One Brilliant Day

The stratus prevailed.

This morning, half the sky was an amazing flying circus of cirrus clouds, swooshing this way and that, combining with altocumulus in a holy mackerel circus, and even jollying a pallet of gray cirrostratus undulatus. It was quite a show at eight a.m., and the sky was a wide-eyed arena of barnum and bailey blue. I was glad I'd given in and driven Matt to school just to see that madcap chalkboard from a stoplight ringside seat.

But now it's three twenty-three and the sky is all pale gray, all stratus, vast as an elephant's backside. Betokening change. The meteorologists can read the signs. The rest of us are dumbfounded gawkers and sky illiterates, except for a field guide knowledge of the basic Latin names paired with a page of photos. Except those don't show the change, and weather is an ocean of change. An ocean of Chang. A sea surface full of changes, like that great poem by Wallace Stevens, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds."

Yesterday's notes:  

The thaw continueth. Must be close to sixty today. We are 

grinning our way into global warming like frogs admiring the roomy quarters of an alligator's maw. 

Me too. I've got my soup and corn muffin outside of Jam 'n 

Java on a picnic table for all to see as an advertisement of the day. Though someone might justly tell me, "Don't encourage it." Like the mother I passed on the bike path who was telling her child: "Old Man Winter says, 'It's not time for spring 

flowers!' "  Which in turn reminds me of a line in a poem by 

Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly. It's the last line:

The Wind, One Brilliant Day     

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

'In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses.'

'I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.'

'Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.'

the wind left.  And I wept.  And I said to myself:
'What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to

you?'



*



Have we woken our garden up when it should be sleeping?

Will the four inches of snow

tomorrow lull it back to sleep? 
      

Nature calls

Maybe I'm ready to visit here again. I'm missing nature. In a dream, a tiny ocelot causes mayhem. In my real day, a goose stumbles. And my friend Marjie sent me a poem by Robert Frost that begins:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

So here are two to slide into the new year.

Dream Menagerie

In my dreams, it’s the fierce hawk in the tree and the lion trying to get in the window. It’s an elusive spring trove of songbirds or migrating flocks like a windstorm of leaves. There are vermin—mice in the kitchen, fearsome insects in terrariums. And wolf packs, large herbivores, even giant yeti-like humanoids. All, I suppose, are my personal fauna: the nature I used to pursue like an ardent suitor, trying to decode its inscrutable messages; the predatory obligations that pursue me through life; the physical world itself of which I am an atomic anatomic reorganization.  

Last night it was a tiny ocelot chasing I’m not sure what, a rodent or a bird, moving unbelievably fast around a wooded backyard similar to the one of my childhood in Connecticut. My sympathies were with the prey, but the little ocelot, no bigger than a finger puppet, matched it twist for twist, turn for turn, finally catching up with it on the branch of a bare tree that came crashing down.

This was deeply upsetting to the hostess of the party and lady of the house. These were her rare and precious trees. Somehow I was to blame; I and others had released the tiny ocelot, had not reckoned on its destructive ferocity. But the dream was also about creating.  In attendance at this party—the guest of honor—was my mentor, Frederick Busch (novelist and former teacher of mine who died seven years ago). We talked. He urged me to become a tavernier, a tavern poet. (This troubadour, never before named—a kind of folk/Beat bard of coffee shops—has been appearing regularly in my dreams for the past year or two.)

Trying to be a tavernier is what I am doing here, I suppose: releasing the little ocelot, to see what happens.

*

The Indecisive Goose

Gray day today. January thaw. Snow shrinking to blebs. I go out on my bike to drop off a bag of bottlecaps (dials for prop washing machines in my son’s play). That done, I ride home along the Mystic River.

15 Canada geese grazing the riverbank between the muddy path I’m on and the roadway. They mainly ignore me, with a few periscope necks popping up now and then: the designated sentinels. One lone goose in the river is coming ashore. I walk my bike ahead to give it room, then look back. It doesn’t join the others but hangs out on the shore. Then I see it stumble and half roll down the stony bank! Never saw a bird lose its balance before. It returns to water, perhaps to restore its dignity. Then it makes for shore again, steps over the small rocks, meaning to join the others, maybe. Who knows? Anyway, thinks better, goes back to water, swims one way, then another, in an indecisive circle. Two geese come flying down to the river with some ado. To help? Harrass? Neither. Splashing down, one of the new geese honks repeatedly from further downstream and I turn to see the rest of the gaggle of geese filing down to the river in a line like a disciplined troop. Hard to avoid the interpretation that one bull goose summoned the others. The indecisive goose does not exactly join them, but swims along at a short distance. Very far downriver I see two swans, bright white against the dark water. I mosey along to see if anything will happen when the geese reach them. On the way, I intercept a flock of probable goldfinches but they are awfully small. Kinglets? No. Redpolls? Wishful thinking. Whichever, a nice convivial flock on a drab day. I’m just upstream from the swans. The geese seem to give them a respectful berth, but no interaction. “Swan.” “Goose.” Just a quiet afternoon on the river.

 

Post Post

Maybe the world did end, briefly. The way that sentence ended. Would anything follow it? Of course. Haltingly, maybe. But nature abhors a vacuum, and vacuums are not especially fond of nature either. For the past year the doorbell has been ringing and it's always the same old Mayan salesman attired in a homespun breechclout, demonstrating his end-of-the-world blowout sale vacuum "with not just one u, but two." You get tired of slamming the door in his face—he's just Mayan his own business, if you will—so eventually you wave him inside, offer him a joint, put on an old jazz CD called "whether the storm?" and hear what the dude's got to say. Turns out not much. He keeps the vacuum in a bell-jar in his lap and never refers to it, much less demonstrates it. To break the ice you ask him what happened to the Mayans anyway, alluding to the mysterious disappearance of their highly advanced civilization? He shrugs, yawns something about the lousy economy, and stretches out on your sofa.  The next morning, he and the vacuum are gone.

So what do we do now, having woken up on 12/22 to find the world miraculously intact? Do we kiss the old girl, the way George Bailey gratefully kissed the broken newel post in his drafty old barn of a house, having been reunited with his own existence at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life"? Or just pick up where we left off, maybe a tad disappointed to be saddled with the same old burdens that an apocalypse would have taken off our backs, fire and brimstone notwithstanding? Or was it just a formal, culture-wide version of the same old second chance we're presented with every morning when the eyes open to the same old but also new world?

Well, whichever: we're all entitled to a fresh calendar with no mistakes and one unspent ticket for a happy new year. May our civilization thrive a little longer.

A Fewness of Vember

There was plenty of vember just a little while ago. But then it got swamped by a rockfall of weather...and an election the size of an asteroid...topped off by the usual visitation of the giant Turkey, accoutered in buckle hat and blunderbuss, with tail feathers stiff and erect in whatever colors you like, but owned by black: stepping across the highways, gobble-gobble-gobble-gobbling, horribly, but meaning no harm. In fact, that long word Thanksgiving, longer than Halloween, longer than Candlemas, hearkens back to a more pious time when people said "gramercy" and "Goodness gracious" and gave prayers of thanksgiving around harvest time. That's what that naked wattly gobble means.

But there were only thirty days of vember, it's one of the humble "hath" months that wears its pants too short, you can see its ankles above its socks, for pete's sake, like june and april and too-short september too. Why not January instead? And now there's none left, no crickets arrayed to carry the tune, no leaves above the waist of the copper beech, no slice of bread to lean against the heel, no stalks of gingembre, no nutmeg for the eggnog, no, no vember!

But all it wanted was a nice elegy, something redolent of burnished blue hard-enamel afternoons and gunmetal gray overcasts, to have felt well-used, hard-working, and it was. In our house it started with "To Kill a Mockingbird," high school play starring Matt Ober as Atticus Finch, the other bird; and ended with a flurry of poems (one below) and two college apps, pointing west to Austin, Texas and southern California. 

*

And the death of a dear cousin, Amy Ober, which no one expected, no one was ready for. We miss her and our dreams are strange and shattered. How can we be walking around without her?

Eclipse

Lying on my bed staring at the ceiling

The bees are vanishing

The water's rising

The banks are failing

The sun is aligned with Jupiter

The lambs are crying

The winds are blowing backwards

The hourglass is empty

And all I can think about is you.

Matt Ober

My square peg in a round month

As a major shareholder in the Sons and Daughters of October 27, I would like to say hello to all my homies, known and unknown, including the guy I met in Ensenada, Mexico some time way back in the seventies or eighties who gave me a drunken abrazo when we discovered we both celebrated our cumpleaño on octubre vento-siete.

I have thanked about half of the better-than-I-am friends who acted on Facebook's nudge that today is my birthday. There is probably a category for the likes of me—a dormant Facebook space-filler who keeps getting messages about other friends' birthdays but does nothing to join that welcoming chorus that has serenaded me today, a ladder of 21 wishes (so far) with affectionate multiple exclamation marks. A birthday sponge am I.

I thought I would be playing "When I'm Sixty-Four" at least once today, but not yet. That number once seemed as old to me as it must have to Paul McCartney when he began writing the song as a teenager. But I've closed the distance in a remarkably short time since back in the sixties when it was a whimsical, wistful lament of sorts of someone looking ahead to when he'll be sixty-four, losing his hair, grandchildren on his knee (Vera, Chuck, and Dave—the perfect names), good for maybe mending a fuse and maybe renting a cottage on the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear, and wondering if he'll still be needed and fed. And now I'm him, as are all the guys I went to school with, the famous, the infamous, and the vast in-between. 

And, yeah, there's some truth to the "Yours sincerely, wasting away" line, but not enough to make it un-ironic. It has more in common with every other number, in that it's a tree ring, basically, a marker; and you look around and say, okay, and oy, and look at the leaves coming down but ain't it bootiful; and while I'm at it, hey there October, you old round pumpkin and apple month, sorry I haven't been writing about you, but I have noticed you're looking especially bon vivant this year, nice colors, good oaks, sorry about the hurricane you're ending with, but I know you're one for drama, and I kind of want the Tigers to win two so it goes back to San Francisco, and, oops, gotta go.

The Cormorant and Me

Wednesday being Yom Kippur, and traditions having shrunk a bit, I take my retreat in two brief installments on the shore of Spy Pond, among the trees behind the baseball field, not far from where Matt and I heard the wing-claps of a flock of swans about ten years ago.

The idea used to be to find a meadow, a glade, a rock, somewhere private, and take stock. Sometimes this was when I was also fasting, so the contemplation would lapse into dozing, irritability, or feelings of virtue. I would ride my pen through random observations of nature and the passage of time, mixed with important revelations of self-improvement. This time I've given myself about fifty minutes, like an appointment with a shrink. I'll settle for a good think.

I seat myself on the thick roots of a maple tree, back against the trunk. I have a nice window on the pond, framed by the maple's overhang and some compound-leaved saplings. Locusts, maybe. I watch a cormorant not far off-shore swallowing a small fish. I don't get excited about cormorants. They resemble loons, the way they sit low in the water, but they're more angular. Their beak tilts upward. They're loons that turn out to be cormorants. I watch this one dive with a quick slithery pounce...then pop up somewhere else a minute later. 

A caravan of gray, laden clouds rolls along the horizon opposite me, betokening rain. The trees are a mixed palette of greens, some yellow, a peek of orange. This balance will change.

Why I do this: 1. Because it feels good to let things happen, randomly: wind in leaves, squealing gull, creaking tree; orderly cloud flow and wind-riffled pond surface, punctuated by the peekaboo appearance and disappearance of the cormorant. 2. Because it feels good to describe things.

The cormorant has climbed up on a big round orange buoy and it is holding its wings outspread like an orchestra conductor. Cormorants have a raw deal. They do not have the oil glands that ducks, geese, loons, and grebes have, to keep them waterproof. So they have to air-dry their wings like clothes on a clothesline between their series of dives, otherwise they might get water-logged.

It strikes me that I have been given a good symbol for the day of atonement. We all have our challenges. I've got Parkinson's, self-absorption issues, motivation issues, etc. Ya want a list? The point is, you've got to meet your challenges with wings outspread. You've got to get on the ball (keep your balance), open your arms, feel the wind, and keep your chin up. All this I learn from the cormorant. Whom, may I add, I will no longer disdain as a low-rent loon.

Pinnacle Rock

 September is the hawk migration. Hawks and September, sharing the same deep blue cloudy toasty raw windy day, depending. Which means, usually, driving out to Mt. Wachusett, an hour or so west, to not see invisible specks that only the Swarovski and spotting scope crowd can see. Luck is a scattered traffic of passersby riding the airstream overhead—kestrel, osprey, TV (turkey vulture), 'tail (redtail), sharpie (sharp-shin), sighted, called out, followed, recorded. And sometimes, on rare Septembers, wheeling kettles of broad-wings by the dozens, and when I'm not there, by the hundreds, even the thousands.

But this year I didn't make that journey. I had to settle for the poor man's Wachusett—Pinnacle Rock, an outcropping on the northeast shoulder of the Fells Reservation, a 2500-acre green space a short drive from home.  I went first by myself, sitting on the summit for a good hour, as if filling the position of Fells guru, and seeing nary a hawk. And I went a second time last weekend with two friends, Helen and Ed, less for hawks than for Pinnacle Rock itself.

I led the way up Fire Trail 56, an uphill walk that levels off, through a corridor of woods—oak and pine, sassafras, aster, and goldenrod (still drawing bumblebees). It was the cooling kiln of late September, lazy but purposeful. We took a side path along a new ledge of rocks, and then it was all rock, just rock: a short ascent, closer to the sky. The pinnacle.

We installed ourselves on three adjacent levels and took in the view. To the north and west lay  nameless neighboring towns (Saugus? Melrose?). To the east, the blue Atlantic. And all around us an expanse of apparent bushes that were really the tops of trees.

We talked, but at this height talk was concurrent with a secondary activity—being above, and exposed; being seen and seeing. Nature was the other party—the host, in fact—with whom we were conversing. So the conversation ranged from news to "olds:" a discussion of the lobes of oak leaves and whether a certain arm of land was Nahant. I saw a hawk in the distance, just above the horizon, probably a redtail. Last time I was here that would have been the culmination of my stay. This time it was a peripheral detail, on a par with the blue jays that flew across the nearby treescape. 

What we saw depended on how we were looking. Sometimes serious topics—work, illness—grounded us. Then a turkey vulture interrupted, rising out of the oaks a hundred yards away, and tilted past us, just above the trees, black and careful as a judge on skates. We watched it teeter by, hunting for smells, feeling for wind, following some winding air route, finally flapping for momentum. That was cool, being above a vulture.

A short time later, a query: Is that another vulture? It was directly above me; then the sun was in the way, so I didn't see it until it was in the clear. It wasn't a TV. Too big for a redtail. What was it? An osprey? No, not an osprey. It could only be an eagle. A juvenile baldy. That underwing pattern of brown and white, and the long wingspan. An eagle, we concurred. On one level, just another chance bird. But higher in our hierarchy—a good sign, maybe. Sufficient for September, for sure. 

Pinnacle Rock delivered.