A Conversation with Thoreau

We sit edge of the pond and watch the ice melt on St. Patrick's Day.
"One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in," Thoreau wrote beside Walden Pond in 1846.
We gaze out over the last of the winter woods as the snow begins to pull away from the base of the trees. Two chickadees claim their territories and a third joins in. A perfect harmony.
The pond is an island of ice as the shallows melt first. "In 1845, Walden Pond was first completely open on the first of April; in 1846, the twenty-fifth of March; in 1847, the eighth of April..." Thoreau calculated the melting by the depth of the ice, the strength of the sunlight, and the profundity of the pond. All ponds melt in their own way. Ours holds the cold. It is set in a dip, surrounded by pines and deep snows. It once served as an ice pond for the town and it is often not open until the end of April.
I take a deep breath. The breeze is from the south today and it no longer chills like the winter wind.
"Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes," Thoreau notes.
I wonder about global warming.
"It's going to be a hot summer," says my wife.
"Hot and dry, or hot and humid?" I ask.
"Just hot," she says. "That's what the winds say, hot."
We hear heavy wings beating above us and look into the vastness of the spring sky.
"How many people have heard bird's wings beat in flight?" I wonder.
"You should take a survey," she says.
I laugh.
"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness-to sometimes wade in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
A hawk soars overhead.
My cellphone rings.
The snow melts.
We can never have enough of Nature.

This Bach's for You

In the lead of March
in fog and snow
and wet that saturates
the soul
I call for alms
a fugue, a prelude
sarabande
partita
passacaille
sixteenth note melodies
of points and counterpoints
a cantata
and a well-tempered clavier
this Bach's for you
to break the gray
and fill the heart again
with dreams
and hope.

Bach, Bach, Bach, Bach
like so many chickens clucking
Bach cluck Bach cluck Bach cluck
point and counterpoint
feathers pour forth
from my throat
as lyrics stick
I strike a chord
and then another
two three
cluck up Bach Bach
with fingers possessed
by ancient memory
I run a triplet
up and down
through Jesu, Joy of Man's Desire
to Goldberg playing out his variations.
This Bach's for you.

St. Matthew's Passion
and St. John's
both rise to move
a steel day
of doom and gloom
to a Bach Bach cluck cluck
clavier of light
the Magnificat
shines through.

This Bach's for you!