Job
(Job 28:28)

Yes: wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord,
which comprehends the power that made the seas,
the earth, the shimmering dawn, the unexplored
unfathomed skies, the moon, and the Pleiades.
Which also know Who comes to judge our shoddy
little failing lives, knowing full well,
we need not fear the one who kills the body,
but only He who condemns the soul to hell.
Which also knows it magnifies the Lord,
defying the demon, being the only release,
oddly enough, from fear, being its own reward,
which is also wise, is faith, is hope, is peace,
is tender mercy, over and over again,
until, at last, is love, is love. Amen.

-William Baer

These past two weeks I've been going through my school's insect collections. Sometimes you open a box and there are perfectly preserved and labeled insects; and sometimes you open a box to a swirl of dust and mothballs. I don't think these collections have been used in ten or twenty years, so it's always a mystery.

p.s. Happy 40th Birthday, Earth Day.

Picnic to the Earth

here let's jump rope together-------here
here let's eat balls of rice together
here let me love you
your eyes reflect the blueness of sky
your back will be stained a wormwood green
here let's learn the constellations together
from here let's dream of every distant thing
here let's gather low-tide shells,
from the sea of sky at dawn
let's bring back little starfish
at breakfast we will toss them out
at night be drawn away
here I'll keep saying, "I am back"
while you repeat, "Welcome home"
here let's come again and again
here let's drink hot tea
here let's sit together for awhile
let's be blown by the cooling breeze.

-Shuntaro Tanikawa, 1955

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace." - Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac"

The Shapes of Leaves

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,

and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

-Arthur Sze, 1998

This is crane week (like shark week, only less violent). I got a job for summer-into-fall raising and tracking whooping cranes (I promise you it's cool), and I will be going to the International Crane Foundation and other Baraboo-area conservation-related places this weekend with the conservation biology class I T.A. for (we will also be counting sandhill cranes for the Annual Midwest Crane Count). So I went on the internet and looked for a poem about cranes. There aren't very many good ones. There aren't very many, period. Especially because anything about non-bird cranes was out.

Hopefully I will bring my camera and not be embarrassed like I was when I went on this field trip two years ago as a student, so there will be some pictures when I get back. This month has been a little anemic when it comes to pictures.

Spring And All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

-William Carlos Williams