Starting the Subaru at Five Below

After 6 Maine winters and 100,000 miles,
when I take it to be inspected

I search for gas stations where they
just say beep the horn and don't ask me to

put it on the lift, exposing its soft
rusted underbelly. Inside is the record

of commuting: apple cores, a bag from
McDonald's, crushed Dunkin' Donuts cups,

A flashlight that doesn't work and one
That does, gas receipts blurred beyond

recognition. Finger tips numb, nose
hair frozen, I pump the accelerator

and turn the key. The battery cranks,
the engine gives 2 or 3 low groans and

starts. My God it starts. And unlike
my family in the house, the job I'm

headed towards, the poems in my briefcase,
the dreams I had last night, there is

no question about what makes sense.
White exhaust billowing from the tail pipe,

Heater blowing, this car is going to
move me, it's going to take me places.

-Stuart Kestenbaum

Yesterday a baby was born...

and so now we have our first whooper chick, and today I took my first turn as mother crane. This means wearing a sack with one sleeve made of white jersey and one sleeve edged with black (my wing) and elastic at the bottom, which hits below my knees, and a white hood over my head with a camo screen in front of my face (it's like wearing blinders on the sides and the top, or so I imagine, since I don't usually wear blinders). It means kneeling in sand below a heat lamp that heats the run to approximate ly 95 degrees, Fahrenheit, while wearing the aforementioned sack. It means doing all this in silence with a puppet on one hand that picks up tiny pellets of food and offers them, repeatedly, to a small bird.

What echoes through my head during this whole process is that I don't want to mess this up. This is the first chick of the year (currently nameless--the name theme this year is cheese, and a list of possibilities is being compiled, and then there will be voting, and THEN there will be a name), and it has been entrusted to us, and somehow by wearing these ridiculous sacks and not talking to it and getting it to drink water from a long-handled red spoon we might teach this tiny bird to be a crane (if no one steps on it--which has happened). What? I still don't believe this actually works. I'm learning how to be a crane at the same time the chick is, though hopefully at a faster rate. Will either of us turn into functioning adults? I'll keep you posted.

Flow

My osteopath congratulates me
on bones that could last 300 years.
So count on chard among the ash,
son, daughter, that you sift into
Scott Springs that feeds
Scott Creek that
swells Rocky Run.

Along the way I startle a trout
nourish a patch of emerald cress
before I spill into
warrior river Tomahawk to
float with the big Wisconsin
a molecule of the Mississippi
an atom flung into the
blue Gulf of Mexico to be
inhaled by the burning sun.

-Margot Peters

I picked this poem up at Necedah NWR the other day--it was on a bookmark in the visitors' center. It seems especially appropriate because today I went kayaking for a long time in the sun, and saw herons and swallows and a kingfisher and a snapping turtle sunning on a log. What is it about water?

Otherwise, not too much happening (it was my day off, remember?). I went to the farmers' market in Baraboo and now I'm thinking about joining a CSA so I don't need to buy all my produce at Walmart.

Tomorrow is my first official day off at ICF, and it comes after a tidy five days of work. I'm learning a lot, blah blah blah. Mostly I pick up after birds and do my superiors' bidding. We're busy getting ready for our first crane chick (or colt) next week, which means the chick rearing facility (dubbed iso, short for isolation) has to be disinfected and at the ready. For me that means weeding sweet clover and thistle in the outer yards, and raking the sand in the indoor runs.

Which doesn't mean my life has been bird free. Every morning we-the-interns clean Crane City, four streets of pens and houses containing...well, enough birds. We also clean the indoor enclosures for the birds on display. The strangest thing about captive animals is how anthropomorphized they are, with their quirks and problems: one pecks at a doorknob, another can't be let inside because she won't go out, another chases his shadow, one hates women. The picture is of Chip and Crockett, the display whoopers, who keep building nests but don't lay eggs. These aren't healthy behaviors for a bird (well, the last doesn't matter much, except as it's a pain for me), and I would venture to say they'd be deemed unhealthy in humans as well. But they make life interesting.

I Am Panting

Why talk

if one can shout

why walk

if one can run

why live

if one can burn.

I am running and screaming from joy

I am running and screaming from despair

I am panting

my lungs work like crazy.

Violent feelings

are good, so I have heard, for your health.

-Anna Swir

I'm a college graduate now, with a B.S. in Environmental Studies, and vague plans for the future. This is it. I am panting.

[I saw myself]

I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
"ring of bone" where
ring is what a

bell does

-Lew Welch

Reading "Whole Earth Discipline" right now, and pulled this poem from there. I'll also point you toward this link. The book is interesting--I have mixed feelings, but it offers a lot of food for thought.

I graduate nine days from today (yesterday was my last day of class).

I've taken to referring to it, not as graduating, but as transcending.

Here's a video.