And what will you do with the grail when you have found it?
– Benjamin Disraeli
Nest:
Never empty. Empty.
Chalice, ringworm, birthmark, mole.
Halo, mandorla. The oriole’s aureole.
Home made by instinct, reproducing the architecture of desire.
Mandala. Prayer wheel.
Round because the egg is round.
Round because the breast is round.
Round because the tree is round.
Round because the horizon is round.
Coiled basket. The snake’s embrace.
Gape, gullet, belly.
A big fat zero.
The kind of thing I write when I don’t know what else to write, gazing at the hairy nest of my navel.
“People say snails carry their homes around with them. But I think because they secrete their whorled calcium carbonate shells out of their own bodies and cannot be detached from them (in life) we should say snails are their own homes.
“They can close the front door with the operculum at the end of their stomach-foot.”
– ever so humble
“How alert and vigilant the birds are, even when absorbed in building their nests!”
– John Burroughs, Wake-Robin
Words on the street
Raincrow
Yesterday around noon and again this morning early, a black-billed cuckoo has been calling from the woods’ edge. He sounds like the spirit-world counterpart of his commoner cousin the yellow-billed.
Cuckoos of either species are mysterious birds, so oftener heard than seen, skulking in the thickest parts of the forest canopy where they wait motionless for long periods before rocketing into action, ambushing their caterpillar prey. “Cuckoos eat many spiny caterpillars and the spines stick in the lining of the stomach,” the webpage for the black-billed cuckoo informs us. “The stomach lining is periodically shed to remove the spines.”
The first time I got a good look at one, I realized suddenly where those long, narrow-bodied birds in Pennsylvania German folk art came from. Messenger of love, said Europeans about the cuckoo’s old-world namesake, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds so it can spend all its time in courtship. Raincrow, the Indians called both the yellow- and black-billed cuckoos for their tendency to call more frequently before storms. They also typically return at the same time as the early-summer rains.
The cuckoo is one of the last neotropical migrants to arrive in North America and has very little time to build a nest, find a mate, lay its eggs and raise its young. To do so, it has evolved a unique nesting strategy. It is able to time its egg laying with outbreaks of insects (especially caterpillars) so that it has a rich food source for itself and its young. Its incubation/nestling period is the shortest of any known bird. Its egg develops rapidly, and at hatching is one the heaviest of all North American songbirds. This is because the chick will have very little rearing time before embarking on its transcontinental migration – it must complete much of its development while still in the egg and come out ready to go. The nestlings are fledged from the nest 6-7 days after hatching, and are off to South America at three or four weeks of age.
Thus the Center for Biological Diversity, based in the western U.S. where the yellow-billed cuckoo is nearly extinct as a result of habitat destruction.
This morning at first light a thrush flies past the porch on loud wings, like a fast smack of oars against the surface of a pond. A bat loops and dives, half-visible against the darker trees. It has been astonishingly humid, with daily and sometimes hourly thunderstorms. The raincrows call almost without a pause. Walking in the woods has become, for me, a misery of sweat and deerflies. If the air were any thicker, we would need periscopes to find our way.
*
GROWTH
Mind poised at
the tipping point
in a fantasy of perpetual motion
like an old-fashioned toy,
wooden bird hinged
at the hips that bends
again & again into
the undiminished fuel
of its reflection.
Last week, I saw
the sun in the surface
of a bog: it bubbled.
It trilled like a toad.
The alchemists
would be pleased, mercury
now lurks nearly everywhere.
Its needle threads the eye
of mother’s milk, quick-
silver fin & feather, legs
of a heron. Extract
of death, let us dance.
Let our bones be honey-
combed with light.
Bulbous, wedded
to our rituals,
we take turns bending
at the hips.
Words on the street
Henri Cole: poet of the in-between
The May/June 2004 issue of American Poetry Review (Vol. 33, No. 3) contains five poems and an interview with Henri Cole, a prominent American poet I hadn’t spent any time with until now. Finding the poems excellent, I waded through the interview, which presented a stark contrast between an eager-to-impress and full-of-himself interviewer and the very straightforward and humble-sounding Cole. Here are a few quotes that particularly impressed me, followed by a poem.
Sometimes, I prefer the company of animals and flowers to humans, who are often not what they appear to be. But is it possible that male and female desire, including gay and straight desire, is all the same thing? That when we lie in the grass and look at the moon or at the face of the loved one, we (man or woman, gay or straight) see the same thing, which is love – an element as pure as oxygen?
* * * *
I have many artist friends. I envy them the physicality of their work. I admire their wonder and horror before the universe. I love the sensuality of their color. “As is painting, so is poetry,” Horace said. At home and faraway, I see all the paintings I can, not to take something from them, but to try to bring more power to my language. Or to put it in another way, I want to borrow from the concrete world and project it into the realm of the abstract, where the lyric exists. My artist friends constantly challenge me to see in an unformulaic, unsentimental way. I’d trade words for paint in a minute, if I thought I would be any good.
* * * *
Why I write when I do remains a mystery and an adventure – even after twenty-five years. The silences in-between are a greater mystery and, also, a source of anxiety. The two biggest influences on my work are sleeping and reading. I wish I could do them simultaneously. They make the little hamster of the unconscious run wild on its wheel. Szymborska says, “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.'” I like the sound of that.
* * * *
The women poets writing today are stronger than the men. This just seems so obvious. We men have written ourselves into a little narrative corner, where we write very confident, professional poems with all the affects of poetry, but the reader feels no explosion of consciousness. This, in my view, is the most dreaded destiny.
* * * *
In my 20’s and 30’s, Allen Ginsberg and James Merrill were gay models of the Dionysian and Apollonian. They were like opposing magnets, and it seemed to me there was nothing in between. Though as a young poet I drank happily from the cup of the Apollonians, as I’ve matured, I’ve sought a hybrid of the two. How to be Apollonian in body and Dionysian in spirit – that is my quest.
* * * *
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH HORNETS
Hornets, two hornets buzz over my head;
I’m napping and I cannot keep my eyes open.
Do you come from far away? I ask, dozing off.
My gums are dry when I wake. A morning breeze
rakes the treetops. I can smell the earth.
The two hornets are puzzling over
something sticky on the night table,
wiping their gold heads with their arms.
Little things are like symbols. My eyes are watery
and blurred. Then I lose myself again.
I’m walking slowly in a heat haze,
my vision contracted to a tiny porthole,
drawing me to it, like flourishing palms.
I can feel blood draining out of my face.
I can feel my heart beating inside my heart,
the self receding from the center of the picture.
I can taste sugar under my tongue.
All the usual human plots of ascent
and triumph appear disrupted.
Crossing my ankles, I watch the day
vibrate around me, watch the geraniums
climb toward the little mountains
where I was born, watch the black worm
wiggling out of the window box,
hiding its head from the pale sun
that lies down on everything,
purifying it. Lord, teach me to live.
Teach me to love. Lie down on me.
– Henri Cole
Words on the street
Home economics
Sometimes you need to live with other people in order to learn deep truths about yourself. Until last week, when my brother and his family moved in for an extended stay, I had no way of knowing that I had turned into this fussy old person who shuffles around the house turning off lights that others have left on.
In other words, someone with a strong resemblance to my old man.
(In many other ways, of course, Dad and I remain strikingly different people. For example, while Dad keeps two pens and a stack of 3×5 index cards in his left-hand shirt pocket to serve as a kind of retro PDA, I use a small, spiral-bound memo pad and get by with just one pen. And while he reads travel books right before bed, I read blogs.)
The other week, I decided on a sudden whim to trample a path through the weeds to the electric meter on the side of my house. An hour later, as luck would have it, the meter man showed up. Seeing a new face, I walked out to introduce myself and make sure he found the box for my parents’ house, as well. Sizing up the house and grounds, he said, “You’re a bachelor, aren’t you?”
This last recollection was sparked by a post on bungalows at not native fruit, which includes some photos of cottages half-swallowed by gardens nearly as wild as mine. Karen writes,
[A] small house is like a spiritual master. It teaches you to be disciplined, to minimize your possessions, to keep things clean and neat, to respect other people’s needs for space. You get organized, living in a small house, or you go bananas.
My spiritual master has porcupines under the dining room, groundhogs under the guest bedroom and black snakes over the kitchen. Small as this house is, it was built haphazardly in stages over the course of 150 years, with the result that it now encloses an inordinate amount of climate-controlled wildlife habitat – spaces over, under and between rooms that are virtually inaccessible to humans. Thus, even during the long stretches when I have no guests or family members sharing my space, I am never really alone. Plus, I almost never have to set traps for the white-footed mice in my kitchen. I think there’s an important spiritual lesson there.
“A small house can be comfortable and incredibly COZY,” Karen adds. Presumably, this is the experience of the shy woodland creatures who have chosen to live among us. I’m quite certain it’s true for Steve, Karylee and baby Elanor, who almost always seems pretty comfortable, as long as her diapers are dry. And sharing a rather small space with several other people instills invaluable spiritual lessons in consideration, conflict avoidance strategies and mutual respect.
Another spiritual service provided by my house is that, in really hot and humid weather such as we have been enjoying here off and on for much of the past month, it doubles as a sweat lodge. I can go upstairs for a siesta and emerge an hour later feeling relaxed and peaceful to the point of stupefaction.
Does living in a small house force me to minimize my possessions? No. Living without a steady income forces me to minimize my possessions. Yesterday, I walked all around the sidewalk sale of a local summer arts festival and admired many, diverse displays of craft-like objects without feeling any urge to pull out my wallet – except briefly for the hanging pink flamingo planters made from recycled tires. Then we went into a nearby bookstore and I dropped $30 bucks. Hey, it was a sale. I saved at least ten dollars. And, small as my house is, there’s always plenty of room for more books.
Some birds
DRYOCOPUS
Why do they call it drumming, what pileateds do? Why not knocking? A tree is more door than drum. Bark bears little resemblance to skin or cured hide. But the hammered beats of a pileated woodpecker are far more rapid than any rap of a knuckle – too fast, in fact, for a casual listener to count. Can we imagine being summoned by such a sound? What winged visitant bears a blazing crest & is given to such bouts of maniacal laughter? What door opens downward, into the earth?
BLAZON
Wet from its bath, a scarlet tanager lands on a dead branch in the midday heat like a hallucinated fruit. This is that hoarse singer, I think, that robin with a frog in its throat. I watch from the porch as he pivots twice, then darts up out of sight: less an exotic morsel than the rampant tongue.
MNEMONIC
“Oh, that?” I said – & thus the otherwise unremarkable, two-syllable song of the Acadian flycatcher might as well be committed to memory.
IN THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY
Making oneself at home in a bone-dry thorn scrub no one else could love & hailing all visitors: this is the golden-cheeked warbler’s perilous way.
TROUBLE IN MIND
A pair of starlings up under the eaves is for us, out here in the hills, a novel occurrence. Though with my gaze drawn so often lately toward the northeast, my thoughts circling that high bog set in a ring of mountains & the nearby hollow full of ancient hemlocks – blank spaces bristling with arrows on the highway engineer’s map – with all that on my mind, it takes me a while to notice these two new tenants, noisy as they are.
But the male starling’s a ventriloquist, I swear he can throw his voice. And his range – odd rasping cries, hollow knocks with thrush-like runs dubbed in… I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t caught him in the act, beak ajar. Black wings flopped & rattled with each convulsive ripple of the nape, spilling iridescence in the noonday sun. As if he’d swallowed some dark rainbow & was trying to bring it back up.
The journal I’m always meaning to keep could well carry the title Year of the Starlings, were it not for this other thing that’s been robbing me of sleep: nothing but an engineer’s wet dream, an impossible outcome, I try & tell myself, even as night after restless night fixes it more & more firmly in my mind’s eye. Yesterday morning we all heard, quite distinctly, an infant wailing from somewhere in the middle of the sky. I run around the house & there sits the starling on the ridge of the roof, head cocked to one side like a diabolical robin, waiting for some untimely nightcrawler to make a move.
(Originally written in 2002. Proposed routes for a highway bypass through Rothrock State Forest, east of State College, PA, were eventually removed from consideration after intense public pressure.)
FREE BIRD
In every flock of blue jays, there’s one who learns to impersonate a red-tailed hawk, does a spot-on rendition of that piercing shred of sky. You’ve heard it, whether you know it or not: on TV & in the movies, it’s the literal call of the wild, regardless of geography.
One can understand how a mob of jays might respond to the shriek of a police whistle. But humans hear fierce defiance & thrill to images of freedom: straight through the wilderness, a highway traveled by a lone SUV while some generic eagle-like bird circles a nearby peak.
The real redtail picks at carrion by the side of the interstate or chases pigeons in Central Park, alternately aped & persecuted by the brazen jays.
Words on the street
