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

Robinson Jeffers

 

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

~Robinson Jeffers

*I think the important thing here is to ask who it is who is speaking.  I feel that there is only one actual hawk here and that the plural in the title simply signifies kinship and connection.  If only men that are dying remember the wild God of the world, then the authorial voice must feel as though he is dying.  A man living with his family at most, cut off from a communal people, he recognizes a similar proud struggle against an inevitability in the hawk before him.  That he would sooner kill a man than a hawk maybe speaks to this estrangement from others being a conscious choice but if he is referring to himself with his mention of violence then there would still be penalties to give him pause, both of a spiritual and bluntly physical nature.  What does it mean for him that the hawk's passing merged in the dusk with the fierce crack of a gun?  What does it mean that he offered mercy to the redtail, first through pity and then with finality?  Is it simply age that makes him identify with the hawk's incapacity?  Night-herons are a communal species.  What does it mean that their river is flooded?

In A Grove of Aspens

High above, their speckled white branches rise with purpose into the golden, receding light as two dark woodpeckers comb here and there for the life held in their limbs and the season's first swallows bank over head.  Lower down, their branches grow crooked and aimless in a lonely reach into dimming light where the younger ones join them, all crossing one another and twisted together into thickets and small clearings.  There is a feeling there of something unable to plainly express itself.  Something which finds its only voice in the sweet smell of leaf litter and Aspen spice hanging among the white hulls of long-downed trees tangled with the faded meadow grass.  Fallen bits of bark float in small, dark pools of snowmelt which also hold the far away reflection of the evening's last light.  Somewhere one hears the gently trickling laugh of a wren and thinks, retracing one's steps, of all the green that will soon fill that small wood and tremble in the breeze.  Crossing the old bridge home in the dusk, there is, on one side, the calm wandering purl of the creek.  To the other, there is the insistence of its short, falling rush.  And a question is carried of whether one has understood all that one needed to hear.

An Autumn Memory

~~~

All summer the water flowed free through the reeds of the marsh, springing up life together with the silt it carried under the sun.  The marsh is still there now touched by late autumn light.  Among the dry, dormant stalks, now largely bereft of birds, one walks hearing a different, lonelier music as a chill breeze shifts those same reeds.  Out among the aimless clicks of willow twigs a coyote stands with ears stiff and eyes locked before casually loping away.  A Black Phoebe still sallies from fence posts and half submerged stumps for dwindling insects.  Mallards winnow murky, dark water and sand through their bills, barely looking up from their feeding.  An avocet, alone and stark white, lets its long, thin legs lead it gently through water shivering in isolated pools, now and again lowering its scything bill into the mud.  And it is there one feels inside oneself a lovely, little heart which understands and needs no answer from the world.  Though maybe as the mudflats turn to granite sand and the light begins to slant, lonely and golden, it may find its reply in the recede and return at the vast lake's edge.  There one crouches over claws and other blue bits of crayfish, looks at dark leaves and green gathered muck. All around one sees in long shadows the tracks of small birds, the white shells split open on wet sand, and all the feathers let fall, careless, to the wind.  And there is faith you may follow, at some time behind, with the wandering pipers and constant, cool pulse of the waves.  And you may see all that I saw and there too see the trace of my steps where one wishes they had more gently lain.

~~~

 _____

On a clear and cold winter morning,
you sit in an arabesque of dormant branches.
Though a songbird chorus scolds from the bushes below,
your troubles have not seen you yet.

They are searching everywhere.
But you,
my little hawk,
they will not find.

On the dead spike of a split-crown pine,
perched with a frozen rush of cirrus above,
you are free to bear your spirit away through the wind
and into the darkness of the woods.

Still they will hunt for you there.
But you,
my little heart,
they cannot bind.
_____

The click-throughs lead to pictures of the writing subjects
*  which, though they are not graphic, do contain a certain amount of sadness.  *
 The decision to view them, is left to the viewer.

I am holding my umbrella over me on a small strip of sand dotted with hailstones and surrounded by shallow water I have just stepped through.  A heavy summer rain is misting up the lake for miles before me and scattering grains of wet sand onto my shoes and up the legs of my pants.  It is strange to feel so calm as lightning sears distant, vanishing arcs here and there between the water's surface and the lowering gray of the clouds.  The darkened water around and before me is rolling, twisting and jumping from the impact of immeasurable raindrops.  All the normal life of the sky, the water, and the wild has sought shelter.  A simple umbrella allows me to remain in the open, watching the sublime movements of the world before me.

Storms are a part of the wild beauty of the world that we can admire only because we have learned how to protect ourselves from them.  This protection alleviates our instinctive fear of danger and death. Because we know with reasonable certainty that it will not be able to reach us, we are free to appreciate the power and elegant complexity of something greater than us-- something which threatens us but which is also a vital part of what keeps us alive.  That little shiver of fear transforms itself into awe.
  

There is a mole who has died, its body left in a rut in the trail.  Wildflowers are growing around it-- small, pink, and swaying over the shrunken black fur and sad, clawed hands.  I am sitting in the tall, wild grass a short way down the trail and the clouds are moving quickly above me.  They move on two planes in opposite directions so that the effect is one of the world spinning much faster than we know it to move and reminds one of  what it feels like to be carried.  I wonder then if those weak, subterranean eyes had ever seen the sky before and what strange species of awe it would have brought forth.

I have always been quietly terrified of dead animals for as long as I can remember though there is behind this another instinct, quieter though more insistent.  There is the irrational desire to help what cannot be helped-- a kind of feral love, longing to reach out with protection though it is scared.  How desperate this feeling is of not being able to fix what is broken.  One can see death without being threatened by it, though one is still repulsed.  This repulsion does not stop me from wondering what is was to be something so different from myself.  And it does not prevent me from seeing beauty in the knowledge that the lost will be taken back into those great arms.  The movements of this world must necessarily be understood as sustaining since they are all designed to bear along that which bears us along.

                          

I am standing on the side of a service road.  A Chickaree has just scrambled clumsily out from under a wooden fence and into a patch of golden light on a summer evening.  It was trying to get clear of me as I passed but it cowers not far away, hunched and panting. Its fur is standing on end and its eyes are dull with what must be sickness, confusion, and pain. There is nothing to be done and no way to protect, only a feeling of shared helplessness.  All that can be given is my quick departure so that at least the danger which it understands will have passed.

One cannot tell what goes through the mind of creatures so different but one can easily understand a sense of small helplessness.  From there it is only a question of scale.  The smaller one is, the more things there are greater than oneself.  We can try to see things from these little eyes, where that pain is like a storm which cannot be understood and from which there is no protection.  For someone outside this tiny, lonely sphere, there is the frustrated desire to alleviate the suffering of another.  One feels helpless but it is only because one is part of a cycle which cannot be helped-- something unstoppable which has within it flashes of the terrible but which is ultimately balanced with life-giving grace.  A sense of interconnection lets us see these storms of a smaller order. 

On the asphalt of the beach parking lot in autumn, there is a garter snake.  Its head is at the center of a spiral made by its body.  You can see where its back has been broken, its mouth is open,and large black eyes shine out from under their transparent scales.  I don't wish to disturb things but it feels better to move the stiff body out among the weeds under some nearby willows.  This way something at least will eat.  Crouched there over that little black spiral in the pale leaf litter, with a thicket of half-naked branches arching over, the warblers flitting through the yellow leaves don't seem to notice either of us.

Maybe I, as a human, feel the need to acknowledge these things more than they need human acknowledgement.  Still, a belief that every life matters and deserves dignity means that death matters too.  Even though one fears it, one can answer that fear with compassion, tenderness, and mercy.  One can extend this umbrella to others as much as one is able.  There is at least a small ability in us to shift ugliness into something of a right and true nature, to gently sublimate its essence in a way more reflective of its place in this great order, set in motion long ago and still moving under that same power.  It is a gift given which, if used correctly, no one will notice.