We have a wonderful woodstove here in our Oregon house that heats the whole upstairs, so I decided to get it going to take the chill off this morning. I opened the lid and began wadding sheets of newspaper and stuffing them inside. I was all business and just about had a heart attack when a small bird flew straight up out of the stove, whizzed past my head and landed across the room. I was immediately startled, completely awed and a little bit frightened by the sudden presence of this wild creature. I figured it must be a fledgling as it only flew in short spurts and not very high. It was covered with a dusting of ashes and although it wasn’t trembling or chirping I sensed the bird’s fragility as it sought to orient itself in this foreign environment of “inside.” Also present in this diminutive creature was the indomitable will to survive and to escape, as it headed straight for the clear glass of the windows, to the tall trees and patches of sky it saw there. Because the day before had been quite warm the stove had remained unlit, making me aware that it was very likely the bird had been in that soot-blackened stove for 24 hours or more with no means of escape.

To get some counsel on what to do with the bird I called my husband in L.A. He was a boy scout in his youth and an experienced woodsman. I rely on him heavily for his clear head and practical advice when it comes to navigating such situations. After giving him all the details together we concluded that to release the bird, instead of capture it and take it to a sanctuary, was the best course of action. It appeared healthy and, as it was capable of flying on its own, we felt it would be better served by being returned to its natural habitat. After taking a picture of the confused little guy as it crouched halfway under the sofa, I caught it and cupping it close to my chest, carried it to the window and let it go. It rocketed out of my hands and flew in a ragged pattern diagonally across the driveway, landing in the tall grass under a pine tree.

The sensation of that small, vibrating body nestled in my palms stayed with me throughout the day and into the night. The whole experience felt holy somehow, like the bird and I had acted as catalysts, each for the other, revealing both the tenuous nature of our existence and the unbridled wonder of it, in such a tender and forgiving way. I will never know if the bird survived, if its mother found it, as my husband suggested she might. I do know that the spirit of the bird and the memory of our brief encounter will live on as message and metaphor in the lore of my own mythology, to be savored and re-savored–a little bit of winged magic fallen from the sky one spring day.

Later that same day…

I finally got out for a walk in the woods across from our house, here at the foot of the mountains. It’s been ten days and for some reason or another I’ve been avoiding it. I practically had to push myself out the door, away from the couch and the TV and my desire for comfort. I followed the deer trails. I would start out on one and then wander off, only to find another going a completely different direction. I veered away from the roads and houses, the sound of people talking. There were the tiniest of wildflowers blooming in the dry soil. I fell in love with each violet, yellow, and rusty red blossom. There were twisted, old stumps laying on their sides, slowly sinking back into the earth. I skirted several red anthills, a hawk circled, a solitary deer bounded through the bitterbrush and sage. There was a heart shaped lava-rock that fit perfectly in my closed hand and two rusted cans that had been used for target practice. (These last three items I picked up and brought home for some reason I can’t explain.) As I stepped out from the woods and crossed the paved road, drawn to the meadow and the golden grasses shimmering in the fading light, I was so grateful for the wisdom of nature, how absolutely embracing she is, how she draws no line between the living and the dead, the budding and the decaying, how they mingle amongst each other as an enduring reminder to the short-sighted of what has always been true, of how we are simultaneously of this earth and not of it. I turned back to the asphalt road and back to my sweet house on the meadow, taking what I found, leaving a few footsteps in the dust.

A BIRD CAME DOWN THE WALK

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, –
The looked like frightened beads, I thought
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.

Emily Dickinson
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Barnes & Noble, Publisher

FULL MOON THAT STRIKES
THE EARTH COLD

or to be young geese again
on the night of their first
migration: two angled lines
joined only at the vertex.
A week ago the full moon

that strikes the earth cold
began a thin blue air
in the distance that parted
for the V of your leaving.

Karen McCosker
A Poem A Day
Steer Forth Press, Publisher 

I haven’t exactly gone underground, but I have been truckin’ a lot lately, thus the blog has not been attended to as regularly as I would like. On May 16^th I hopped in my ’93 Mercedes at 5:30 AM, swung by and picked up my friend Seva and off we went on a road trip—heading due north up the I-5. In no time (a little over six hours, actually) we cruised into San Francisco and being a little worn out from the early start we snacked and napped in our hotel room. I’ve always loved to visit San Francisco. The architecture and the vistas are incredible. It’s been years, probably ten or more, since I’ve been there and now that my son has taken up residence there, I imagine I’ll get there more often.

To put the rest of the trip into a mini-version here’s what happened: visited my son at the Presidio Native Plant Nursery where he is doing an internship for a year; had dinner (Thai food) with him and friends in the Haight-Ashbury district; the next morning ate breakfast at the Stanford Hotel on Nob Hill, lunch in Dunsmuir (just south of Mt. Shasta), where the sun was shining and the locals were quite colorful; decided to keep on driving to Sisters instead of stay the night in Dunsmuir; arrived at the house, after buying groceries, at about 6:30 pm; unpacked, ate some dinner and crashed in our respective beds.

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It was a gorgeous, clear day in San Francisco. The view from our hotel window.

The next morning the notorious SF fog was doing battle with the rising sun.

The Native Plant walk at the Presidio, all in bloom.

Inside the large shed where the employees, interns and volunteers work.

Mother and son hamming for the camera.

It’s been a busy week, with the focus on fixing up my husband’s office/art studio area downstairs. It needs everything: paint, carpets, shelving, desk, art table and lighting and chairs. After a few days of cruising Bend and Sisters going to second-hand stores, hardware stores and paint stores we rented a big-ole truck for a day on Tuesday to pick up the various pieces we had decided on, with the last stop being the carpet remnant, which turned out to be six feet too long (12 feet total), thus leaving it hanging out of the truck bed. To keep it from flying out of the truck as we drove the 20 miles from Bend to Sisters, Seva sat on the end of it to weigh it down and off we went down Hwy 20. I only wish I had picture of that!

Spring is making its way slowly but surely up here in the high country. The creek in the meadow is full, the grass is already a foot high and the birds are everywhere–robins, Steller’s jays, nuthatches and woodpeckers—making nests and chattering up a storm in the early morning hours. The weather is never predictable this time of year, with temps ranging from the 30’s to the 80’s and rain, sometimes even snow, that can come out of nowhere to send you scuttling indoors for a jacket or to start up a fire in the woodstove. In our yard is great rock garden that I just love because it is so ungroomed and random. The rocks are all native (the former owners took them from the property) and there are wildflowers of all sorts that poke out of the nooks and crannies. I may just go get a couple of those wildflower seed packets at the nursery in town and throw them out there helter-skelter to see what comes up.

This second week I’m here by myself, still working on the house projects, but now having more time to devote to some writing and reading. Speaking of which, I just finished Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I totally enjoyed. I’m also reading a book I found at the local bookstore called, Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher. This book I couldn’t pass up, for obvious reasons. I’m also a few pages into an oldie, but goodie, that I never read in my youth, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I’ve also watched four movies this week on DVD: Sweet Home Alabama (one of Seva’s favorites), The Barbarian Invasions (my second time for this touching film), Les Choristes and A Love to Hide (both of these are French movies and excellent). As for poetry, I am reading poems by Tomaz Salamun, a new poet to me, from his book, The Four Questions of Melancholy. Powerful stuff and a style that seems to be a direction my own work is heading in.

Well, I think that about does it for catching up. I leave you with a poem by Tomaz Salumun and some more photos of the wildflowers amongst the rocks (and a local woodpecker lookin’ for some morsels).

THE TREE OF LIFE

I was born in a wheat field snapping my fingers.
A white chalk ran across the green backboard.
Dew made me lie on the ground.
I played with pearls.

I leaned fields against my ear, and meadows.
The stars were crackling.
Under a bridge I carved an inscription: I don’t know how to read.
They rinsed the factories with salt water.

Cherries were my soldiers.
I was throwing gloves into the thorn bushes.
We ate fish with the golden break knife.
In the chandelier above the table not all the candles were burning.

Mother played the piano.
I climbed on father’s shoulders.
I stepped on white mushrooms, watching the clouds of dust,
Touching branches from the room’s window.

Tomaz Salamun
 

Lupine with a touch of dew. 

  Looked this little guy up (yes, it’s a male) in my bird book. He’s a White-headed Woodpecker.

It’s ten p.m. and I was just sitting on the side of the bed, in the dark, ready to crawl in and drift away and I started thinking about what it means to be a poet and that got me up off the mattress and to the keyboard. It’s been one of those month-long stretches of time when I have rarely been in the “poetry zone” and mostly on the go, taking care of business. It’s fine. There’s a big part of me that enjoys getting things done and flexing the left side of my brain as I get my new computer set up or train a new assistant in the chiropractic office or supervise workers installing new pipes in the shower and others trimming bushes in the backyard. 

I have grown a bit wiser over the last few years, at least enough to know that when there is such a spell of “doing” that seems to last forever, not to get too frustrated or upset or think that I’ll never write a line of decent (or any kind) of poetry again. It’s not how it has turned out in the past. I have always come back to write. What I know as true for me is that it is in the quiet, the silence, my creativity finds an opening to come forth. In the dark, or when I am alone, vulnerability shows up, a little fear. I walk nearer the edge of sociability and being a recluse. My senses awaken and deepen. I hear the spider move across the ceiling, feel the blood pulse in my veins and taste the chicken soup my mother fed me when I was seven, in bed with mumps.

Writing when there is noise, whether it is the television in the next room, cars and trucks on the street or my own head running down my to-do list a hundred times an hour, just doesn’t work. Sometimes I can do revisions on a poem or essay when there’s a lot going on around me and often lines or words or ideas I’d like to explore come floating along and I jot them down for future reference, but rarely, if ever, can I write anything worth its salt when I can’t lay down the stuff of the day and be prepared to weep at the unbelievable beauty and sadness of this human existence. I don’t expect to find much time in the next few days or possibly weeks to bask in quiet reverie, but I so cherish the opportunity to snatch an hour or two, like now, when the house sleeps and the only light is the glow of the computer monitor as the blank page slowly fills up with words.

As to my question about what it is to be a poet, I’m not sure if history is the best reference, if being a poet means you must withdraw from the world, to separate from it so that you can see it more clearly, or if it means that to write relevant and humanistic poetry you must participate with full vigor in all your life has to offer. My guess is that each poet has to define his or her own environment of involvement, how much to weave in and out of the inner and outer world and that they must do this based on what life has handed them and how they produce their best work. I’m still in the process of ferreting out the give and take of my own "poetry zone" and perhaps this, in the end, is what it is to be a poet—to be searching for a way to be of this world; to have a family, to love and hate, succeed and fail and through it all still be the one who speaks in tongues, the one who states emphatically that the emperor has no clothes, the one who dances on the slender edge of the night.

WANTS

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff –
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death –
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Phillip Larkin
Collected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Publisher

JET

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

Tony Hoagland
Donkey Gospel
Graywolf Press, Publisher
 

Here’s my thoughts from this week’s PE letter with accompanying poems. Sweet Dreams! 

I’ve been going through a period of enjoying good sleep. If you’ve ever been an insomniac (which I was earlier in life) or a restless/up-and-down type sleeper you know what torture it can be and how it starts to skew the daylight hours, making you grumpy and inattentive, with health issues starting to crop up in body, mind and spirit. You get the idea. Well, what a relief to have made it through the last couple of years where the hormones were jumping around like kangaroos on espresso, allowing for little or no chance for a peaceful and deep reverie at night. I would either be freezing cold and piling every blanket in the house on top of my shivering body or feeling like someone had dropped me in a vat of boiling water, like the proverbial lobster, flinging the just-moments-ago precious blankets off onto the floor, leaving not even a thin sheet to cover my steaming body.

It’s hard to say what changed the “climate” but these last couple of months I have rediscovered what it is to sleep through the night, with only an occasional trip to the bathroom or groggy awakening to check the clock and roll back over into dreamland. And, speaking of dreams, those too have been more fun and interesting, leaving less residue of angst and fear that I was going over the mental edge when I awoke, my eyes bolting open and calculating my best escape route from the creatures under the bed or rustling around out in the backyard. I’m not sure what affected the change—whether it was just the body running its course with the whole change-of-life thing or if all those vitamins, herbs, homeopathic remedies, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic and various healing modalities had finally reached their cumulative potency and kicked me through to a new zone – like restarting the computer when a program stalls and you’re not clear exactly why, but when you Ctr-Alt-Delete all is well again on your monitor screen, one of the many mysteries of this life that you just accept, unless you want to spend your lifetime researching and analyzing the why and the wherefore of such things.

I’m grateful, that’s all I can say, and honestly, take one day (or should I say night) at a time, not sure that the next time I lay my head down on the pillow I won’t wake an hour later in a cold sweat, desperately flailing about for those blankets that I so confidently stashed away in the closet down the hall.

SLEEPING ALONE

It should be easy, no one
   Else breathing beside you
And no restless turning
   Away and, look,
No hands or uneven feet
   In the wrong nightmare
And no murmuring heart
   Open or shut now, sighing
For you or yours but yours
   Alone this night, oblivion
Not yours for the asking
   Or begging, but the surprising
Glimmer of dawn, even there
   In that place somewhere
The other has gone to sleep
   Without you, not now
And then, but forever.

David Wagoner
Good Morning and Good Night
University of Illinois Press, Publishers

A BED FOR A WOMAN

I sat right up in bed and said, “Help.”
I didn’t scream it as if I were dreaming
a nightmare. I don’t know what I was dreaming.
The “Help” came from a dream core like the pulp
in the core of a tooth. I wasn’t frightened,
and that’s important since it took all my
energy and self-concern to understand why
I spoke in the darkness but wasn’t frightened.
I rose up out of bed like a person
whose fever had broken as this person
had known it would. Desperation,
hysterical shapelessness, was not in the word
as it would have been had I called, but I spoke.
“Help” was more like an answer. When I woke,
but not immediately, for I was too startled, I smiled
in this bed for a woman, far from the crib of a child.

Molly Peacock
Cornucopia
W.W. Norton & Co., Publishers