A Song

 https://youtu.be/PsXGzblg7Ws?list=RDKiV7Vo9k8RM

“Green Eyes”

Kate Wolf

The Balance

What I wrote on Father’s  Day           

Gunnar throttled one of Peter’s hens today. Amid the peace of a near-perfectly-knit day, an unusual day composed of good will, love, & a nod to convention, a dog did what he is wired to do: unsupervised for  a moment he chased a hen, and as is in his nature, he broke her neck. We have no idea how Gunnar got to her. 

We all screamed, thrashing in the brutal intersection of nature & opportunity. The garden dimmed, the silence shattered into the noises we made that surely reached the lakes, because she was not the first hen to encounter her demise thusly. Andrew’s two golden retrievers and our Gunnar, a German shorthair (we’ve not known which culprit), have sadly been the agents of similar untidy ends of three hens of those we’ve started raising, in the last three years, for their eggs and their wondrous, unknowable presences on our patch of dirt and hopeful ground. 

We have worked to adjust, accommodate, learn and tap into rural wisdoms about harmonies among the inhabitants of our place. 

Earlier, I sat in a quiet moment in our bedroom, penning a ditty on a card for Peter on this Father’s Day. To steady my hand, I pulled a book from a pile underneath a small antique side-table from my long-deceased and much adored arch and witty uncle. He periodically shipped me an old piece, an ancient ratty Persian carpet, family photos reproduced from his ordered and catalogued archives, ensuring he’d always be with me in the ways that material touch can carry memory. 

Peter had given me the book, Ghosts, by Roger Clark, nine years ago for my birthday. I’d started to read it, became distracted, and there it sat, pulsing away for its moment, or should I say, there it sat, brimming with momentous resonances I could never have imagined, waiting for revisiting. 

Peter buried his sweet pullet behind the pond, at the corner of the pasture she’d pecked and explored as she was let out of the coop every day, and I sat on the patio, angry and heartsick with the image of this feathered clump of life twitching her end as we cried and roared at Gunnar. I’d accused the goldens and had to shout my apologies to Andrew, who came running from his back barn, when Peter told me, no, no, with tears streaming, it was Gunnar. 

There is a stillness when the twilight comes. Vesper, the time of evening, a prayer, the liminal slow-turning from one day into the next, from the known to the unknown, when all that breathes and persists, all that went before until it became today, moves on, inexorably. The day is soon to be done. 

I’d been sitting on the patio, sad. We aren’t farmers, perhaps inured to scenes like this. We’re people who searched for an edge environment, eschewing certain conveniences and  habituations that ease the demands of daily life for others. Perhaps we overreacted, but we are learning and each time we lose an animal—mostly our pets— we grieve. When we’ve lost our pasture animals we vow to come closer to whatever lessons await to enable our improvements as their caretakers.

I’d brought Ghosts downstairs after penning the card for Peter. I opened it up again, to my long-ago bookmark. 

I can’t say exactly why, but as I read and drifted away into the pages, which are not about proving whether or not ghosts are real, but, as Clark writes, about what we see when we see a ghost, and the stories we tell each other about them, of a sudden I looked up. 

The world, my world, our world, stopped for an instant.

The colors of the landscape strobed brighter, the green away to the pond intense, the potted floral pinks and hots of what I think of as our patio garden room heating into the nanosecond; nothing moved, and there, in homeostasis, the gift of homeostasis, all the wee souls buried here, our beloved pets and creatures, the energies and persistences of those humans as well who came before us here, alive in their pasts in the old farmhouse built in 1842, all, all arrived in some fullness in the panoply that can never be measured or retained. 

The air in a moment gone forever was vibrant; all was balanced. I took a photo. Every night the sun going down glows for some seconds in a purely round verdant aperture amid the tangled honeysuckle, spirea and evergreen, a golden orb, and then gone, as it rolls on its westward journey. 

I don’t know why, but I was calmed. Homeostasis. All is well.



The Finger Lakes Six June

 So. I listened to this on my way into Ithaca to work this morning… 

https://open.spotify.com/track/1Uqsh9xaDNEJHgi5mZWjE6?si=ugxXcXmXSiu0F05dJYGt1w&context=spotify%3Asearch

I stepped out into thick smoke from wildfires that crossed Canada west to east, burning in Québec’s 600 sq miles of forest. I looked at the wind map, to see the swooping ladle of winds into the Ohio Valley and then the flowing turn into our strange skies. Now in this night we learn there are 135 new fires 🔥 in Québec, perhaps 250 miles as the crow flies from these deep long lakes… 

Here no one is outside and few people on the road; the smoke penetrates my nostrils even with the house closed up and my vehicle closed up. I woke up coughing near to choking, eyes watering all the day. In the City people are wearing masks again; I saw a few on the virtually empty Ithaca streets. 

It was so eerie, and this haunting and beautiful piece pulled me into the strangest peace… we have done this, we humans have. Look how this sorrow quiets everything… elsewhere people and animals flee the flames. Here, we float into a barely-known new reality, fire, and there, in Ukraine, the Russians blew up Kherson Dam, and humans and animals and cities drown… and this is how it ends: Fire and Water. But the piece took me somewhere. I just can’t begin to excavate it, and perhaps because of my unwillingness to fight in the moment, the odd, deep, inexplicable solace of the tones and emotions from an ancient world consoled me.

Paragraph

My brother said to me 

I should write it all down, 

But when I was talking with him

About this stasis and my flooding mind, 

we were walking

In a grove of pecan trees

In the valley of the Rio and

I forgot to tell my brother that 

I can’t write it all down

Until I find the words in my head,

Not rustling like butterflies 

Under old cottonwoods along

The river, walking with you 

Hito, along the 

Rio Grande

Hito, I say

Some years ago you gave me advice

As always, as it’s always been, 

You tell me things I need to know 

Have you words again? 

I turn out the light, no new day coming on yet, just 

This day ending 

And for some seconds 

Everything twinkles, points of light 

I guess, leftover from taking in

Sun, clear high blue sky, heat 

Harbinger of solstice 

Still a promise only felt, 

Sparking all around in the dark that 

Quickly gathers in a room screened 

Open to the pulsing night 

Outside my bedroom window 

The sky is plush and deep, 

Like the rolling marine when the

Only light left somewhere in the North Atlantic

When we were sailing in my dreaming

Is what silver taps 

The tips of waves in moonlight 

Here, the patch of moon 

Without my spectacles on appears 

Like quartered, silvering gold hanging 

A fire in far sky

I think for a moment that 

You are under this sky too

Just some things I wanted to tell

You, Hito

No worrying sense of them,

There never has been

Tu me manques

Not Sure

 Somewhere Over the Rainbow 

Where is that?

I would like to think I might go there 

When I am no longer

Animate and breathing in this 

This

I think 

When I die

I will, I hope 

Call into 

And recall 

My leaving moment

The promise of my own

Energy left behind on

The infinitesimal calendar 

Knowing 

That is all of my own life

Left there

And still, nothing

Nothing

But a pleading blip

 

Spring

 Birds fly low to new loam

Gleaning a bit of twig and brush, 

Lifting off and airborne 

Making home

Plumbing season’s architecture 

Fluttering thru the chill

And more than any hallmarked words

Scientific paginations

Their deep knowing settles 

Into my waiting bones, 

While the 

Geometry of their evidence,

Empiric, always startling anew,

Wings icy winter’s discontent

Into the newborn ether of 

Just an ordinary day.

Tiptoe

I’ve lost myself in a wilderness

Not entirely of 

My own making though 

It does have roots in 

My sloth, laziness I guess,

My unwillingness

To push through agitations that rose up,

Rise up, burble up,

Fragments I seem unwilling to 

Lasso and beat into these barren, 

Unkempt and 

Fallow fields, these caverns

Missing 

Some chance to join the 

Rooted wilderness 

I love beyond expressing

But I’m lost to that rich, spare landscape

In these last unpresent months. 

Year. Years. I do not know. 

If I want to be kind to myself I say

That I’ve been marinating

Perhaps

Perhaps not

Perhaps wishes, lies, dreams, truths and 

Gazing across landscapes, into skies, 

Stirring ancient questions 

Are nothing more than indulgences

But I wish to find a fulcrum

I have been unable to put 

Plea and deep heart into a universe 

I no longer understand, 

If in fact I ever did, save now and then in 

Some infinitesimal starry, 

Momentary nexus that comes along 

Brushed when precious worlds 

Collapse together 

Still, my affair with words and spaces, 

Emptiness, color, change, the shapes

Of sound and love 

Float stymied and unmoored

In ordinary, endless days.

I do not know if she, I, I guess, can return; 

I’m not hoping 

For any continuity 

I am just being in some way brave

Admitting that if I cannot write 

I cannot imagine how I’ll breathe. 

In the fragile, loamy new days 

Portending spring, I try to take 

Some deeper breaths

I’ve been here in this 

Hilly hallowed hollow before.

Far away, now, I dare to feel 

The ringing bells.