Necco's been at it again, with 'it' being either 'injuring himself' or 'animal hospital' (they're both true, so you pick). The dog is hapless. And yet--right now he's standing at the door, in his purple-polka-dotted cast, because he wants to go out and play in the snow (but the cast will get wet: Necco's trips outside right now involve suiting his cast up in a plastic bag and a neoprene sock). He doesn't know what it felt like for us to stand in the vet's office and hear that our dog might wind up three-legged if his tendons don't heal--he doesn't know that the same vet operated on him on Christmas Eve so he'd have a better chance of keeping that fourth leg. Necco is, after all, a dog. He doesn't know why he has a cast on his leg, he honors no holidays, he really likes snow and running around.

One of the earliest things I remember writing was a rumination on a dog's death (I was age eight), and I'm kind of tempted to go into the whole dog thing again here, like I did when I first started this blog and Necco swallowed a plastic bag. But mostly--hey, Necco, we're glad to have you home, you big dumb dog. You can't even read, and yet I'm writing to you. There you go: human-canine relationship, in a nutshell.

Massachusetts Audubon Chart No. 1, 1898

In the corner of an antique store
hanging by a nail, I bumped into
this water-stained, frayed-edge chart.
Ingenious at getting twenty-six birds—
from chimney swift to chipping sparrow,
all life-sized—on 27 x 42 inches,
Fuertes painted his stiff birds posed
in characteristic attitudes
on a convenient streamside dead tree, on reeds,
and on the wing in the background sky.

After I bought the chart and hung it
near the stairs, I found almost all twenty-six
are right here, going by
at various times outside my window.
Seeing the little golden crown on a kinglet,
or the tail-splash of red that sets off
the catbird’s silky grey, puts me in good cheer.
And there’s the sudden paradise of intimacy
when I turn my binoculars toward a house wren
nesting under the skewed lid of my propane tank.

None of this is life-changing
or halts the numbing dailiness of chores,
but since I hung this chart of birds,
I’ve come to think that what we know of our lives
often has nothing to do with understanding,
but with some accidental loveliness
we put our hopes in, the excess, say,
of a thrush fluting its elongated ee—oo – lay;
or the way a flock of goldfinches
yellow the air they fly through without asking.

-Robert Cording, 2012

Christmas Prelude

O little fleas
of speckled light
all dancing
like a satellite

O belly green trees
shaded vale
O shiny bobcat
winter trail

Amoebic rampage
squamous cock
a Chinese hairpiece
burly sock

A grilled banana
smashes gates
and mingeless badgers
venerate

The asses of the
winter trees
rock on fat asses
as you please

Be jumpy
or unhinged
with joy
enlightened
fry cakes
Staten hoy.

-Lisa Jarnot, 2008

Journey Into the Interior

In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
-- Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.

-Theodore Roethke, 1961

The Plain

A muddy-wheeled cart goes lurching
between the poplar trees' wide rows
just where the narrow track
cuts from the main road.

Crops, naked fields, horizon
and sky surround a single horse
and driver in a wide frame,
hiding them in fixity that never alters.

The distant here seems very near
and what's near seems far away:
all sing together as one--
everywhere furrows, lumps of clay--

horse, driver and small cart
rolling the work hours way
through slow centuries,
and buried by the nights and days.

-Sandor Weores, 1988

Lines for Winter
   (for Ros Krauss)

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

-Mark Strand, 1979

I bought a plane ticket to Norway a couple of days back. I'll be there from January until July, 2013, studying at the University of Tromsø and finishing my thesis. There's also about a month of traveling tacked on there, at the end, so it's not all hard labor without pay (if it ever was such a thing). 

A little over a year ago I packed up my life and moved to Saskatoon, mostly because the opportunity was there. And Saskatoon brought me the opportunity to go to Norway; unexpected, but welcome, so now I'm packing it all up again (and hoping everything will fit--the Volvo and I have been through a lot together, but she stays the same size while the rest of my stuff keeps expanding). 

Look, I'm not going to pretend to know how life works--and I understand my own life least of all. I read a lot of books as a kid (read a lot of books still), and I'm often tempted to impose storybook narratives on things. Really, this is the only thing I can tell you with certainty: I have a plane ticket to Norway. I need to apply for a visa, but if everything goes well I should be boarding a plane in January, and flying to a place by the mountains and the sea where the sun doesn't break the horizon until January 15th. I'll keep you posted.

For now, though--I'm enjoying Saskatoon (Toontown! The City of Bridges! The Paris of the Prairies!) and dealing with all the things that need to be dealt with before I drive home in December (I hit the road in a couple weeks, barring further blizzarding). Mostly research stuff. It's possible I'll manage to write a coherent post about my research eventually, but this is not that post. This post is purely informative, and the information presented is this: I'm moving. Again.

Happy Thanksgiving. Funnily enough, I celebrated Thanksgiving already--on the Canadian holiday, which coincides with U.S. Columbus Day weekend in early October, which feels about a million years and miles away. Anyway. Throwing this song up to commemorate the day mostly because I lived in Stockbridge part-time once (Alice's restaurant is under new ownership; it is about a half a mile from the railroad track, though). That also feels about a million years and miles away. Anyway--enjoy the holiday, if you're celebrating.

Matter

First there was the revelation that I did not matter.
There was a kind of freedom in that.
I could stand in my office above the garage,
In the clutter of files and insurance bills, postits and catalogs,
Thoreau’s “ton of brick,” the finally
Untranscendent,
And be the simple instrument
Of necessity,
Played in this minor, suburban scale.

If this is enlightenment, I thought,
Then it has nothing to do with simplicity,
With silence, the moon suddenly
Gone from the spavined bucket.
It is the moment when the disciple sets out,
Warned against persecution, assured
Of the pentecost,
The testimony in tongues, the single–
Minded speech of what will not cohere.

Here is the tongue of the notebook, like blue coal
Rattling in a half-empty scuttle,
And the broken E-string of my older son’s violin
Like him, a tongue of barely contained fire.
And the bank statements, impolitic, reductive,
The photo album, with its babel of allegiances,
The address book’s aphasiac stutter.

And outside the window, what was there to trust?

If I bowed my head slightly, who can blame me,
Who could not translate any of this
Into any language but belief’s.

-Jordan Smith, 1997

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

-W. B. Yeats, 1919

Meditation at Five Islands

There is no help for it after all,
nothing to keep one’s unlived lives
from dragging their heavy chains
along the bottom of the sea,
full fathom five and so forth.
The heart wants what it wants,
which is everything. The brine
air and the hundred-year firs
and the secret music cupped
in the polished nothing of a shell.
There is no way to feel in the hand
the solid mass of the life one has
lived, to know what it is. There is
only the walk down to the shore
and the stones held in the palm,
and only the sea to look to, as far
as one can, which is only so far.

-Dave Lucas, 2012

Empire of Dreams

On the first page of my dreambook
It's always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The store-fronts gutted.

I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn't be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.

-Charles Simic, 1980

In Which the Earth Splits Under Our Feet

All day the city readied for the snowstorm;
plows lined the corners of the parks, salt was thrown.
They cancelled the postal service, closed the schools—
kitchens stocked in milk and batteries,

the city was a closed organism, shut down,
and we would be caught in its damages.
All winter I've taught myself languages and music,
studied opposite words in opposite languages

collected arias in snow globes. This city is about
nothing at all—not the tall buildings or soaked corners.
Along the ocean, even the boardwalk understood the brief
credos, how one ruin should not hold all the failed

synchronisms. Across the street he sat at the table
again, head in hands—not that I would ever know him.
Across the country, he rented a car and drove himself
and gun into the woods—not that I would ever know him.

How long could we remain deliberate rib cages,
inconsolable at the bitten world that keeps us.
At this time, the most unrecognizable shadow has become
my own. I sat at bars. We sat at bars. We followed the weather.

We took light breaths with hope that the totality of winter
we carried inside would fade quickly outside.
I've looked for the right words to say the right things
to the landscape of split ranches and swing sets, two cars

buried in snow. A simple apology wasn't enough.
And then the cities we thought we would own,
to speak of their winters is to speak of the glove
that is meant to go missing, thrown salt.

Suitcases to the door, gun to teeth—
as a letter from one who loves the other—
what do we care for, facing fracture
the very bone-scrap leverage of the earth undone.

-Florencia Varela, 2011

The Sun

Look: the sun has spread its wings
over the earth to dispel darkness.

Like a great tree, with its roots in heaven
and its branches reaching down to earth.

-Judah Al-Harizi

West of Your City

West of your city into the fern
sympathy, sympathy rolls the train
all through the night on a lateral line
where the shape of game fish tapers down
from a reach where cougar paws touch water.

Corn that the starving Indians held
all through moons of cold for seed
and then they lost in stony ground
the gods told them to plant it in--
west of your city that corn still lies.

Cocked in that land tactile as leaves
wild things wait crouched in those valleys
west of your city outside your lives
in the ultimate wind, the whole land's waves.
Come west and see; touch these leaves.

-William E. Stafford, 1960

Bird-Understander

Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport
so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird
trapped in the terminal----all the people
ignoring it----because they do not know
what do with it----except to leave it alone
until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside
and set it free or----(failing that)
call a bird-understander
to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird----and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander
better than I could ever be
who make so many noises
and call them song

These are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurt

you have offered them
to me----I am only
giving them back

if only I could show you
how very useless
they are not

-Craig Arnold, 2009

I'm reading Moby-Dick. The last time I read it I was about ten and tackled the book because (a) it was big, and (b) my dad said he'd pay me twenty bucks (which he did). At the time, twenty bucks had seemed like it would buy very nearly anything a person could want--now I can only think of all the things twenty bucks wouldn't buy me: groceries for a week, a tank of gas, a visit to the doctor. Those are also things that, at ten, I would have had little interest in purchasing.

Moby-Dick, though. I'm not far in. I'm reading it slowly, which I suspect is the only way to read it. I remember very little of it (Queequeg is the sum total of what I remembered that isn't included in the category of 'general knowledge about Moby-Dick most people have').

I'm surprised by how much I like it. Everyone knows "Call me Ishmael" (don't they?) but I like what follows:

"Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand on me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

No wonder I don't remember Moby-Dick. I didn't get half of it. It reminds me of that Conan bit where he writes blues with children, and it makes me wonder about the books we relate to and the ones we don't, because I think the ones we relate to are the ones we remember. Oh, to be sure, I've never set foot on a whaler (unless you count Boston Whalers). I'm not even a person prone to strong bouts of depression. But I know a thing or two about moving around, and I've had a few drizzly Novembers of the soul. At ten? Well. I wanted twenty bucks to buy candy and stuffed animals. So, you know where this is going. Books don't change, but we do.

Sitting in a Small Screen-House on a Summer Morning

Ten more miles, it is South Dakota,
Somehow, the roads there turn blue,
When no one walks down them.
One more night of walking, and I could have become
A horse, a new horse, dancing
Down a road, alone.

I have got this far. It is almost noon. But never mind time:
That is all over.
It is still Minnesota.
Among a few dead cornstalks, the starving shadow
Of a crow leaps to his death.
At least, it is green here,
Although between my body and the elder trees
A savage hornet strains at the wire screen.
He can't get in yet.

It is so still now, I hear the horse
Clear his nostrils.
He has crept out of the green places behind me.
Patient and affectionate, he reads over my shoulder
These words I have written.
He has lived a long time, and he loves to pretend
No one can see him.

Last night I paused at the edge of darkness,
And paused, covered with green dew, alone
With the alone.
I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow
To the shadow of a horse.

-James Wright, 1962

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care
--A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
------------------In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
--Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
------------------In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
--Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
------------------Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
--Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
------------------With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
--Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
------------------Tell where I lie.

-Alexander Pope, 1700

Ode XIV to Solitude

Thou, that at deep dead of night
Walk'st forth beneath the pale moon's light,
In robe of flowing black array'd,
While cypress-leaves thy brows o'ershade;
List'ning to the crowing cock,
And the distant-sounding clock;
Or sitting in thy cavern low,
Do'st hear the bleak winds loudly blow,
Or the hoarse death-boding owl,
Or village maistiff's wakeful howl,
While through thy melancholy room
A dim lamp casts an awful gloom;
Thou, that on the meadow green,
Or daisy'd upland art not seen,
But wand'ring by the dusky nooks,
And the pensive-falling brooks,
Or near some rugged, herbless rock,
Where no shepherd keeps his flock!
Musing maid, to thee I come,
Hating the tradeful city's hum;
O let me calmly dwell with thee,
From noisy mirth and bus'ness free,
With meditation seek the skies,
This folly-fetter'd world despise!

-Joseph Warton, 1746

Quink

1

Sick of ink (a professional worder)
I went into the biosphere
With two botanizers, a birder,
And a Leave-No-Trace-Trained mountaineer.

We witnessed the sacred in several classes.
They showed me how elevations flatten
On a topo map. Through fine field glasses
We confirmed a quantity of Latin.


2

Idle by nature, sick of talk,
I went into the somewhat wild
With an undifferentiated dog,
An apple, a gum wrapper, and a six year old.

The crags scratched our eyeballs. A brace of Quink
Came burtling out of their whiskets. Old Breather
Whulphed. It wasn't what you think,
Exactly. I guess you had to be there.

-Richard Kenney, 2012

I have a box of suspiciously old Fujifilm (BONUS ROLL, 4+1 pack, with a 'process before' date of November 2008 and a coupon inside the box that expired in March 2007) that I've been running through my FM3A lately. I posted a couple of pictures a couple of weeks ago (and added some to the most recent poemday), and here are some more.

I'm not really one to make bold statements about film v. digital v. anything else, and I've certainly been shooting a lot of digital lately, so I'll just say that the quality of light in these puts the photo in photography. I'll stop before this dissolves into something I really don't need to write right now. Someone else has done it already, I'm pretty sure.

[We are the knife people...]

We are the knife people, iron men, coat people
---and he-lands-sailing.
Souse eaters, house makers, husbands
---of kine and goat and swine, farm builders
---and keepers of kettle and scummer, word
---scratchers, corn stealers and bad sleepers.

As if towns could build themselves.
As if stumps jumped from the ground or
---flesh of beasts fell into trenchers.
As if paradise prevailed on earth.
To come to rich moulds and lush plantings,
---long-necked trees and tongues of land,

to redd the wild for the unborn.
---To reck not the peril.
Suffering snakes that may fly, wolves
---that may ravish. Kingdom
---of sachem and sagamore.
Kingdom of corn and thorny promise.

To satisfy our appetite of spirit,
---our thirst of property.
To seek not the opera of war but
---belittled by the possibilities
to stand silenced by the task before us—

these be my sudden and undigested thoughts.

-John Spaulding, 1989

Lake Echo, Dear

Is the woman in the pool of light
really reading or just staring
at what is written

Is the man walking in the soft rain
naked or is it the rain
that makes his shirt transparent

The boy in the iron cot
is he asleep or still
fingering the springs underneath

Did you honestly believe
three lives could be complete

The bottle of green liquid
on the sill is it real

The bottle on the peeling sill
is it filled with green

Or is the liquid an illusion
of fullness

How summer’s children turn
into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer
nights bid us to get down with each other
on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful
whether or not
it will change the world one drop

-C. D. Wright, 2002

where you are planted

he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees
as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees.

fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst
open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees.

one hundred degrees in the shade : we settle into still pools of humidity, moss-
dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees.

the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we
splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees.

frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly
plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees.

i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i :
it’s part of what makes me evie : i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

-Evie Shockley, 2011

Black Earth

Openly, yes,
---------With the naturalness
---------Of the hippopotamus or the alligator
When it climbs out on the bank to experience the

Sun, I do these
Things which I do, which please
---------No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
---------Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

In view was a
Renaissance; shall I say
---------The contrary? The sediment of the river which
---------Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used

To it, it may
Remain there; do away
---------With it and I am myself done away with, for the
---------Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was

There to begin
With. This elephant skin
---------Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of
---------The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light

Can filter—cut
Into checkers by rut
---------Upon rut of unpreventable experience—
---------It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the

Hairy toed. Black
But beautiful, my back
---------Is full of the history of power. Of power? What
---------Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never

Be cut into
By a wooden spear; through-
---------Out childhood to the present time, the unity of
---------Life and death has been expressed by the circumference

Described by my
Trunk; nevertheless, I
---------Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after
---------All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it

Has its centre
Well nurtured—we know
---------Where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where ?
---------My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of

The wind. I see
And I hear, unlike the
---------Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made
---------To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear,

That tree trunk without
Roots, accustomed to shout
---------Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact
---------By who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that

Spiritual
Brother to the coral
---------Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light
---------Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to

The I of each,
A kind of fretful speech
---------Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?
---------Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that

Phenomenon
The above formation,
---------Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely—
---------That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first

Time, a substance
Needful as an instance
---------Of the indestructibility of matter; it
---------Has looked at the electricity and at the earth-

Quake and is still
Here; the name means thick. Will
---------Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no
---------Beautiful element of unreason under it?

-Marianne Moore, 1918

For me, this post is a mile marker, a little green rectangle along the highway that tells you you're halfway between someplace and someplace else. I've seen it on the horizon for a little bit; you could say I've been waiting. It's kind of a silly thing, but this is the post that brings the place: sk tag up to 83, which means it pulls ahead of the place: ma one. There's no clean correlation between the number of posts and the time I've been in a place, but here's the truth: Saskatoon is the place I've lived the longest since I graduated college two years ago. In less than a month, it'll be a year since my car and I crossed through Portal (North Dakota) into North Portal (Saskatchewan), a year since I moved into my shoebox of an apartment. I slept on the floor that first night and ate the trail mix leftover from my drive. I had no Canadian money (let it never be said that I know what I'm doing. I was miles past North Portal when I realized I'd forgotten to change any cash.).

17 September 1914

The astonishing reality of things
Is my discovery every day
Each thing is what it is,
And it's hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me,
And how much this suffices me.

All it takes to be complete is to exist.

I've written quite a few poems,
I'll no doubt write many more,
And this is what every poem of mine says,
And all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is a different way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at stone.
I don't start thinking about whether it exists.
I don't get sidetracked, calling it my sister.
I like it for being a stone,
I like it because it feels nothing,
I like it because it's not related to me in any way.

At other times I hear the wind blow,
And I feel that it is worth being born just to hear the wind blow.

I don't know what people will think when they read this,
But I feel it must be right because I think it without any effort
Or any idea of what people who hear me will think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it the way my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet,
And it surprised me, for I didn't think
I could be called anything.
I'm not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, the value isn't mine
It belongs to my poems.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

-Fernando Pessoa, 1914

August

This world so
golden so un-
reachable this
August morning
with its hills
its tawny stub-
ble fields its
full-crowned
trees its sin-
gle scarlet
branches arch-
ing overhead
as desperate
music pours
from the
speakers is
reason enough
to live almost
although it's
hard acknowl-
edging that this
is what it
gives us: sim-
ple being
depthless mir-
rored imma-
nence daylong
and here for
the taking.

I want the
world to an-
swer back the
way the song
wants—shared
joy and shared
grief shared
adoration
spilling into
the unrepen-
tant void. And
today it al-
most does: sun-
struck seren-
ity and self-
content im-
mense impervi-
ous beauty
distant pres-
ent godly evi-
dence—as in
the near far
hills the
first most
gaudy leaves
the rough down
gold or russet
no hint of
gray yet on
your untouch-
able cheek.

-Jonathan Galassi, 2012

Same scene, different season.

Cherries

In the minute it took
to fetch the blue bowl

from the kitchen
to pick the just-ripe

cherries, the blackbirds
had come. They picked

the branches clean, ascending
into their own blue bowl.

Lacking wings, I
look for meaning.

We were all hungry.
We were all fed.

-Andrea Cohen, 2012

My feelings about the prairies are mixed and I think well documented, but maybe not documented well here. The prairie, for me, is a foreign landscape--alien to the places where I grew up, where I learned what a landscape was. Everything's splayed out on the horizon. But lately I've been trying to get myself and my bike out to the Saskatoon city limits periodically. Once you break out of the suburbs you can trace big, square routes on the Range Roads, which are all gravel and nearly void of cars; my company is red-winged blackbirds, hawks, the occasional coot.

Today I got to a corner of dead ends where I didn't want to go further east but I couldn't go north or west, so I hauled my bike onto a tractor path that ran west along the power lines in hopes of hitting another road. Out in the pastures--out on the range, I guess--the world splits open and the prairies make sense. Their wildness is in their space, in the very openness of them, the fact that I can get on my bike in the center of Saskatoon, ride for thirty or forty minutes, and be left alone with the sky and the grass, the wind and the low hills. There's not another town for miles. There are just homesteads and range and perfectly straight dirt roads. I could lie down in an aspen grove while the world collapsed and rebuilt itself around me and never be the wiser.

There's a verse of 'Home on the Range' I didn't learn until recently: "How often at night when the heavens are bright with the light of the glittering stars / I stood there amazed and I asked as I gazed, does their glory exceed that of ours." The prairie abounds with reminders of your size, your smallness in a wide world. There are no small spaces, only vast expanses, and you can always, always see the sky.