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