The Edge

Before Life
supercontinents
floated
on a crust
of molten lava.

I skirt
a marsh
opening
to spring.

Two otters
snake
the dark waters
in the morning sun.

A merganser
fluffs
his great white hood
wags his wings
and walks on water
while a female,
unimpressed,
continues pulling
at the cattails.

There is no
common language
not even between lovers.

Geese honking
open up the sky
to imbedded thunderstorms
that change the winds
while ice melts
like glaciers
calving into
chocolate waters
to be surfed
by madmen
with a brushfire
of words
unleashed by
continents colliding
450 million years ago
in the crosscuts of I-90
they leave their marks.

We all want to be known
as we leave ourselves
in stone
in bones
in ashes
turned to Earth
a barred owl calls.

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!

Smoke Signals

Ravens gather
to read
smoke signals
that rise
like diatonic triads
of metamorphosed
cellulose
into a steel
gray sky.

The product
of some
disturbance regime
like ice,
or water, wind, fire
or a ten ton skidder
and a chainsaw
with a thirty-six inch bar
that rocks
the northern forest
where the ravens roost.

I ride shotgun
in another world
a disturbance regime
of twelve lane freeways
and a van filled
with darbhukas
and djembes,
bodhrains
tambourines
claves, marracas, and triangles.

The distribution
of what I know
as sensible
careens into a place
no GPS can navigate.

The blackberries
are not edible
where the cormorants gather
on the wire skeletons
of electronic lives
the smoke signals
shift like magnetic north
on an obsolete compass
and the triads
switch to a minor key
as the flames fly
from pine to birch
and citibank demands
a disturbing regimen
of voluntary
mandatory
Saturday workdays
to cut jobs
of thousands
as trillions
of paperless
dollars
flow over a dam
made of swiss cheese
and scatter
in the winds
like so many
smoke signals.

Cancer
is what
my life is
my friend
says to me
as I breathe
in the smoke
and wonder
what the burning
will do
to my throat
my eyes
my lungs
my heart
my tears.

Truro Terns at Sunrise

Photo by Mari H. Hall

The Second Coyote

"I have your coyote,"
the message says.
"Come get it,
it's freaking
everybody out."

She is frozen
on a snowbank
her red gold tail
flutters
in the breeze.

She seems so alive
I stroke her
like She is
my long lost dog.

But She is dead.

Shot by an old timer
who sits and waits for her
to take his bait
before he pulls the trigger.

"Pests,"
he sputters
Damn coyotes eat
his venison.

I do not tell him
that like humans,
coyotes reproduce
when threatened.

In my mystic's hands
I carry this dog's spirit.

I have tracked her
through the hemlocks
ash and beeches
across the swamps
at midnight
I have heard her
sing and laugh
and call.

I have touched
her menstrual blood.

I raise my arms
to the wind
and ask,
"What do I do
with the flesh
and bones
and the beautiful
soft fur coat?"

I google
"preserving skeletons"
and find the algorithms
to create the perfect curve
of a computer skeleton.

But there are no numbers here
in this world of flesh and bone.

"Boil it,"
my brother tells me.
"Soak it in water
until the meat comes off."

"Bury it in sand
and let the maggots
do the dirty work."

Dead eyes stare at me.
The muscles are hard
beneath my kneading hands.

There are no numbers here.

There is antiseptic clean
in the rotting flesh
and blood that stains
my fingers brown.

This song dog
trickster
gray ghost
rises
to explain
that there is
no order
in the chaos
of the spirit
no rhyme
no reason
no numbers.

Only Life
Only Death
in the blood
and guts
of what binds
us to the tendons
and the ligaments
of life.

There is only
our own willingness
to participate
in each other's minds
and to witness
each other's lives.

I take
this Spirit
into me
and She
opens
my Eyes
my Ears
my Heart
to Life.

Photo by Mari H. Hall