Living in a temperate zone where green returns after gray slumber, I always find the leafy proliferation a wonder. It’s a festive temple, of sorts, and a comfort.
Restore your soul in its abundance.
~*~
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Tag: Poetry
ENDLESS PERSPECTIVES
Rarely do you stand at the summit. It’s a lesson of life.
Even on the trail, the climax awaits, somewhere overhead.
We need something to look up to, from infancy on.
And then there are clouds – or the surrounding range.
Or the streams, threading together, below.
~*~
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TRAIL NOTES FROM MY YOUTH
The lessons remain:
- Travel light.
- Take no more than you need.
- Leave a campsite cleaner than you found it.
Not a bad model for a poem, either. Or a whole collection to pack along the way.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
IN AMESBURY TONIGHT
Just a heads-up for anyone who might want to show up in Amesbury, Massachusetts, tonight. I’m the featured reader at this month’s Prime Time Poets gathering. The open mic starts at 6:30 in the Market Square Bakehouse, 5 Market Square, just a few blocks from John Greenleaf Whittier’s home. And, yes, I’ll be paying homage to Whittier in his more topical, acerbic vein.
Once again, Bryan P.T. Riley has put together a lively slate of reader for the coming months. Here we go!
FORGET ZEUS AND HERA, FOR NOW
The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.
It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.
Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.
~*~
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HEDGES AND SHRUBS ABOVE, WHO KNOWS WHAT DOWN UNDER
If you garden, unless you have a pickup truck or access to one, you’ll have to decide what to do with the limbs and branches you trim. Bagging them for the dump’s a pain. One thing you don’t see in the colorful gardening books, of course, just may be essential. I’m speaking of the brush pile. Especially if you can’t get a burn permit due to neighborhood density.
The wood breaks down over time, however slowly, but the pile does provide refuge for small critters as well as kindling for our wood-fired stove through winter.
It’s all part of working our plot, with an emphasis on composting and natural balance.
In an urban setting like ours, rejuvenating the soil itself can be a revelation. Items keep coming to the surface from somewhere underground – stones, glass, costume jewelry, bits of metal or plastic objects. Nothing prepared me for the spaceman, though – the one holding a pair of pliers. No, he topped the toy horse and the Neanderthal with a club, for certain.
~*~
For more on the book and others, click here.
REFLECTING ON MY COLLECTED ROSES
How long ago these events seem!
Yet, they still bloom.
Even through winter.
~*~
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JUST WAITING TO SHOW OFF
As the snow melts away, you look. Intensely. At the openings. Find snowdrops already blossoming. And then all the rest that’s been active.
~*~
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WHERE DO YOU ORDER YOUR SEEDS?
Yes, we know all about the catalogs and the pondering that happens each January, along with the flurry of ordering. If you’re a gardener, you’ve wrapped all that up and have the seed packets in hand.
So where are your favorite sources? And why?
And if you need inspiration or simply want company or comfort, consider the experiences in these poems:
For more on my poetry collection and others, click here.
IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHENTIC AMERICA
As I said at the time …
I’m a sucker for writing that stays close to the grain of everyday experience. The charge often leveled against such transparency or luminosity accuses such work of being “superficial” or even “banal.” (Recently, I saw a blast of “shallow” fired at one poet, and I’m still angry – maybe I just don’t have a lot of patience anymore with work that baffles me more than it informs or moves emotionally or spiritually. After more than a quarter-century of returning repeatedly to his pieces, I’m still amazed at their depth and continuing revelations.)
You also seem quite aware of what I call the “motor oil” dimension, something I think is required in the sustained voice of any current, authentic American artist: an ability to acknowledge the oil stains and discarded cans in the American landscape – urban or rural. It comes up as cigarette butts, the Port-o-John, the neighborhood Arby’s, or the sounds you detail. Makes the beauty of the turtles all the more authentic. (By the way, what is the sound of a turtle’s voice?)
Turtles – like serpents – go into realms humans cannot. Must be part of their mythological empowerment.
Hmm, thinking of Snyder again, how his Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems came from summer employment, as a forest fire lookout atop icy Sourdough Mountain, while yours was more Siddhartha-like along a muddy river. Also, of the gentle humor I’ve admired so much in Brautigan’s work, also present here.
~*~
For my own resulting poems, click here.
Jnana's Red Barn 