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

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.

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

Tenebrae

Near are we, Lord,
near and graspable.

Grasped already, Lord,
clawed into each other, as if
each of our bodies were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Wind-skewed we went there,
went there, to bend
over pit and crate.

Went to the water-trough, Lord.

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It shined.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord,
Eyes and mouth stand so open and void, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.

-Paul Celan

I Taught Myself To Live Simply

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

-Anna Akhmatova

I've been seeing--and hearing--sandhill cranes flying overhead, migrating north. It's spring!

Another Spring

White birds over the grey river.
Scarlet flowers on the green hills.
I watch the spring go by and wonder
If I shall ever return home.

-Tu Fu

The Hoe

In March the earth breaks open, stirs
from its suspension: Water
puddles and floods
our road. You take your hoe
when we go walking, and you fold
soaked earth into soft pleats,
to let the water flow. You free
the orphaned pools to travel and rejoin
their brooks and streams,
and the braided water leaps
between new wet walls, and falls
over the edges of the road
and into the woods.
With your hoe you scoop
sodden leaves into woven walls, so
these floodgates open, this drawbridge unlocks,
these little excesses of ice and rain and snow
run off, without turning back.
I stay, and watch you clear our way,
parting mud with sure true strokes,
leading water where it wants to go.

-Alice B. Fogel, 1990

Light at the end of the tunnel--it's spring break!

Everyday History

To rise
and make fire in the stove,
in the brain after the reeling of the smoke,
in the ducts of the bones cold from sleeplessness,
and to seek the way to the hand,
from the hand to the drinking glass,
the remnants of yesterday's ashes in the hollow of the face,
perhaps a bird-blown windstorm will revive them yet,
and to wander
from one body to another,
and like nomadic kinds: to seek the everyday motherland,
and, having found it
or not,
to spend the night in a single smile's tent,
and to walk in the Creation like a stranger,
to breathe in the dawn
poison of the trees,
the iron dust of the towns,
to go to all the wars,
to wear the lilac leaves around the neck
like a dogtag
and understanding everything
and understanding nothing, to part with what I love
and rage for what I loved,
brazenly, like my own life's
hired man.

-Sandor Csoori, 1992