Song of Work

Ochre and sienna slashed by tremulous
strains of green— here is where the furrows
were gutted by the wheel. It turned as all
things used for purpose dial to the next
toothed radial: what is it about labor
that burnishes the surfaces it works
over or levels down? Change me,
I begged my beloved, I begged the trees,
the light, the river that never needs to think
about changing course; that must hear
but never knows how difficult to keep one
note sustained, aloft in the dark.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Of time travel and coracles

Time-travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Shortly before I left, I heard a mention on the radio about the effects of jet lag on memory — it sounds worse than marijuana by far. I heeded the advice to expose myself to plenty of sunshine, though (I was fortunate that my visit to Wales and England coincided with an unusually sunny period) and managed to reset my body clock fairly quickly. What I didn’t get used to was the longer day. I would wake up when the blackbirds started singing at dawn and discover that it was only 4:30 in the morning.

Traveling home, of course, I got back the time I lost on the flight over. It was just about the longest morning of my life, starting at midnight when I was en route on the express train from London to the Birmingham airport, continuing for many hours at the airport lounge (I didn’t bother getting a motel room), and then on the flight itself, which left at 9:00, lasted for seven and a half hours, and arrived at noon. I had a window seat at the very back of the plane, and spent much of the time gazing at the tops of clouds from 35,000 feet in a state of mild stupefaction, the combined effect of sleep deprivation, a recently contracted head cold, and the sheer wonder of it all.

The plane was a Boeing 767 and bucked and heaved a lot more than I remembered from my previous intercontinental flights on 747s, and this combined with the wave-like tops of the clouds made it feel almost like a sea voyage. From time to time I’d switch on the screen in the back of the seat in front of me to check our position and verify that we were, in fact, hurtling along at 500 miles per hour. I thought back to my very first day in Wales, when I got a chance to ride in a small, flat-bottomed boat known as a coracle, a version of which the Irish St. Brendan supposedly crossed the North Atlantic in. Thousands of newly hatched mayflies were rising off the river as we took turns trying to pilot the rudderless, slow-going craft against the current.


View on YouTube

The boat had just been made two days before by John and Cathryn Warren, the next-door neighbors to my hosts in Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Peter Wakelin (that’s Peter in the coracle after me; Clive’s voice is in the soundtrack, and he did the filming while I took a turn in the thing). I had simply happened to mention that a good friend of mine in the States was crazy about coracles, and asked if they knew where I might see one.

Somehow the unreality of flying across the Atlantic in a few hours was balanced by the unreality of having my desire to see a coracle instantly granted, sitting in it and finding myself unable to go anywhere very quickly except in circles. In fact, at that moment, there was nowhere I particularly wanted to go. Though the ancient ocean-going coracles did probably have rudders (and according to The Voyage of St. Brendan, could be fitted with a sail), their relative unsteerability constituted part of their attraction to Celtic monks, for whom the ideal form of travel involved surrendering to the will of God and going wherever the winds and currents took them. Some of the more God-besotted ones set off without even an oar. I could see their point. Almost everything — trees, wildflowers, birdsong — was new and miraculous to me, and I wanted nothing more than to stop and soak it in.

*

UPDATE (5/19): I’m honored to report that this post has spawned not one, but two responses from my friend Kristin Berkey-Abbott. Check out “Coracles and Communication,” which includes a poem called “Coracle of Prayer,” at her personal blog, and “Coracles and Currents” at Liberation Theology Lutheran.

You

Mirage, to be reflected— from the French se mirer; from the Latin mirare

Who are you writing to?
Who are you speaking to?

Every question’s pitched

toward a you. Always I and thou,
though no one meets the face
I lower to the sink except its own

reflection glancing back
from the milky porcelain
glazed with water drops,

then glancing up again
through the curtained window
where the one green leaf

at the end of a branch
shakes itself dry and turns
into a hummingbird.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Siren songs

London by bus
London at night, from the top of a double-decker bus

I was woken at 6:37 a.m. by a nearby police siren. This wouldn’t seem so remarkable if I were still staying in London, or Aberystwyth, or Brooklyn, but I was home in my own bed in Plummer’s Hollow. Why had my unconscious mind decided to awaken me in this manner? I pondered it briefly, turned over and went back to sleep.

English harbour
English harbour (from the collection of Clive Hicks-Jenkins)

When the plane lifted off from the Birmingham airport Monday morning and flew west over the English and Welsh countryside, I got a brief view of fields and villages dwindling below before the clouds closed in. Picturesque, bucolic? You bet. I felt a pang of sorrow to be leaving my friends — old ones and newly made alike — and wondered when or if I’d ever visit the UK again. But many hours later, as I stared through the bus window at the lush and seemingly uninhabited forests of northeastern Pennsylvania, groggy as I was from almost two days without sleep and a recently contracted head cold, my spirits soared. This was exactly the way I used to feel years ago in Japan, whenever I’d escape the city and take a train into the mountains: giddiness, as if meeting an old flame, combined with a sense of deep satisfaction. Yes, Wales was green, too, but much of that green was pasture; the mostly bare, sheep-haunted hills struck me as stark and sad.

marionettes
marionettes from the collection of Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I like cities, I really do. While killing time in Manhattan yesterday afternoon, I paid to enter the subway and just sit on the platform for a while, enjoying the ambient soundscape, eavesdropping and people-watching. Few people anywhere are as flamboyant and interesting as New Yorkers. The thunder of the trains approaching and receding in their dim burrows evoked the romance of travel as well as anything, I thought. It seemed an appropriate coda for the trip, which had begun with a visit to an old friend in Brooklyn on May 1.

Cemetery piano
Piano-shaped tombstone at Highgate Cemetery, London

When I finally dragged out of bed this morning and sat out on the porch with my coffee, though, I was gobsmacked. I’d gotten home late the previous night, so this was my first good look at the mountain, and man, did it ever change in the last two weeks! The oak leaves were just beginning to burst their buds when I left. Now the edge of the woods is once again a solid wall of green, the grass is high, and birds I haven’t heard in more than half a year were calling in the rain: yellow-billed cuckoo, red-eyed vireo, Baltimore oriole. I heard a scarlet tanager’s chit-bang call, followed a few seconds later by a cameo of the singer himself on a black walnut branch, an ache of red against the greenery. A hen turkey clucked nearby, presumably with chicks somewhere in tow. Huge success as the trip may have been, I’m glad it didn’t last any longer than it did. It’s good to be home.

For a different recollection of my trip, from one of my hosts, see “Boots” at twisted rib blog.

Letter to Nostalgia

City I once wore like a shawl
on my shoulders, the soft brown outlines
of your hills and valleys the first thing I saw
coming in at dawn on the lowland bus—
Where will I see again except in memory
such astonishing green, or the deep sapphire
of a sky outlining trees that push through sheer
outcroppings of rock? And it’s true, nothing
I’ve seen abroad holds a candle to this view:
early morning light glinting off rooftops,
the cry of bean curd vendors in the streets;
my children once, in their own youth, holding out
bowls by the gate for a taste of this sweet.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Letter to Duty

Dear shadow busy in the nest under the springhouse
eaves, see how the bird feeds its young. A phoebe hovers,
bug in its beak, tail like a tapping foot. Oh industry,
ah marriage, that long list of errands unscrolling
with its own kind of fervor after days and nights in
the sunlit meadow— Is this all that remains
of desire’s candle that burned, its two seared
ends meeting in the middle? It can’t be so, else how
could I still quicken, years and years later,
to the unexpected heralds of warmth returning?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Landscape with Shades of Red

Cranberry, Sparkling Berry, True Red, Movie Star Red, Red Delicious, Sunset Red— how many names for these little tubes of pigment lined up on a drugstore wall? My older daughters and I come here to find a name for the color of our changing moods. In the fall we turn to russet shades, to nutmeg and chocolate and spice; in spring we might crave the fluttery pink of orchids, the softer wistfulness of mauve. But here we are on the precarious brink of summer— just like that pair of tanagers foraging in the rain, not two feet from the porch: though it is the male in his costume of brash red that trails the drab female onto a branch, and returns my level gaze. Of course it is the same old story all over again. The Beatles sing “Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?” and Mrs. Robinson lights her cigarette, rolls her stockings back up her legs. Elaine and Benjamin have barred the church door shut and are running, running away and into the bus.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In a Hotel Lobby, near Midnight

Pick-up Lines

You’re 50; I’m 50. So what do you want
to do about it? Even Emerson had cabin
fever. Being in the woods so much,
you’d like just once to feel the mud.
All that walking about, carrying the soul
like glowing embers in buckets. That’s
too big a responsibility. And when
something’s hot like that, it’s better off
meeting something just as hot.
How about we try for some joy?

Response

Correction, I’m not quite 50. And mud is no
big deal, since women have typically more to do
with it than fussing over how their boots have gotten
dirty (have you tried to get it off denim or canvas?)
—Walking, walking, with no destination or design,
no pressing agenda other than reflection: now that’s
something I’d like to have the leisure to do. Scribble
in a notebook, pause, scribble again; look up in the trees
where the squirrels run like thoughts as yet unbound;
then come in at no set time to tea, or rum; or more quiet.
As for those glowing embers we carry around in buckets–
I’ve come to love the way they burn like gathered stems
of flame willow, like fiery clusters on flame trees: staunch,
insistent, not so easily summed up or dismissed; vivid
hurt against silver-white canes of the ghost bramble.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Study for St. Kevin and the Blackbird

in response to a drawing by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

The blackbird has built a caravan park
on a roundabout where five roads
join a hot pale highway.
What led her to choose the straight & narrow
over a hedge’s Medieval maze of streets?
She eyes the lights, which only blink,
& cocks her head at the pulse
of unseen traffic.