You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
More than zoology prompts these poems. The human imagination runs wild across the range. Up the mountain. Into the sky. Down in the sea. Under the earth.
To run along, fly along, swim along, sing along, crawl along, click here.
It’s all in our nature, too.
~*~
How difficult it is to see fish in the water, especially when looking in from above. They’re so perfectly camouflaged.
It’s another of the things I’ve observed living along a river and near the ocean. Or even looking into the large tank at the New England Aquarium for the divers doing maintenance below, where only their bubbles give them away.
We look and still miss so many things right in front of us. As for me, I like to think I behold everything. Now what were the color of the bank teller’s eyes just a minute ago? I’m clueless. What what make and model was the car that ran the stop sign and nearing collided with us just moments before that? I was caught breathless. And you want to talk about God?
Of course, it helps to know where to start looking. If you can.
The former railroad bridge that now delights pedestrians on the Community Trail reflects in the black mirror of a late autumn morning. Snow, by the way, transforms the trail for cross country skiers. It’s what we can expect to see any day now.
As the temperature drops, the water gains clarity. Gone is the tannin tint.
Here the river plunges over the Cocheco dam and falls.
The birds and squirrels have already harvested the sunflower seeds. I like to leave the stalk up anyway, just as a perch for the critters.
An argument’s been made that November has the loveliest sunsets of the year.
Humankind’s attraction to other animals – the baby ones, especially – is universal. What is it in our love of pets, for instance, that so opens us to our own existence?
What I see is a recognition of our animal nature and a desire to snuggle in amid our fellow critters rather than hover above them. Well, most of them – there are those we fear or detest. Even so …
As the German grandmother loves to quote, God has a big zoo.
And that includes us.
~*~
For a look at my animal kingdom poems, click here.
I’ve already written of living along the Susquehanna and being introduced to the trail that wove through a wooded strip between the water and the freeway.
The site included a bridge that stood closed to vehicular traffic and a low dam that once diverted water to power cigar factories along the riverbanks. Only part of the foundations of the mills remained, along with some of the weir, which filled with moody water after a heavy rainfall.
At the time I was living in an inner-city neighborhood – Italian by day, Afro-American by night. The riverside provided a mostly private escape into nature.
It was enough, though, to give rise to poetry. Follow its seasons and flow in my new chapbook by clicking here.
Among the mature trees surrounding our house are several black walnuts, including one that hangs over the 1928 one-story addition where our kitchen sits. Its open ceiling allows us to hang pots, pans, and stemware from the joists – shall we just call it a rustic look? – and I’ve sometimes considered installing a skylight or two.
On the other side of that roof, squirrels strip the nuts from the trees early in the season of a typical year. Watching their frantic action can be quite amusing, first as the leaves on a branch shake furiously and then as a squirrel bounds away with a large ball in its mouth.
A few nuts might actually survive into autumn. More likely, we find them buried the next spring as we prepare the new garden and sift compost. Having lived here for a decade-and-a-half, we think we know what to anticipate as the seasons advance.
Not this year, to our surprise, at least as far as the walnuts go.
Our awareness that something was amiss began in the middle of the night. Was somebody trying to break into the house?
The next morning, though, as wind whipped around the house, the noise really picked up. Imagine someone hitting the kitchen roof with a baseball bat. Repeatedly, sometimes three or four a minute. The whack was enough to make us jump.
I moved one car further from the house – we’d seen what large hail did to a friend’s pickup truck and the damage wasn’t pretty. These nuts were larger and heavier, after all, and ones that fell on that side of the roof were bouncing into the driveway.
The tree still has a few nuts left on the branches, but the racket has slowed considerably. Instead, some of the pathways leading to the garden are now covered in walnuts. As my wife observed, it’s like trying to walk on marbles.
Between that and the noise, it’s enough to drive anyone nuts.
Or squirrelly.
In their early days, New England towns built enclosures like this to constrain livestock that had been captured on the lam and impounded. These days such sites are altogether nostalgic.
Jnana's Red Barn 