Cibola 95
Reader (15)
Now let us return to our beautiful and delightful castle and see how we can enter it. . . . But you must understand that there are many ways of “being” in a place. Many souls remain in the outer court of the castle, which is the place occupied by the guards; they . . . have no idea what there is in that wonderful place, or who dwells in it . . .
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Interior Castle
Ah! The omen for staying here is not easy on things with souls.
A slave passes a late evening;
A slave doesn’t stay long among you.
He has become the jujube, one long mound of dirt.
Jujubes have become the hero’s portal.
The tree of life has become the covering for his nakedness.
SEYDOU CAMARA
Kambili (translated by Charles S. Bird et. al.)
The Hook
We’re in The Hook Natural Area in the Bald Eagle State Forest of Central Pennsylvania, 5,000 acres of silence and pollen. The 100-year-old forest is beginning to close in: open above, darker and denser below. Young hemlocks rising beneath the canopy of birch and oak resume their millennial project of bringing soil to the rock-strewn hillsides, needle by needle.
Black and yellow birch limbs torn down by January’s ice storm have one final flowering on the ground. Catkins long as fishing worms release clouds of yellow smoke as we clear the branches from the trail. I wonder if the parent trees can feel this reflex flowering of their dismembered parts, the way a human amputee is said to be bothered from time to time by the unscratchable itching of a ghostly foot? Pollen, like rain, falls equally on the just and the unjust. By the end of our two-mile walk, my boots have turned a gangrenous shade of green.
I kneel and crouch and lie on my belly, trying for an acceptable shot of an obvious subject. But the charms of painted trilliums aren’t as obvious as they first seem; these flowers are far more recondite than their large and showy cousins the wake-robins, for example. Given a better camera, would I see half as much? Each clump of trilliums tempts me with new possibilities, unique arrangements – redemption! But the picture taken in haste, with little thought, turns out the best.
For sheen, there’s shining club moss, rhododendren. Almost every other surface – living or dead, organic or inorganic – harbors some patina, colorful assemblages of moss, algae, fungi, lichen, monera. I think of all the orders of angels: so many different ways to feed on light and nourish shadows. The first-succession black birches and oaks will take years to rot, slowly releasing their sweetness back into the soil, long after this barely recognizable hemlock stump will have dissolved into the slightest pimple on the forest floor.
Hobblebush blooms at the bottom of a ravine, acres of ankle-breaking talus guarding it from its nemesis, the white-tailed deer. In the late afternoon sun, the blossoms glow as white as any warning meant to make a deer turn tail. A nearby waterfall already plays on night’s changes, oblivious to the drought that elsewhere cracks the moss. Why “hobblebush,” I wonder, for such a limber tree? Its shadow stretches skinny wet fingers over and under the stone.
Butterfly effect
A Boston Globe editorial entitled “Driving Out the Butterflies,” by Derrick Z. Jackson, concluded with my nomination for Quote of the Week:
Monarchs as a species are not endangered, but the migration is. The butterfly is losing its wintering mountains in Mexico, where millions of them famously cluster, to illegal logging. In its summer grounds of the United States and Canada, fragmentation happens in the form of sterilization. Suburban tracts and their asphalt and pesticide-protected lawns are wiping out meadows. On farms, herbicides meant to protect crops wipe out everything else….
“At some point, the fabric starts to unravel,” [biologist Lincoln] Brower said. “People ask me, What’s the difference whether we have a monarch migration or not? I say, Why do we care about the Mona Lisa or classical music? We care because it is a cultural treasure. We have to start viewing the natural world as a cultural treasure.”
This in turn reminded me of Pennsylvania poet Harry Humes’ poem “Butterfly Effect,” from his book of the same name. Humes riffs on the image from Complexity Theory, popularized by James Gleick in his 1988 bestseller Chaos, of a storm’s ultimate origin in something as minor as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on other side of the earth.
Women turn away from sifting and measuring,
a man watches a deer stagger,starving, across the frozen river.
The horizon hardly stirs,and all the pianos are silent.
The bright wing of the skydrifts so close you could raise a hand
to it, the air delicateand your fingers itching a little,
as if something had landed there.
In another reminder of just how little we know about this planet against which we are busily committing ecocide, biologists announced this week that a species new to science, from what appears to be a previously unknown family of mammals, has been discovered in the mountains of Laos.
Friday catbird blogging
Outside drinking my morning coffee on the front porch as usual, it’s nice and cold and I get to listen to a wood thrush singing on one side of me and a catbird on the other. I can’t imagine a better way to start the day. In my left ear, lacrimae rerum; in my right ear, Rabelais.
The catbird is the resident master of scatting and improvisation. He lifts the “tinkling bell” theme from the wood thrush song and plays with it like a cat toying with a stunned chipmunk. Poor thing, you think, at the same time admiring the cat’s ability to turn on a dime and pounce. The catbird’s laughter does have a touch of cruelty to it: Such a simpleton! he seems to be saying about the more classically inclined thrush. But the thrush keeps right on singing, a deep well full of sweet water.
An idea pops into my head: Friday catbird blogging. It could be the start of something big!
Unfortunately, though, I don’t have a picture of a catbird, so I’ll have to post one of a cat instead. I’m thinking there might be one or two other bloggers out there who wouldn’t mind the occasional photo of a feline – who knows? Stranger things have happened. Anyway, her name is Margaret. I’ve never heard her sing a single note.
The guest
by Du Fu
(712-770)
It’s spring, so the water’s high
on both sides of my house.
Watch your step.
I’m used to greeting seagulls –
whole flocks of them, every day!
Please excuse the fallen blossoms.
With no other visitors,
I haven’t swept the walk.
You’re the very first guest
to enter by the wicker gate.
Living so far from the market,
our meals are plain – no
fancy dishes. And poor
as we are, our beer’s
a little stale. But
we can invite my old neighbor
to drink with us, if you’re willing.
I’ll give a holler over the fence:
“Come help us finish off
the rest of this beer!”
__________
This translation is dedicated to my friend Chris.
Beer: The Chinese word jiu refers to alcohol in any form. Since most undistilled fermented beverages in East Asia come from grains rather than fruit, it seems more accurate to refer to them as beer rather than wine.
Words on the street
Cibola 94
Marcos (5) (conclusion)
He glances again toward the people
& sees how some of the women
look appraisingly toward those plants
he’d thought were weeds
growing randomly through
the piled rocks–which, he realizes,
follow the contour as regularly
as terraces. Wipe out
any infertility from this land
filling the hungry with
an abundance of good things
so that the poor & needy may praise
Your wondrous name forever
world without end. (Amen.)
The Indian Marcos passes him
the calabash filled with holy water
& he sprinkles it where the elders indicate,
pursing their lips toward the stone
nurseries with their odd crops
which he recognizes now as some relative
of the maguey plant,
leathery green clusters
of upthrust spears. Then
before continuing the procession
they erect an extra, larger cross–
the one Esteban had sent back
with a message to hurry,
the mission fields were ripe–
& since the ground’s too hard
to dig, they pile up stones
pirated from the fields
to form a miniature Golgotha.
Holy Cross, which art the divine
gateway to Heaven, Altar
of the singular essential
sacrifice of the body
& blood of the Son of God,
open for us a safe & peaceful road
for their conversion & for our conversion.
Give our king peaceful possession
of these kingdoms & provinces
for his most sacred glory.
Another holy song,
the interpreter whispers.
He uses still the priestly language,
but we understand that this
is the most important blessing of all
upon the land. The headman
shifts the rogational cross
to his left shoulder. If I have to keep
my face solemn like this
for very much longer, he mutters
to the man beside him, I swear
it’ll turn to wood. Who ever heard
of a god served in sorrow?
But at a signal from the friar he resumes
his stately walk, leading the people
to the next point in the circuit
where long ago First Woman
stippled the soft wet ground
with her planting stick.
__________
Holy Cross . . . glory. I took this formula for the Act of Possession from a quote attributed to the notary and secretary of Juan de Oñate, when he “took possession of all the kingdoms and provinces of New Mexico” in 1598. It actually constitutes a tiny subsection of a very lengthy legal and religious discourse delivered by Oñate on the spot. To read such speeches in close conjunction with translations of Native oratory is to be struck anew by the gulf between the two civilizations.
It was recorded by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a lieutenant under Oñate and subsequent author of Historia de la Nueva México. This work, recently reissued in a bilingual edition by the University of New Mexico Press, is actually an epic poem–one of many 16th- and 17th-century New World epics written by Iberians heavily under the spell of Virgil. It’s unique for its length, for the interminability of its sentences, and for its composition in blank verse rather than rhymed meter. The central drama in the book is the “revolt” (more accurately, resistance) of Acoma Pueblo, just east of Zuni/Shiwanna, ending in a Spanish victory complete with cameos by the Virgin and St. James the Moorkiller.
The double-take
I don’t recognize these photos that are allegedly of me, someone says on a listserve. That’s not who I am. Growing old never seems real. Childhood was real, and the people around us who were old then seemed as though they must have been that way forever. I remember how my grandma used to hum as she moved around the house, a mostly tuneless hum as far as I could tell. I never asked her about it, but I find I do the same thing now, living in the very same house where she and Grandpa spent their summers when I was a kid. Maybe it’s the same hum, too.
The Baltimore oriole has returned to the yard and the wood thrush to the woods, and it’s difficult to escape the impression that these are the very same individuals that have been coming back to sing every year for the past 35 years. The power of songs to outlive us: this is what makes them the true currency of warm-blooded life, the way they bind an aging pulse to an ageless but no less fragile place in the world.
But now it’s almost dark and the birds are still. It’s Monday evening, and I’m sitting on a stump at the bend of the old woods road, resting somewhere between daydream and meditation, too tired for either.
I find that sleep deprivation interferes with my ability to experience joy. It’s nothing for the body to support tension and irritation, but taking deep pleasure in things requires every faculty we possess and then some. Instead, I find myself increasingly abstracted from my body and all of its superstitious attractions and repulsions. I’m listening for the whip-poor-will rumored to be calling at the far end of the property, but all I hear are things rustling in the leaves, jets high overhead, dogs barking in the valley. One of the planets glimmers through the branches of an oak.
There have been some interesting goings-on lately. One of the turkey hunters told us about a wood duck nesting in a hollow oak tree some fifteen feet off the ground, right on the dry ridgetop. He had been sitting against a tree a short distance away, and the duck kept poking her head out to look at him, he said. The nearest pond of any size is a half-mile away at the base of the mountain. How the mother duck intends to lead her ducklings there is beyond me.
On top of the other ridge, there are a few very small vernal ponds, as I’ve mentioned before, but the last one is rapidly drying up in the drought. My mother was up there gazing at the little puddle that remains and wondering if any of the wood frog tadpoles would make it to maturity, when she heard a rustling in the leaves behind her. She turned around and there was the mother bear walking along with one, two, three small cubs bringing up the rear. This marks the fourth time this bear has raised a litter on our end of the mountain, presuming it’s the same mother each time, which would make her about ten years old. The bears paid my mother no mind, just kept going wherever they were going. It’s a rare privilege for a wildlife watcher to be so completely ignored.
The third sighting last weekend was my own: a pair of Cooper’s hawks that kept calling back and forth in an agitated fashion. As long as I stood still, the male was content to sit and watch me from a safe distance, preening his breast feathers, but as soon as I’d move he’d take off again, making a wide arc through the trees, disappearing completely and then reappearing from a different point of the compass. I examined every tree for hundreds of feet in all directions, but couldn’t see any sign of a nest. Like the black bear, these Cooper’s hawks have become regular breeders on the mountain, but only once in the past four years have we managed to find their nest.
The thing I like about nature in general is the sense of complete unpredictability and spontaneity within regular cycles of events. Over at Slow Reads, Peter reports on groundhogs that run unexpectedly straight toward him – and an eccentric neighbor who knows just what to do.
The farmer begins to prance in a circle, raising his hands and knees high and lowering them, and the groundhogs just follow him, prancing in their own way.
Or so his friend Michael told him. I have my doubts. But while Peter was photographing the back end of a rebuffed woodchuck, “Rurality” was face-to-face with a gray rat snake.
I tried to snap a shot when he was scoping me out with his tongue, but none of them turned out too well, and after a while he quit doing it…
I tried to prod him into leaving, but by that time he’d become too relaxed and didn’t want to leave.
The problem with wildlife-watching, it seems, is that the wildlife watches back. This elementary truth sometimes seems lost on those who want nature to resemble a made-for-television drama. I remember a visiting friend one time declining my offer for a guided tour of our woods: “I’ve seen trees before. Boring!” Indeed. Where’s the drama? Most animals spend most of their waking hours doing nothing, wildlife researchers tell us. They have plenty of time to sit and contemplate the frantic to-and-froing of human beings.
Night comes while I wait: I certainly can’t complain about the service! I’m sitting here not expecting anything to happen, and the closer I get to accepting that there is nothing that needs to happen, the straighter I sit. Even in my sleep-deprived state, I’m enjoying the stillness.
But it isn’t like that, really: my life, I mean, or yours either. Apparent stillness is simply an artifact of defective hearing; as I grow older, I should have many occasions to revel in the growing silence. Or maybe I’ll just a hum a little louder. And in all likelihood someone will come by here tonight – on four feet, perhaps, or on two wings – and in the darkness we will recognize each other, we will do what they call a double-take. Any moment now.
Words on the street
