I think
sometimes
about how a pine
must stay
where it is placed.
How it cannot free
its heart
and that the heartwood 
always hardens first,
helping it to stand.

Without asking why,
it makes of itself
a home for all things
plain, beautiful, or
only
just necessary;
scatters its prayers 
on winds
and draws what it needs
from where it's rooted.

Pushing itself so,
maybe
the lead bud is lost,
it grows haywire and 
higher,
raising up then what
it's chosen to bear,
thinking of nothing,
just continued, blind
giving.

So what 
if bark goes brittle
and the needles brown,
that it feels itself fall
and gives 
over to rot from
within.
It does so at peace, 
on the side of life
only.

By it
other lives spring up
every green which way
but what does it get
from losing itself?
I mean
it was quite noble
but where 
is the wild romance
in that?

It's the song I've been trying to sing...

There was the lonely pine on one side and the willow sticks bare on the other, with you just behind as I crouched there in the snow over that scatter of feathers-- dappled, yellow-tipped, and mingled with the red of life recently taken.  There was little trace of the vanished raptor aside from the blood which had dripped from its beak, and it had taken the larger part of its meal with it when it flew.  As you joined me in that small cloister picking through the shafts and down, I wondered if you felt it too--the need for some connection which I still couldn't then name or understand.  The hawk's feather, a mark left by the wings, or the outline of a talon in the snow-- I would have taken anything then and everything else had receded.

We had found the lake shifting calmly on that dim winter's morning after days of storms, the water sighing up to the snow-banked shores and breathing back out.  A mallard pair drifted lazily across the glassy, dark surface ahead and a gull wheeled lazily beneath the low-hung stratus.  To our left the cheery noise of a feeding flock enlivened the willow bushes and the pines above.  We tried to follow their quick movements and pick out the ones we knew: Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Dark-eyed Juncos, Mountain Chickadees and Yellow-rumped Warblers, here a Steller's Jay, there a Robin, and beyond them the year's first trilling of Red-winged Blackbirds.  With flicking tail feathers, in nimble dives and hops, they went about their foraging with little songs, making a haphazard chorus which flowed and trailed and then subtly rose into an agitation we hadn't understood at the time.

It was then, from behind, that the bird-scream broke from a throat made for singing as we turned to see the outstretched wings pulling back and the kicking stretch of the talon seizing a Meadowlark with desperate grace.  There was a feral control in the young hawk's strike, the sharp driving down into the clearing of snow, and the adamant holding there beneath the mantling wings.  In the background, seeming far away, a few Jays scolded and all the smaller birds called out in alarm as the feathers were sliced and torn in small brown tufts let drift across the sparkling white with, here and there, a downy yellow tip catching the light.

I, of course, did not see the spirit leave the lark.  There was only the stilled reach of its wingtips fanning up out of the snowy crater towards the mantling wings of the hawk as if to ward off its fate.  Then there was simply the small bursts of feathers, and the slick red of the hunter's hooked beak as it came up from that hollow of snow.  The lark had been a creature of the tall grass, sand, willows and sage.  Wild, beautiful, and now gone-- it was being taken up into the heart of another, more fierce beauty.  Likely neither had eaten much for days due to the storms and such a thing is hunger that it had led them to each other, one driven careless and the other single-minded.

It must have been that inner gnawing which made the little hawk tolerant enough to share that clearing which now seemed at the very center of things.  In the stratus-diffused morning light its eyes flared with the saffron of its youth as it alternately scanned for trouble and quickly put its beak down to the ruined black V over those lemon feathers and the spreading salmon and scarlet of its work.  And I wondered what that hawk knew of peace in the life given to it.  Would it be a vague meaning hidden somewhere between a full stomach, the cessation of scolding and calls of alarm, the wind and sun on outspread wings, the breeze and the tremble of dappling shade over a secluded perch? Or maybe its peace was simply and only here, in the hunt and its culmination.  With its spirit as dilated and focused as its pupils, it could have been most alive in the headlong diving through branches, the sharp finality of the strike and its strewn-feather coda.  And then it was also possible that, in a way
I little understand, from first fledging it knew nothing but peace in all the movements of its life so long as they carried it ever forward.

And what can be said of the Meadowlark?  It had hatched who-knows-when from its brown-splotched egg in the nest made for it of the same grass where it would grow, learning to fly and to hide, to sing and to hunt.  It must have spent all summer and fall foraging along hidden paths among the willows, spiking its head up towards the sun from the sea of beach grass, and singing brave from the fence posts or sage tips its whistling song against rivals and for any female in earshot.  Or maybe it had been the one listening, its interest piqued by the song of another as it started to think of building its own nest in the grass.  And what should it mean that it met its end violently at the dim tail of a vast winter in the talons of a famished hawk?  Where should we find the notion of peace in the rising of its partially stripped and reddened body, seized up out of that clearing of snow and carried a short distance, gliding to that lonely hollow between willow and pine?  Would its spirit have then lingered plaintively, sung out in some bittersweet species of joy, or just slipped off unspeakably silent and gentle into the land it had always known?

The hawk had savored its work for a while in seclusion then, picking and rending more carefully now, before it abruptly rose with its meal and flickered out of sight.  As the two of us bent under those branches and over the feathers, what came back to me first was the great lake nearby, gently meeting that small strip of sand which the wind and water themselves had brought down from the mountains.  Worn from the granite then sifted and rushed down streams and falls and out into the open, the unceasing waves had lapped it back onto the beach over thousands of years.  When viewed in its own scale, this same weather may have violently scoured the ridges and peaks and ripped these same grains of sand down from the heights to the valley, their cycles entwined, creating and breaking down in the same action and meeting here simply on a different turn of the wheel.  Life and its opposite surely have their courses as well, meeting in a multitude of different formations, partnerships, and oppositions which only seem wilder because they can more clearly be seen.  This hawk had met that meadowlark in the winter morning light, one beauty now carrying another, and they had both continued on in their own particular ways.  I could not see a true end to any of it at all and it was maybe that connection which I was searching for in the snow.  Wasn't there the promise in these things that damage can be redeemed, that from ugliness can come beauty, that meaning is always there whether we see it or not?

I am sure that every living thing hears those waves too as a constant refrain and, though it must be different for each of them, there has to be something in it of the heartbeat of their world, sometimes wildly pounding and then sure and serene as though there was a certain, unshakable peace running through it, deeper and without fear.  When you looked back out from under the branches, I did too.  And all around the clearing each little bird was again taking up their part in the ever-changing chorus, hopping and flitting, now and again stretching their small wings to wheel out in an arcing path through the slowly brightening sky-- little circles in a larger turning.

 

 

 

Upper Truckee Marsh, January 30th

You won't see the gull fly but can still hear its call
with the world closed in pogonip, simple and small.

It's all dim-lit somehow, though still thoroughly white.
Just hoarfrost on willow sticks in gently chill light.

You'll sink steps through deep snow to that crescent of sand
and the murmuring swell of the lake come to land.

Still half-held in sleep, geese just drift out of the fog.
They float and they dabble in peaceful dialogue

Which you can't understand but can follow its tone,
Stood only glad to be here and not here alone

While each plash and ripple talks to each quiet wave
And those black, wary eyes wonder how you'll behave.

Conjunct and quiet, you are then part of it too,
That plain melody of day reduced and made new.

You cannot define it though its right at the fore.
You still heard it inside, walking back down the shore

While the mist started to clear as if from a spell
And slow from the willows, the ice crystals fell.

Was the day brightening then or being obscured?

Soon that small, delicate song might no longer be heard.

And if it goes silent, can it still be a refrain?
Because maybe the answer might help to explain

 Why you would see, walking home in that second dawn,

 A once playful raven chasing after a swan.

Born with a weak heart

I don't mind exploring along the same paths for the rest of my life though, of course, they never are the same. To walk along these mountain ridges, drift down beside the streams among the cedar, pine and fir, and out to the willows and sand of the larger shore around which they have all come to stand. With repetition, the steps layer over one another in memory, gathering with them all that was seen and coloring what came before.  Here the purple flowers next to the brittle husks, there the aimless damselflies and glistening needle ice, your sadness, fear and buoyant joy, the worn feathers caught in the brown grass, the perfect, short-lived blue of the crayfish shells turning to pinkish orange in the heat, and the wren singing without cease as the sky changes its colors too under the setting sun.

 To each of these places for which I have an affinity there is, without fail, a spiritual, if not physical, remoteness-- a kind of restless, communal loneliness.  It's there in the Swallows, weaving their arcs through the sky, vanishing into the blue and returning again just as fluidly as if they were the very spirit of the wind, as if their absence in the winter was no more than a longer ebb in their constant turning with its center somewhere even they may not understand.  And maybe it is strange then that one should still see freedom in tethering oneself to the same landscapes when others range so far but the world is always there no matter from where one chooses to watch it.  There are always the hailstorms or the gently falling snow, the cool relief of the lake on a Summer day as overhead the cumulus drifts or later the stratus lets through the shafts of morning light, the wet granite roar of the falls and the evening's glow lingering on the faint ripples at the edge of the water.




 There are things in this world for which I have no defense and others against which I refuse to defend myself.  With each step, they can reach me just as they need to-- in beauty, sadness, and joy.  I suppose that one only really wishes to defend what one loves and that my love has always turned itself outward.  So then what does one do with a Killdeer's fretful call from somewhere not seen, the searching tap of a nuthatch high above, nighthawks gliding over the sand unconcerned with our presence in the dimming light, the first and last Red Wings of the season bristling up in the same song, little shadows of birds shivering up out of the beach grass to disappear into the willows, a hen harrier skimming low and hungry over the reeds, and the tiny scattering of olive and gray feathers, loose and drifting in the dust of the mountain trail?  I don't know how to keep these things safe unless it's to keep them alive within, let them join together with the old, and build with each new outing.  So I try to remember to follow the course of things in faith as witness and to give myself over to the world and all of the ways to pass through it.  The paths are largely the same even if my steps and the life around them have changed and thankfully, more often than not, I tend to know my way home.

 

Perhaps that Great Egret sometimes falters too
for all his deliberate pressing of those long black toes into the mud.

Is it anger there in that hunting, yellow eye?
Do you see yourself in that second before you strike through the water's surface?

And the nightmares? Do they shoot through your sleep too?
That heavy knife-bill swinging wildly for a moment as you wake, confused.

I can see as you see me, crouched here by the riverside, and that neither of us understands
quite what drives the rowing retreat of your angelic, white wings.

A feather dropped as you lit into the air and you must have seen, as you half-circled the sky,
that little something lost and carried by the river, flowing by, just out of my reach.

Tahoe Mountain Trail

 

And what would people like us find on that evening mountainside, where the fire passed through some years before?  The trail leads out and up through all the broken white trunks, charred in streaks of softly iridescent black and stood ghostly over the undergrowth.  Our chosen path cuts into the dark, rolling green of the hillside where flickering wrens trill out their song and retreat into the dense labyrinths of chaparral which already look ancient though, here, they couldn't be anything but young.  Then the leaves start to give way, higher up, where the reddish dust spreads thinly over rock deeply scraped by glaciers long since passed into dusk and vanished out into the vast lake now visible beyond.

 




Here the last of the snags give way to the first of the trees not touched by the flames.  Here we see, by the dozens, the elegant thrust and curling away of the seeds fallen from the Incense-cedar still standing above us.  Here Fox Sparrows have fed on the joyous red star burst of Sierra Gooseberries and left the spiny husks at the foot of the bush.  Here among the natural rubble we can hold up the long, roughened, sun bleached cones in the dimming light and pick out, along the horizon behind them, the limbs of their sibling Sugar Pines, heavy with cones and silhouetted against the blush of sunset and icy blue of the lake now fairly glowing beyond.





The lights of three boats pass in different directions over that distant water, aligning together for a moment and then pulling away.  And who couldn't feel it, then?  The underlying spirit of that ridge-- its long held scarring, the traces of its more recent pain, and the mitigating grace of life both abiding and returning.  It's everywhere as we turn back down the trail towards the warm home-lights of the forest valley and the headlights winking here and there through the trees.  The bats are out now, their nimble shapes arcing and looping after unseen insects across the deepening blue of the sky as it drifts into night.  Eventually, back down among the lost trees glowing faintly white under the moon, we stop to pick out constellations we are still learning as the stars take their places above.  And, barely seen out the corner of the eye, there the gliding, faint outline of an owl as it lands on a faraway branch, black against the lighter dark of the lake now calming beyond.

I know a place

 

 

Just down-slope from a well-used trail near the creek there is a pool thickly covered in duckweed at the foot of an old tree trunk which has splintered at its waist and been wrenched over into a stoop.  Think of this as a signpost.  It will invariably be quiet there with a lonely and forgotten feel but maybe a chipmunk watching from atop those ruins will give away the true nature of the place and then the evening flame of a Northern Flicker startled out of the brush will confirm that you are in the right place.  Though it avoids you and makes itself silent, there is so much life in this small margin between trail and creek.  Life both like your own and not, life hidden within other, larger life or its remains, concentrically bound to each other but still intrinsically free and enduringly fugitive.

And, in the rich, retreating light just beyond that point, you will find the bone-white trunk of a fallen pine which juts out over the water at the creek's bend while, above it, an unusual pattern of carved clouds jags into the blue sky.  All around you will be wild Rose and Swamp Onion in the hip-deep grass, wavering in and out of the shadows cast by that sun-bleached wood.  There with you too, some Bigleaf Avens, Nude Buckwheat, a few noiseless birds passing too quickly and near the edge of vision to name, and many semi-hidden sinkholes giving way to the wet sand and large enough that you could curl yourself up into them-- a secret within a secret.

If you end up there, you will feel it.  How soft all the petals are, how coarse the blades of grass, how you want to be hidden there too, and how it all springs up where many others have fallen beside that creek which itself passes by so quietly that one has to take it on faith that it's still there, moving behind you with its own unnameably gentle insistence.

*       *       *

What a rare solitude to find in Summer along those quiet, evening shores.  With the mountain's cross of snow above still glistening in the twilight, there are only these hands dipping into that calm water to comb and pick through the little rocks left here long ago by the same glacier that carved this valley.  Somehow thinking about time without feeling its passing, here and there, the dripping fragments are held up to admire in the last light and let fall back in musical splashes.  Talking of teaching kids to find solace in the wilderness and of simple, ancient lives long passed under these trees at the foot of this same mountain.  There are only the bats around now, still darting silent overhead and skimming just above the surface of the smooth, darkening water.  You can just see the gentle ripple after letting a stone fly out and how the dim light catches the swells with such a sweet, subsiding glow.  And do you wonder how long that peaceful hush might follow alongside or inside through the dark woods on the trails towards home?

*       *       *

"Would that be a life to disregard?"

I have been turning this poem about in my head for something like a month now:

The Rabbit

Scatterghost,
it can’t float away.
And the rain, everybody’s brother,
won’t help. And the wind all these days
flying like ten crazy sisters everywhere
can’t seem to do a thing. No one but me,
and my hands like fire,
to lift him to a last burrow. I wait

days, while the body opens and begins
to boil. I remember

the leaping in the moonlight, and can’t touch it,
wanting it miraculously to heal
and spring up
joyful. But finally

I do. And the day after I’ve shoveled
the earth over, in a field nearby

I find a small bird’s nest lined pale
and silvery and the chicks—

are you listening, death?—warm in the rabbit’s fur.

~Mary Oliver

 ~       ~       ~

Last week at the library, we all watched a juvenile Robin perched outside the window, shivering and breathing heavily from the exertion of flight which must have been new to it.  With the glass in between, it didn't notice as one got so close as to see its delicately squinting eyes and the tiny feathers on its rapidly pulsing breast.  It stayed there awhile and someone said they saw a parent Robin fly down to feed to its young.  One could see the small glow of wonder on others' faces as they watched something new to them and realized that it was also something familiar.

The next day, I came home from the library to a rabbit in my driveway.  I sat and watched for a bit as it picked out dandelion stalks to eat, ears alert and eyes fixed.  It would start at the bottom, pulling the stalk in with its lips until it got to the top and let the flower husk drop to the sand.  I slowly and deliberately got out, walking around the back of my car away from the rabbit.  It froze but it did not leave.  I quietly went inside and sat by the window to take a few pictures before it hopped up the short woodpile and disappeared through the small, hidden gap in the fence.

Today at the library, I was called into the break-room by a coworker to look at little bits of down sticking to the window and, on the other side of the glass, a juvenile Robin lifeless on the ground.  She had seen it hit, fall, and convulse and I was sorry that she had.  She told me that a Steller's Jay had also watched and hopped down to the body afterwards.  She had needed to tell someone and assumed I would understand, drawn to birds as I am.  It looked unnaturally peaceful there in the afternoon light and I didn't know what to say.

Later, I forced myself to go outside and take care of the little bird.  A graceful companion came out to help me and brought with her a shovel painted gold, of all things, from a different ceremony.  She helped me to raise it up from the moss where it had fallen and let me carry it alone, that little dark weight resting on a plane of glittering metal, to a nearby bush at the foot of a pine.  There I laid it, as beautifully as I could manage in a patch of light among the pine needles and little white flowers I couldn't name.  I thought briefly of burying it but it felt a strange thing to give to something so recently belonging to the air.  Somewhere above, a Jay was still hopping from branch to branch in an anchored way, as if trying to see from every angle the scene laid out below and maybe to understand.  

It seems disordered somehow to hate death, a natural part of life and the world, as much as I sometimes do.  I suppose that I, as a living thing, am naturally in opposition to it and so it makes sense to feel that pull of defiance-- to know its weakness and to gently work against its uglier qualities.  If only one could always be able to answer that revulsion, anger, and pain inside with beauty and the knowledge that life will come back in all its forms, strong and clever and joyful enough that nothing could stop it even if it wanted to.

Though it's difficult, maybe it is good to look at it as one can look at the mountains.  There is beauty in the wind and rain, the snow and ice, even as they scrape and eat away at stone and soil, destructively balancing erosion against the steady rise of the earth.  And it is only together that they make the rivers and waterfalls, scattering life as they go and gathering up what isn't used into glittering beaches on the shores of the vast lake which they hold between them.  A taking away is a necessary part of that process.  It helps to remember, when there is suffering, that even a short life taken is still a part of that greater economy of life and connected to the sustaining cycle in which we are all held.  For me, today, there was a young Robin left still and the memory of a rabbit stealing safely away.  Earlier, for Mary Oliver, it was the other way around.  Though there was ugliness and sadness in both cases, there was also the mitigating grace of beauty.  Despite loss, there is always an enduring joy of life, safe under cover again among the flowers and smiling irrepressibly back at its old sparring partner.

April 25th

 

The world given over to gray skies and faint wind for the afternoon, it helps to walk along the river with its two-foot, sandy cliffs and attempt to move at the same calm pace of the water.  One's mind goes fluid quite naturally and the feet try their best to gracefully flow over the granite sand still wet from melted snow and around the skeletal stalks of last season's flowers and faded grass.  This early in the spring, only the lupines are fully green, those plants which give more than they need to take.  Opened already in symmetric bursts of cupped leaves, many have kept to them pure droplets of snowmelt held at their centers, raised up and gleaming, even in the dull overcast light.

I don't always know what it is that keeps me walking or what keeps this love of the world held to its faithful, eddying ripple on its surrendering course.

But, just there, at a river bend, part of the soil has broken off and fallen into that gentle, insistent current taking with it half a colony of lupines caught in mid-tumble.  Held under that clear, dark weight, with roots still in the soil, they continue to respire.  And so little bubbles cling to the sunken leaves with their own supernal luster.

And I do not know why it never occurred to me then that those lupines might be saved or whether I could have done anything for them at all.  I do not know why I walked on to sit in the sand by the shore and watch the gulls huddled up against the chill breeze and lake waves.  Nor why I should have seen, on the way back, a wind-hovering kestrel, bobbing in place against the current of winds, hunting high above the marsh and held in what seemed like the center of the sky.  He flew on without striking, talons empty in the grey evening air.  And it seemed a strange counterpoint both to those lupines which remained sunken and freezing and those still above and offering their jewels. 

What is it, in the world, that holds each of us so differently in the same arms?

The Ides of March

 

     

The morning sky is overcast and we are thin under its gentle light held in dawning
Late winter and downriver through willow and alder, over marsh grass and needle ice to lake's edge
Stranded there in sand bars sleep hundreds of pools of ice still frozen in spite of the building warmth of day
Will it be for the last time this year we will see them held solid from the dreaming of their continual movement?
Through some alchemy of the wind and sand carried down from the mountains by the same water it now holds,
We see something of what must occupy the sleeping waters, what it remembers and what it anticipates
It charts for us the cycle it has always traveled, mapping what it found to love there

There are frosted peaks and rocky valleys, rivulets and mighty currents around distant islands.
Limbs of trees, the flowing bark and the fanning, twisting root.
And there too their quicker friends, the remembered insects and ghosts of flowers trapped beneath

And the calling birds echoed here and there in the ice,
the tips of their wings, secondaries spread in flight, bobbing tails and shining eyes,
feet that would soon break the surface again

Beneath the ice one could see the water taking back up its song and

It almost seemed, if one could have looked long enough,

as though one might have seen one's place and home,

a land these waters must also have passed

as the sun broke through the clouds