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