To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

-W. S. Merwin, 2005

Happy Christmas.

[little tree]

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see-------i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid

look-------the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel"

-E. E. Cummings

Meet Jayber.

Five Moose Night

Wonderful, really, the way the full moon
casts an enormous shadow of a seemingly tiny
but in truth enormous moose across the meadow grasses
stroked by wind. Happy, too, the way the wind
in my face does not blow my scent to the moose.
The wonderful moose and the wonderful moose shadow,
the very possibilities of which I have never imagined
but the reasons nevertheless I walk in the woods at night.

His shadow dewlap's a yard long, his antlers vast
spatulate hands holding up the moonlight
and the brightest few barely visible stars.
Wonderful, the abundant chartreuse wolf lichens silvered,
the meadow grasses dimly flashing, the moss-filled
not uncomfortable depression of stone I have seated myself in.
Intermittently dark, the shadows under the trees,
into which the tiny moose, at last, herds the enormous shadow one.

Lonesome, the thirty more minutes I wait, the wind
wandering also away, and half-blind, my walking
into the woods myself, watchful, slow, straining for silence.
Wonderful, the silence and the shadows of the trees,
and wonderful, the light from the kitchen window,
a golden parallelogram illuminating both the bird bath
and the great bull moose lapping with its shadows,
one cast to the left by window light, one to the right by the moon.

-Robert Wrigley, 2014

Porch Pew in Summer

-------for Brian and Wilbur Frink

Never a prayer for some place more than this,
wild turkeys in the field where old years blaze
each December into new, where grandkids
roam the drive now, in charge of cat, daisy,

spontaneous song. Any ten disciples
might take their rest on this long crafted oak
left to weather. Wine all around then, the spell
of day sinking in a gospel of talk.

And on quiet nights, painting or writing done,
the garden weeded, house projects holding
for the time being, two people might lean
to one another on the pew, holding

hands in the spreading dark, these few candles
lighting up the sanctuary, the world.

-Richard Robbins, 2014

Harlan County

Stepping over the stones of my mother,
chicken bones, straw,

the cellar in which the man was found,
that man my grandfather

the day the sharecroppers left town,
their son shot dead —

the thing whiskey’ll do to a man.

The woman who waited under the house at night,
counting ghosts and bobcats through lattice of leaves,

walking bare-boned lanes,
toes buried beneath blackened leaves —

no cause for worry
if you’ve walked every acre, planted every row.

Nothing can get you if you pay it no mind.

I tell you these things
so you’ll not mistake my actions for fear,

not think I do not know what makes a life,
what makes people do the things they do.

I know my fears — I’ve named them,
counted them out one by one

like tarot cards, voodoo dolls:

birth,
death,
poverty,
obscurity,
that you will leave me,
or I will leave you.

-Kate Buckley, 2008

The Distance

Prayer, as in:
my silence approaches
God's silence.
The distance to be covered
is so immense
that there is time
to live my life
peacefully.

Psalm

I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn
on your holy day. The harbor is before me,
Governor's Island, the Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head
what Rabbi Nachman said about the world
being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
ask you to bless them and before you
close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

-Harvey Shapiro

A Certain Weariness

I don't want to be tired alone,
I want you to grow tired along with me.

How can we not be weary
of the kind of fine ash
which falls on cities in autumn,
something which doesn't quite burn,
which collects in jackets
and little by little settles,
discoloring the heart.

I'm tired of the harsh sea
and the mysterious earth.
I'm tired of chickens--
we never know what they think,
and they look at us with dry eyes
as though we were unimportant.

Let us for once--I invite you--
be tired of so many things,
of awful apertifs,
of a good education.

Tired of not going to France,
tired of at least
one or two days in the week
which have always the same names
like dishes on the table,
and of getting up--what for?--
and going to be without glory.

Let us finally tell the truth:
we never thought much of
these days that are like
houseflies or camels.

I have seen some monuments
raised to titans
to donkeys of industry.
They're there, motionless,
with their swords in their hands
on their gloomy horses.
I'm tired of statues.
Enough of all that stone.

If we go on filling up
the world with still things
how can the living live?

I am tired of remembering.

I want men, when they're born,
to breathe in naked flowers,
fresh soil, pure fire
not just what everyone breathes.
Leave the newborn in peace!

Leave room for them to live!
Don't think for them,
don't read them the same book;
let them discover the dawn
and name their own kisses.

I want you to be weary with me
of all that is already well done,
of all that ages us.
of all that lies in wait
to wear out other people.

Let us be weary of what kills
and of what doesn't want to die.

-Pablo Neruda

East Tennessee

Fields humped up
bordered with cedars.
Here and there a pale
flash of Cumberland
limestone like an ancient
creature rolling up.
Breaching. Never
far under the grass.

Few folk left now
with the bone so close
in their faces. Hard
to scrape a living
behind a mule. Hard
even to bury the dead.
People who if they
didn’t shoot fed you
and passed the jug.

Headlights hauling
the car from hollow
to hollow, turning
the dial—the little
stations still remember
and you can sing
along. Sometimes
whatever the fiddle
saws falls apart
and leaves a voice—

a wail like bare wire
lifting up and away
from the cedars along
the fencerows like dark
torches against a sky
the sun’s forsaken
into which from somewhere
stars are wandering.

-Edward Wilson

Four Very Fat Legs

I am jolly as if I were
very fat.
As if I had four
very fat legs. As if I jumped very high
on my four very fat legs.
As if I barked
cheerfully and very loudly
with those four very fat legs.
That’s how jolly I am today.

-Anna Swir

Route 40—Ohio, U.S.A.

It is dark now.
Nets of snow
tumble about us.
We slide like fish,
the road dissolving.
And in the fields
the farmlights chant:
You have no land—
You have no land.

-Milton Kessler, 1963

Reading Milosz

I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
but also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone
transforms us for a moment,
we believe—truly—
that every day is sacred,

that poetry—how to put it? —
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city's ordinary din resumes—
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

-Adam Zagajewski, 2008

The Idea
------------------------------------------------for Nolan Miller

For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold
That ice on the valley's lakes cracked and rolled,
And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,
And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,
Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white
Among false curves and hidden erasures;
And never once did we feel we were close
Until the night wind said, "Why do this,
Especially now? Go back to the place you belong";
And there appeared, with its windows glowing, small,
In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;
And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,
And would have gone forward and opened the door,
And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,
But that it was ours by not being ours,
And should remain empty. That was the idea.

-Mark Strand

a poem written by a bear

let me go eat some salmon

why are there coke cans in the river

what if i wore a bullet proof vest during hunting season

i’m a bear; i walk in the forest and look at the river and the river is cold

i saw campers today and they ran away and i was alone and i destroyed their tent

let me go scratch my paw on a tree

let me go eat a salmon

last night i cried onto my salmon

the salmon was sad but it still wanted to live

it wanted to swim and be sad and i ate it under moonlight

i saw a moose scream the other day

it screamed quietly under a tree

i felt embarrassed and sad and i thought, ‘oh, no; oh god, oh my god’

sometimes i climb a tree and sit there and sing very quietly

sometimes i want to go to a shopping mall and chase the humans and claw them

i’ll ride the moose into the shopping mall and ram the humans

the moose and i will ride the escalator and i will hug the moose and the moose and i will cry

i will eat the moose

i don’t care

i will scream and throw the bubblegum machine from the second floor to the first floor

i felt compassion for the salmon and now i don’t care anymore

i’ll walk into a parking lot and chase a large human and hug the human and cry

i’ll walk into a house at night and push the humans off the bed

i’ll stare at the bed and i’ll feel fake

-Tao Lin, 2006

A World Where News Travelled Slowly

It could take from Monday to Thursday
and three horses. The ink was unstable,
the characters cramped, the paper tore where it creased.
Stained with the leather and sweat of its journey,
the envelope absorbed each climatic shift,
as well as the salt and grease of the rider
who handed it over with a four-day chance
that by now things were different and while the head
had to listen, the heart could wait.

Semaphore was invented at a time of revolution;
the judgement of swing in a vertical arm.
News travelled letter by letter, along a chain of towers,
each built within telescopic distance of the next.
The clattering mechanics of the six-shutter telegraph
still took three men with all their variables
added to those of light and weather,
to read, record and pass the message on.

Now words are faster, smaller, harder
... we’re almost talking in one another’s arms.
Coded and squeezed, what chance has my voice
to reach your voice unaltered and to leave no trace?
Nets tighten across the sky and the seabed.
When London made contact with New York,
there were such fireworks, City Hall caught light.
It could have burned to the ground.

-Lavinia Greenlaw, 1998

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

-James Wright, 1990

FreshGrass at Mass MoCA this weekend, and there were many good performances, but the two standouts were Valerie June and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. If you ever get the chance to see either live, take it.

And...that's about all I've got to say for myself, this time.

For Poets

Stay beautiful
but don't stay down underground too long
Dont turn into a mole
or a worm
or a root
or a stone

Come on out into the sunlight
Breathe in trees
Knock out mountains
Commune with snakes
& be the very hero of birds

Don't forget to poke your head up
& blink
Think
Walk all around
Swim upstream

Dont forget to fly

-Al Young

A Passing

Coyotes passed through the field at the back
of the house last night–coyotes, from midnight
till dawn, hunting, foraging, a mad scavenging,
scaring up pocket gophers, white-breasted mice,
jacktails, skinks, the least shrew, taking
a bite at a time.

They were a band, screeching, yodeling,
a multi-toned pack. Such yipping and yapping
and jaw clapping, yelping and painful howling,
they had to be skinny, worn, used-up,
a tribe of bedraggled uncles and cousins
on the skids, torn, patched, frenzied
mothers, daughters, furtive pups
and, slinking on the edges, an outcast
coydog or two.

From the way they sounded they must have smelled
like rotted toadstool mash and cow blood
curdled together.

All through the night they ranged and howled,
haranguing, scattering through the bindweed and wild
madder, drawing together again, following
old trails over hillocks, leaving their scat
at the junctions, lifting their legs on split
rocks and switch grass. Through rough-stemmed
and panicled flowers, they nipped
and nosed, their ragged tails dragging
in the camphor weed and nettle dust.

They passed through, all of them, like threads
across a frame, piercing and pulling, twining
and woofing, the warp and the weft. Off-key,
suffering, a racket of adominables
with few prospects, they made it–entering
on one side, departing on the other.
They passed clear through and they vanished
with the morning, alive.

-Pattiann Rogers, 1990

Letter from Maine

Yes, I am home again, and alone.
Today wrote letters, then took my dog
Out through the sad November woods.
The leaves have fallen while I was away,
The ground is golden, while above
The maples are stripped of all color.
The ornamental cherries, red when I left,
Have paled now to translucent yellow.

Yes, I am home again but home has changed.
And I within this cultivated space
That I have made my own, feel at a loss,
Disoriented. All the safe doors
Have come unlocked and too much light
Has flooded every room. Where can I go?
Not toward you three thousand miles away
Lost in your own rich life, given me
For an hour.
-----------Read between the lines.
Then meet me in the silence if you can,
The long silence of winter when I shall
Make poems out of nothing, out of loss,
And at times hear your healing laughter.

-May Sarton, 1983

Trying to write something to go with these photos, and I'm coming up a bit dry. There's no reason for that, though--there's so much I could say. Maybe I feel like I've said it already. Another backpacking trip; another stretch of mountain scenery, another story that's better experienced than told. Still, it was a good experience: bright mornings and cool evenings, occasionally brutal scrambles up rocky trails, sunrise and sunset from mountain ridges.
This time I was in Pemigewasset Wilderness in White Mountain National Forest, which I guess gives me the opportunity to reflect on our national wildernesses, the definition of wilderness, things like that. The Wilderness Act turns fifty this year. Pemigewasset itself was designated in 1984, so its federal designation is only thirty years old--though of course, the land is much older than that, which is perhaps what makes the designation important: it's a decision of leave this be. I passed a rusted out stove from a logging camp back in the woods, a mark of history and human presence--though of course the trails I was walking were also a mark of human presence. But for the most part the forest was quiet, and when I set up camp for the night the silence was a weighted reminder of my distance from roads and people. Whatever has happened, the forest rebounded, perhaps different but still real and vital. 
p.s. For another angle on national wildernesses, head on over to High Country News.

Autumn Aspens: Cumbres Pass

Though stands low on the mountain
remain green as sliced limes,
higher up, midsummer's far gone

in flaming amazement. When wind
riffling a ridgeline grove
fans our caveman sense of fire

as a wonder lovely to own,
over Cumbres Pass gold leaves
spill and spin like doubloons

till flame and coin seem one,
close as we'll come to money
on trees loved for their moment

almost better than money. Just when
have we spent such afternoons?
Less than once in a hundred?

That many? Then stop the car
again. At happiness to burn. Bright
as the life we're still looking for.

-Reg Saner, 1997

I brought in several rolls of film to be developed a couple weeks ago, and got back an eclectic set of images--some from Norway, some from home, some from Saskatchewan, and a handful that appeared to have been taken years ago, by my brother, in New Hampshire and Wisconsin and maybe Vermont. And it's fun, to take short and long trips backwards in time to these other places. But as I keep reminding myself, I can only be in one place at a time.
It doesn't always feel that way, though. I took a quick trip up the mountain (that's Mount Greylock) yesterday and I found myself walking, pack on my shoulders, through Massachusetts and Norway at once: lush green woods on either side, heavy with rain and mist, and yet in my mind's eye I could see the sparser mountains of Norway. I didn't want to be back there (not yet, anyway)--I've enjoyed being home and reacquainting myself with New England's woods. But for a few moments Norway was as vivid to me as the real landscape around me, and I suppose it was a reminder of something I wrote in this blog a few weeks ago: I carry these places in the strange pockets of my mind and they will emerge like negatives from forgotten rolls of film; almost as real as life, even if they aren't.

What's a picture for? Or a memory? I'm asking, because I've got a hoard of both.

St. Elizabeth

I run high in my body
on the road toward sea.

I fall in love. The things
the wind is telling me.

The yellow sky quiet
in her quiet dress.

Old birds sending news
from the reddish hills.

& the one hawk flying
in the distance overhead.

That hawk is what
the wind says. In love

with the heaving
of my peacock chest,

with my lungs, two wings,
such flying things,

but mine for now, just for now
as I open my stride

above the good, dirt road,
fall in love with the mustard

& coriander dust,
& the far, far mountain

beveled by light, by rain,
the easy eye of the sun, now,

smoke floating across the hillside
like a face I knew once very well.

Very well, I fall in love
with the flowers & the wash

hung like prayer flags, see,
in red Juanita's yard. In love

with the earth the color of earth. In
love with the goats, their bellies & hooves,

& the goat mouths bleating
as they greet me on the road.

I fall in love. How they wear
their strange & double-eyes.

How they do not blink
or laugh at me

or say a thing I understand
when I ask them in my English,

because they circle around my feet,
as if they always knew me,

Were you my children once?
Did I know your names?

Oh, little magics?
Little children?

-Aracelis Girmay, 2011

Mixed Media

The stars grow lemon
in the field, spread
like tea leaves in
a cup; red-wing
blackbirds fold themselves
into the fence,
corn dreamers.

The sky undulating
with clouds returns
gold-throated arpeggios
to the one walking
at sunrise, sunfall.

Light as the air
I sit on my
cottage steps;
a tom cat come
home to die for
the day.

-Duane Niatum, 1991

A Blessing in the Dust

You thought the blessing
would come
in the staying.
In casting your lot
with this place,
these people.
In learning the art
of remaining,
of abiding.
And now you stand
on the threshold
again.
The home you had
hoped for,
had ached for,
is behind you—
not yours, after all.
The clarity comes
as small comfort,
perhaps,
but it comes:
illumination enough
for the next step.
As you go,
may you feel
the full weight
of your gifts
gathered up
in your two hands,
the complete measure
of their grace
in your heart that knows
there is a place
for them,
for the treasure
that you bear.
I promise you
there is a blessing
in the leaving,
in the dust shed
from your shoes
as you walk toward home—
not the one you left
but the one that waits ahead,
the one that already
reaches out for you
in welcome, in gladness
for the gifts
that none but you
could bring.

-Jan Richardson

Thanks to Katerina for this one.

Well. I'm leaving Norway. And I feel a little bit of everything: wild hope for whatever comes next, eager anticipation for home, muddled regret at leaving this place where I've been for the past year and a half. Tromsø has been good to me. As I leave I hold that goodness in my head, coupled with another fact: it's time to go.

There's a quote from 'Walden' (if I haven't quoted 'Walden' enough in this blog): "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." Right now Norway feels like a life I have lived out, and although there is more to this country--I haven't nearly plumbed its depths--it doesn't feel like there's more here for me right now. That's partly because what's here for me is the university, and I feel more than ready to put the strange cloister of universities behind me. And that's partly because--well. Sometimes the time comes to make a decision, and right now my decision is America and uncertainty, because I want to see what I find there. Between Norway and Canada, I've been gone for some time. 

I might have more to say, about what this place has given me, about what this place is. About the things I'm leaving and the things I'll miss. At the moment, though, it's hard to see much beyond the transition. I wonder, vaguely, about reverse culture shock. I look forward to seeing family and old friends. But over my last few weeks I've stood in these mountains, or down by the sea, and felt something pure and clear that I can only call love for this place. And now I'm leaving it behind indefinitely for somewhere familiar that feels a little bit foreign, and although I'm looking forward I can't help but pause at the gate to look back. So I'll say it: Tromsø, I'll miss you. And whatever the future holds, I hope my experiences here can be a moveable feast; at the very least, I am certain I will carry them with me into the future, although I'm uncertain what guise they'll take. 

North

Look North more often.
Go against the wind,
you'll get ruddy cheeks.
Find the rough path. Keep to it.
It's shorter. North is best.

Winter's flaming sky -
summer night's sun miracle.
Go against the wind. Climb mountains.
Look north. More often.

This land is long.
Most is north.

Road's End

The roads have come to their end now,
they don't go any further, they turn here,
over on the earth there.
You can't go any further if you don't want
to go to the moon or the planets. Stop now
in time and turn to a wasp's nest or a cow track,
a volcano opening or a clatter of stones in the woods--
it's all the same. Something else.

They won't go any further as I've said
without changing, the engine to horseshoes,
the gear shift to a fir branch
--which you hold loose in your hand
--what the hell is this?

-Rolf Jacobsen

To the Harbormaster

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

-Frank O'Hara, 1957

A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,
I am Essex-born:
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,
the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In
Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the
light of flaring sundown, seven kings
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings
the place of law
where my birth and marriage are recorded
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white
statue forlorn in its garden)
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,
(forgotten? and further away
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once
but many times?).
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,
picking up fragments of New World slowly,
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map
made long before I was born shows ancient
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire
for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country
remembers the first river, the first
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,
that new smell, and remembers
the walls of the garden, the first light.

-Denise Levertov, 1958

I was back in Lista last week, visiting the small, quiet place where my maternal grandmother came from. I stayed in her childhood home, a staunch house made of listing boards which purportedly dates to 1816. I spent my days walking along the coast, riding the old 3-speed bike from the barn out on the thin roads that thread through pastures, swimming in the bracing water, eating long meals in the tiny yard while Norwegian conversations ebbed around me.

My relationship with my Norwegian relatives is haphazard at best, stymied by the fact that my Norwegian remains poor. Lista--or Borhaug, or Vågsvoll, if we want to pin the location precisely--is not my home, of course. I'm not from there. I remember sitting on the front steps of the old house last summer and wondering what it would be like if I were from that small place in the shadow of the Lista lighthouse; it would be different, surely, and I would be different. So, no, it's not where I'm from. But it's as close as I get in Norway, and even as I fall out of step with these Norwegian conversations, I'll occasionally skim from them a story about my grandparents, and inside the house their are photographs of my grandparents, my parents, myself. So if the house is not home, it is not unfamiliar, either. Lista is similar: it is, after all, a place I've been before--last summer, last spring, ten years ago, twenty-four years ago. I know the roads in a loose way, enough not to feel lost. And I have family here who will embrace me, even if I am definitively American and a little at odds; because there is no question about the fact that I am family. And maybe that's part of why Lista feels a little bit magic: I am not from Norway, but I'm tied to this particular part of Norway, to this place. The cords have been frayed by time and salt, but they're there, tenuous but real.

While we were sitting in the tiny yard that's wedged in between the house and the road, eating rice pudding and drinking coffee, one of my mother's cousins told me, first in Norwegian and then in English, that Tante Sine--my grandmother--used to say that it's the same sun, same moon, over Lista and the U.S.A. And I suppose she was right. But as I watched the full moon rounded itself out over Lista, I wasn't sure how much it mattered. I was happy to be where I was.

Sure On This Shining Night

Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.

-James Agee, 1934

Somnambulist Ballad

Green, how I need you now, green.
Green the breeze. The branches green.
The small boat far on the sea.
The pony on the high sierra.
With shadows on her waistband
She dreams on a veranda,
Green her skin and her hair green
With eyes of icy silver.
Green, how I need you now, green.
Under the gypsy moon,
She is observed by things there,
Things she cannot see.

Green, how I need you now, green.
Gigantic stars of hoarfrost
Come with the fish of shadows
That opens the high road of dawn.
The fig tree scrapes the breeze
With sandpaper of its branches.
The mountain, a filching cat,
Bristles its acrid spikes.
But who's coming? And where from?
She's dreaming on her veranda,
Green her skin and her hair green,
She dreams of the bitter sea.

Good friend, I want to barter
This horse of mine for your house,
My saddle for your mirror,
My dagger for your quilt.
Good friend, I have come bleeding
From the passes of Cabra.
"Had I the might, my boy,
We would strike up this bargain.
But I am no longer I
Nor is my house my own house."
Good friend, I want to die
Decently in my own bed--
If it might be, made of steel,
And the linens of fine holland.
Can't you see the wound I've taken
From my breastbone to my throat?
"On your white shirt you wear
Three hundred swarthy roses.
Your blood is oozing, pungent,
On all sides of your sash.
But I am no longer I
Nor is my house my own house."
Let me at least, then, climb
Up to the high verandas;
Let me climb, then, let me climb
Up to the green verandas;
Balustrades of the moon
Where the water's voice resounds.

Now the two friends are climbing
Up to the high verandas
Leaving a trail of blood,
Leaving a trail of tears.
Tiny lanterns of tin
Were trembling on the rooftops.
A thousand tambourines,
All crystal, lacerate the dawn.

Green, how I need you now, green.
Green the breeze. The branches green.
The two friends have gone up.
A long wind was leaving
A rare taste on the tongue
Of gall, mint and sweet basil.
Good friend, where is she, tell me
Where is your bitter daughter?
"She waited, how often, for you,
How often she would be waiting,
Fresh her face and her hair black,
Here on this green veranda."

Over the face of the cistern
There the gypsy girl wavered,
Green her skin and her hair green,
With eyes of icy silver.
An icicle of the moon
Suspended over the water.
The night turned intimate
As a little village plaza.
Drunken civil guards
Were pounding down the door.
Green, how I need you now, green.
Green the breeze. The branches green.
The small boat far on the sea.
The pony on the high sierra.

-Federico Garcí Lorca

Work

Some mornings, the clouds
settle rooftop low,
--------holding us in place
like a specimen slide.

I spend my days
wondering how a hammer
--------weighs the hand
that holds it,

or how the starlings apron
the stoplights
--------at Alcatraz
and Adeline.

A glassworker told me once
that she could tell
--------by the scars
who bandages their fingers

and who kisses closed
the wounds. I don't
--------know how
my father woke

hours before sunrise
each morning and worked
--------until long past sunset.
Sleep was a country

to retire to, an Ecuador.
I live where the light is
--------thin, and clothes us
like linen.

In the hills above town,
a black snake scrawls
--------across the path
like a signature.

I still have countries
left to discover, and ballets
--------of work
for my hands to learn.

-Ryan Teitman, 2014

Long Finger Poem

I'm working on my poems and working with
my fingers not my head. Because my fingers

are the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branch

I touch the evening's quiet breathing. Sounds
of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.

The tree points everywhere. The branches can't
reach to their roots though. Growing longer they

grow weaker also. Can't make use of water.
Rain falls. But I'm working with these farthest stretching

things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air.

-Jin Eun-Young, 2003

May

When I looked down from the bridge
Trout were flipping the sky
Into smithereens, the stones
of the wall warmed me.

Wading green stems, lugs of leaf
That untangle and bruise
(Their tiny gushers of juice)
My toecaps sparkle now

Over the soft fontanel
Of Ireland. I should wear
Hide shoes, the hair next my skin,
For walking this ground:

Wasn't there a spa-well,
Its coping grassy, pendent?
And then the spring issuing
Right across the tarmac.

I'm out to find the village,
Its low sills fragrant
With lady's-smock and celandine,
Marshlights in the summer dark.

-Seamus Heaney, 1972

I graduated a few days back, I guess. In Saskatoon, it was convocation, and my graduate degree was formally bestowed upon me, although I was not there to receive it. Thanks to the mail and the transitive properties of degrees, though, I'll still be getting that piece of paper eventually, and I have the dubious privilege of saying that I hold a master's. And now I have the similarly dubious privilege of saying "What next?"

I got an email from my department on the occasion of my graduation containing that old chestnut that's ostensibly from Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." I recently re-read 'Walden' and in their original place I can milk some meaning from those words, but denuded of context, as they so frequently are, those two sentences become the sort of meaningless platitude that's difficult to do much with. By contrast, here's the actual quote:

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

If, Thoreau wrote, and that makes such a difference. It's not a command or an imperative, just a possibility, an option. But it's a possibility with the radical potential to carry a person across borders into fresh country.

So I don't know what's next. I'm weighing possibilities, or perhaps more rightly, I'm weighing dreams: one against the other, this against that. Nothing is ever as simple as a platitude, and most people can't live in air castles. For now, though, I'm comfortable living in this liminal place while I sort myself out. It's not tenable indefinitely, but it'll do in the interim.

[Ocean which I pushed up]

Ocean which I pushed up
with my fingers so I could touch
the orange sand below

and white mountain
which is not white but for getting
caught in the cold

Stay here where it is warm
and where the sun shines, for later
celestial garlands of dead light
will draw you into the cold for sure

-Joshua Beckman, 2013