphorescence,
And all about were scattered chips
Of pale cold light that was alive.

-Kenneth Rexroth, 1946

Last night I was at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. I almost didn't go; I was tired after work, it was hot. I drove twenty minutes towards home and then executed a neat u-turn somewhere in West Stockbridge.

I went back to see Greg Brown. There's a funny parallel between this and Solid Sound, earlier this summer. Like Wilco, I last saw Greg Brown in concert in Wisconsin--at the Cedarburg Cultural Center, when I was in, what, 9th grade? 10th, maybe? A long time, ago, anyway. It was mostly old people, save my friend Marlo and another kid from our class. The man in front of me was in dire need of a belt.

I've also been to Falcon Ridge before, when I was in elementary school and my parents won free tickets to camp there for the weekend. I got bit by a donkey. It's a story I've told repeatedly, though maybe not here. I do not remember who any of the performers were, though my parents tell me Greg Brown was there then, too.

Again like Wilco, Greg Brown's a musician that I've been listening to since high school, maybe even since eighth grade (which was when I started listening to music as a conscious thing). He's probably been in the background of my life longer, because my parents introduced me to his music.

I go through phases with music, but I have a CD of my favorite Greg Brown songs that always finds its way back into my car's sound system--last night, driving home in the dark on Route 22, northward-bound when everyone else seemed to be going south, it was there. And then there are individual songs: listening to Vivid on loop when I was in New Zealand; Rexroth's Daughter was my most frequently played song on iTunes freshman year of college and long after. Senior year of college I had the lyrics to Walkin' Daddy pinned to the back of my desk. And there are others, too many to name (what about My New Book? what about Billy from the Hills?).

Would it fly if I said I think Greg Brown is one of the best American songwriters, full stop? Because that's probably about where my thoughts on him lie. I might say one of the best songwriters, but he writes from a distinctly American perspective--he merits recognition for that.

Last night he performed with Bo Ramsey on electric guitar, under a sheet of dark sky hemmed by the  hills of upstate New York. Sometimes I sat up and watched; sometimes I lay flat on my back on the itchy blanket of hay meadow, looking up at the sky. Was it worth turning back for? Oh, yes. Have I gone to far too many concerts this summer? That might be true, too. I should probably be trying to understand what makes live music worthwhile, but for now I'll settle for remembering the ragged cheer the crowd let out when Greg Brown took the stage. And, from other festivals this summer: someone in the crowd when Wilco was performing at Solid Sound throwing hundreds of glow necklaces into the night sky like shooting stars. Hot air balloons ascending into the air while Emmylou Harris performed at the Green River Festival.

We're human. We're alive. Sometimes we just want to celebrate.

As at the Far Edge of Circling

----As at the far edge of circling the country,
facing suddenly the other ocean,
the boundless edge of what I had wanted
to know, I stepped
----into my answers’ shadow ocean,

the tightening curl of the corners
of outdated old paperbacks,---breakers,
a crumble surf of tiny dry triangles around
----my ankles sinking in my stand

taken----that the horizon written
by the spin of my compass is------that this is
is not enough-----a point to turn around on,

----is like a skin---that falls short of edge
as a rug,---that covers a no longer
natural spot, no longer existent
to live on from,---the map of my person
----come to the end of,-----but not done.

-----That country crossed was what I could imagine,
and that little spit of answer is the shadow—
not the ocean which casts it—---that I step next
into----to be cleansed of question.

---But not of seeking----…it as
if simplified for the seeking,
----come to its end at this body.

-Ed Roberson, 2010

Someone donated a copy of A Natural History of American Birds of Eastern and Central North America (by Edward Howe Forbush, revised by John Bichard May, with color plates by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Allan Brooks and Roger Tory Peterson, published in--if my interpretation of Roman numerals is correct--1939) to the Cobble. The book itself is in very good condition, but I don't think I've read a word--I just sit around, flipping through the charming plates, looking at pictures (more photos of the pages in my flickr--it was hard to choose).

Your Way

No-one has marked out the road
you are to take
out in the unknown
out in the blue.

This is your road.
Only you
will take it. And there’s no
turning back.

And you haven’t marked your road
either.
And the wind smooths out your tracks
on desolate hills.

-Olav H. Hauge

Brief Eden

For part of one strange year we lived
in a small house at the edge of a wood.
No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody
to ask questions. Except
for the one big question we went on
asking ourselves.
-------------That spring
myriads of birds stopped over
briefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn
to our leafy quiet and our brook and because,
as we later learned, the place lay beneath
a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds
brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks
or crossed bills, birds small
and enormous, all of them pausing
to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings,
and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we
of a destination. By the time we’d watched them
wing north in spring, then make
an anxious autumn return,
we too had pulled it together and we too moved
into what seemed to be our lives.

-Lois Beebe Hayna, 2009

Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We're keeping busy —
This way, that way, we're making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.

-Gary Soto, 1995

I wrote a very long blog post last night. This is not part of a new thing where I write very long blog posts.

Here's a picture from the Bart's Cobble visitor's center, where I answer tourists' very pressing questions about the locations of waterfalls (we're in a township called Ashley Falls, which does not actually have any significant waterfalls) and bathrooms while surrounded by dead animals (secret: I like it).

Solid Sound was this weekend.

It's a music festival at Mass MoCA, curated by Wilco. It is, technically, three days, but I went yesterday and yesterday only, with the rest of the family, and we sort of ambled around and ate popsicles and waited out a thunderstorm in a tent made of umbrellas (also, poked one another in the head with umbrellas while trying to maintain tent integrity) because we were too lazy to go inside or something.

Actually, we might have been holding our seats for last night's Wilco concert in the umbrella tent, but that's semantics.

The Wilco concert, though. The first and last Wilco concert I went to, before this, was in 2006 at Milwaukee's Summerfest, which is an alcohol marinated jukebox on the shore of Lake Michigan. I had just graduated high school, I had just gone to Bolivia for two weeks, and this was probably only a few days after my arrival home (sans luggage--thank you, Air Boliviano). After we got back from the concert, I slept for fifteen hours straight, until three in the afternoon the next day. That concert sticks in my memory as the first time I realized I liked the song Hummingbird, which they played as we were walking out of the park, leaving before the concert was completely set, as my family tends to do.

So move back in time, to when I first listened to Wilco, some time in Dad's car (we were pulling out of the driveway, 1626 Robin Court, or maybe pulling in), and then move forward slightly in the timeline and you'll find me, with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in my grey and orange clamshell Sony discman while I set in the back of the school bus. This is circa 2003. I was a sophomore in high school. The bus route is still mapped in my mind, and I remember listening to Radio Cure as we wheeled through one particular loop of houses. The window would be cold, and I probably had my forehead pressed against it, so I felt every jolt in the road. I was trying to listen to my music, and not the bus driver's radio.

So back to North Adams, last night. I was sitting on a damp dropcloth in a field, and then came the opening bars of a familiar track, and I remembered. I was a sophomore in high school, riding the school bus.

In yesterday's present, the audience rose to greet these songs like old friends (everyone singing you were right about the stars, each one is a setting sun while Jeff Tweedy remained silent). It was a reminder of the strange way music accumulates meaning. For me, there's a string of memories attached to those Wilco songs. And there's other music, all it which I'm incapable of hearing without remembering. Maybe that's less than ideal, the wrong way to listen to music because I'm not just listening to the music, because it's playing in sync with some past iteration of itself (maybe I should take James Agee's advice about Beethoven's Seventh, turn it up all the way, lay lightly on the floor, listen to it loud: "You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.").

But the things I remember remain, and they'll layer one atop the other with the music in the present:

Heavy Metal Drummer, the second song in the encore at Wilco's June 25th concert, Solid Sound, 2011. We are leaving. I stop and splash mud off my boots in a puddle. In 2006, this was the only song I really wanted them to play (they did). And here it was again. It's a lot like pop, a lot like summertime, that one song that my 18-year-old self wanted Wilco to play live. They are playing it again now. And then they start Passenger Side, and we can't leave just yet, because Mom and Dad want to hear this one, just one more, and we're sharing a trail mix cookie from that co-op in Williamstown, and it's late and I have work in the morning, but right now we're here, music is playing, this is it.