Saturday, April 16, 2022
Friday, April 8, 2022
To the fig tree on 9th and Christian
Tumbling through
the city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig
its arms pulling the
September sun to it
and she
has a hose too
and so works hard
rinsing and scrubbing
the walk
lest some poor sod
slip on the
silk of a fig
and break his hip
and not probably
reach over to gobble up
the perpetrator
the light catches
the veins in her hands
when I ask about
the tree they
flutter in the air
and she says take
as much as
you can
help me
so I load my
pockets and mouth
and she points
to the step-ladder against
the wall to
mean more
but I was without a
sack so my meager
plunder would have to
suffice and an old woman
whom gravity
was pulling into
the earth loosed one
from a low slung
branch and its eye
wept like hers
which she dabbed
with a kerchief as she
cleaved the fig with
what remained of her
teeth and soon there were
eight or nine
people gathered beneath
the tree looking into
it like a
constellation pointing
do you see it
and I am tall and so
good for these things
and a bald man even
told me so
when I grabbed three
or four for
him reaching into the
giddy throngs of
yellow-jackets sugar
stoned which he only
pointed to smiling and
rubbing his stomach
I mean he was really rubbing his stomach
like there was a baby
in there
it was hot his
head shone while he
offered recipes to the
group using words which
I couldn't understand and besides
I was a little
tipsy on the dance
of the velvety heart rolling
in my mouth
pulling me down
and down into the
oldest countries of my
body where I ate my first fig
from the hand of a man who escaped his country
by swimming through the night
and maybe
never said more than
five words to me
at once but gave me
figs and a man on his way
to work hops twice
to reach at last his
fig which he smiles at and calls
baby, c'mere baby,
he says and blows a kiss
to the tree which everyone knows
cannot grow this far north
being Mediterranean
and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils
of Jordan and Sicily
but no one told the fig tree
or the immigrants
there is a way
the fig tree grows
in groves it wants,
it seems, to hold us,
yes I am anthropomorphizing
goddammit I have twice
in the last thirty seconds
rubbed my sweaty
forearms into someone else's
sweaty shoulder
gleeful eating out of each other's hands
on Christian St.
in Philadelphia a city like most
which has murdered its own
people
this is true
we are feeding each other
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe
never again.
~ Ross Gay
Skunk Cabbage
And now as the iron rinds over,
the ponds start dissolving,
you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers
and new leaves unfolding
upon the brash
turnip-hearted skunk cabbage
slinging its bunches leaves up
through the chilling mud.
You kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows out in the most
unabashed way, attracting
into itself a continual spattering
of protein. Appalling its rough
green caves, and the thought
of the thick root nested below, stubborn
and powerful as instinct!
But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again - a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
~ Mary Oliver
Thursday, April 7, 2022
Sunday, April 3, 2022
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
Since I was a child, I have felt some sort of ineffable contact with nature. Not connection, that's too passive a word. Contact. It feels like a living spark passes between myself and a tree, myself and a rock, myself and a goose or a snail. I'm a secular person, but oh yes, there is a sacredness, and a one-ness, and a spirit, and it is this living earth. I have been on a hillside of waving golden grass in northwest India, at my daughter's side, watching as a tiger moved silently through the landscape. It is my deep love for the beauty of the natural world, and my deep love for my daughter and our bewildered species, that drive me to climate activism. Despite all the damage and the crises and the work to be done, it is easy for me to imagine a smaller, quieter, greener world in which my daughter and her loved ones breathe easy.
In my fantasy of that world, life and work, family and community, are intertwined because the commons are restored. My daughter, her family, and I, come together with neighbors to work in our forest garden during the day, and tell stories and make music when night falls. Our forest garden needs no fossil fuels. The work is done and the food harvested by ourselves, and by nature. In the world that's coming, there is no plowing that kills the soil and its microscopic life, there are no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers. My grandchild plays among bees that pollinate, birds that fertilize, and trees that enrich the earth.
That's the world I work for when I work for climate sanity. I work for restoration and for right relationship with the earth. I do it out of a deep sense of biophilia, and belief that our species will finally find its place. I do it for love.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
The Summer Day
Saturday, March 1, 2014
In Memory of a Tiger Man
The tiger-tailed comet named Fateh Singh Rathore blazed across our collective skies, dousing itself in the forests of Ranthambhore on March 1, 2011 after 73 years.
I am not a superstitious person. But like everyone fortunate enough to have spent time in his company, I know, without hesitation, that Fateh will spend eternity among Ranthambhore’s tigers. He will occasionally take a little time from his beloved forest to haunt bureaucrats and government officials in Sawai Madhopur, Jaipur, and Delhi foolish or short-sighted enough to fail to do everything in their power to protect the tiger, thus incurring the Tiger Man's wrath. By the same token, whenever they take steps to ensure the tiger's future in India, they will unaccountably feel the most genial presence.
I first met Fateh, in the mid-1990s, in my living room in New York, in the pages of Geoffrey and Diane Ward’s beautiful book Tiger Wallahs: Encounters with the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats. The Wards devoted a long chapter to Fateh that will become a treasure and a refuge to those who will miss him so deeply. Anyone longing to spend a few more minutes in Fateh’s company, if only on the printed page, can find solace here. Before I had finished the first paragraph, I was mesmerised by this whiskey-swigging, ghazal-singing tiger guru who in person turned out to be as welcoming of wide-eyed American admirers as he was of the most significant Indian or international VIP.
Fateh’s campfire was a place of wonder. Night after night, stars overhead, happy humans drawn together by the warmth and passion of Fateh’s personality, the occasional tiger or leopard roaming just outside the fire’s glow... was there any more meaningful place to be on this lovely planet? I can picture that campfire as if from outer space. It is burning bright.
It was awe-inspiring to watch Fateh, with consummate grace and his unique panache, balance the demands of protecting Ranthambhore with the more prosaic comforts of his guests. I remember one night at the campfire banquet, laughing as he piled chapatis on my young daughter’s plate, dubbing her “Princess Chapati,” a name she’ll carry with her always. On her first trip into Ranthambhore, Julia sat beside Fateh in the front of his jeep, her face spellbound as she listened to his whispered interpretations of the vocalisations coming from a tigress and cubs invisible in a hillside glade.
The forest found Fateh after he had wandered through his youth, uncertain of his place in the world. Interviewing him for this magazine in March 2008, I heard from his own lips what Ranthambhore’s tiger-filled forest was like when he arrived decades ago:
The beds of the three lakes where people see all the wildlife today were farms where water chestnuts and wheat were cultivated. There was very little water for wildlife. There were shops near the Fort! Everywhere you looked, there were agricultural plots. The forest was completely denuded by cattle, by people, by lopping and browsing. You couldn’t see a blade of grass on the ground. There were 96 villages on the periphery, 20,000 people and an equal number of cattle. People used to camp everywhere. At night, if you climbed the Fort and looked out over the entire park, you saw nothing but campfires. Every hilltop was occupied. No one today can even imagine what it used to be.
If we wish to never see what Fateh witnessed in those first months and years of his work in Ranthambhore, we must follow in his footsteps, giving our own heart and soul to ensuring a secure future for tigers in the beautiful landscape that Fateh returned to Nature. Chinese folklore claimed that the wind was the breath of the tiger. When tigers are secure in Fateh’s vision of India, people of all stripes will breathe easy as well.
~ Written by myself for the April 2011 issue of Sanctuary Asia (www.sanctuaryasia.com)
~ To read an obituary of Fateh in The New York Times, click here.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
No, twice in one year is not too many. Today marks the 150th anniversary of the President's delivery of one of the ultimate democratic statements in history, a statement that demands as much attention, as much defending, on this day as it did on that.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Thursday, May 9, 2013
In memoriam.
The magnificent black rhinoceros, numbering some 70,000 in 1970, down to 2,500 in 1993.
A 50-million-year-old species decimated in two decades in a wholesale slaughter driven by demand for rhino horns in Asia. How can it be argued that Homo sapiens is not a blight upon the earth? It's too late to make amends to one of four subspecies of black rhino, the Western Black Rhinoceros (pictured above), which was driven to extinction in the first decade of the 21st century.
Please sign the new Avaaz petition to save the remaining exquisite rhinoceros.
(dedicated to Julia - JS)
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Dear Cub kids,
I used to think that the behavior of songbirds seemed completely random. In fact, (I hate to say it), in the self-absorbed ignorance and conceit of my life as a human, I used to feel rather sure of it, to feel only fleeting curiosity about the behavior of the small birds in my neighborhood. Too small, too seemingly random… “beneath” my interest??
As so often happens, my mind was changed, my attention seized, by a book. (I hope books never disappear!) This one is called What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal The Secrets of the Natural World. It was written by Jon Young, who was lucky enough to grow up under the mentorship of a man of Native American ancestry, with keen abilities to be in and of wild places.
This book is full of intriguing stories, advice and insight about how to learn of and from birds. Okay, I admit, my realization that birds’ lives and behavior just might be full of meaning preceded my reading of this book. It has grown as I have grown, with the years – if there is one thing I do know now that I didn’t 40 years ago when I was 14, it’s that we – Homo sapiens – know so very little about the natural world around us, and that we constantly, constantly underestimate the behavior, capacities, and yes, wisdom, of other creatures!
Everything that songbirds do is to a purpose. As well-educated kids with great science teachers, you’re probably thinking to yourselves, “well, right, no kidding Jen!” Everything every animal does, with the possible exception of our own species, is to the purpose of survival, to put it a little too simply.
Have you ever spent time watching the small birds in your neighborhood? Have you noticed the quicksilver ways that they move and communicate with each other? Our scientific understanding of songbird behavior is in its infancy, but people like Jon Young have learned a lot from years of simply… paying attention. When you think of songbirds, in addition to their minute beauty, your mind probably dwells on their songs, right? Have you asked yourself why songbirds “sing”? Jon Young and other “observers” of bird language, (including many in India!), listen to, identify, and try to interpret many different kinds of vocalizations: songs, companion calls, territorial aggression, adolescent begging, and alarms. Young says that he is sure that there are many more that we humans are unaware of, including at least three others: migratory flight calls, whisper songs, and copulation calls.
Young shares fascinating stories about blue jays imitating the screech of a sharp-shinned hawk so as to frighten other birds away from a feeder, and his own realization that a weasel (not some other animal) was prowling in the woods near his home by watching the behavior of an alarmed flock of tiny wrens. He asks readers if they’ve noticed the varying behaviors of different kinds of birds at a feeder – the way one type of bird is always the first to flee at some, as yet to we humans, invisible sign of danger, while other birds take longer… and why?
Young urges readers to develop an as-frequent-as-possible habit of sitting in one spot outdoors, and watching and pondering the behavior of the birds in the small area within the reach of our senses. He talks about three reasons for doing this on a sustained basis: first, the human observer will develop a deeper sense of what’s really going on in the world of birds; second, through our deepening awareness of bird language and behavior, we will inevitably see and learn more about local wildlife (since everything birds “say” and do relates to the world around them); and third, we, the human observers, will “settle down.” Literally, into our bird “sit spot,” but also figuratively, into a dawning realization that understanding birds can help us, as Young poignantly puts it, “understand ourselves and, if we wish, make some changes.” “Too often,” Young’s childhood mentor used to tell him, “we humans walk in arrogance.” The awareness needed to understand birds, the prolonged practice of quieting ourselves and turning our attention outward to what is really happening around us, will inevitably change us… into, I would venture to guess, deeper, more thoughtful human beings…
When we first start paying attention to birds and their songs, says Young, we hear only unordered cacophony. Listen more deeply, and you’ll begin to “hear” the reason underlying the chaos. Harmony emerges… an essential lesson for the noisy, cacophonous, fractious primate in danger of desolating a beautiful planet.
But don’t worry about that. For now, join me in finding your own bird sit spot, and we’ll learn together.
Your friend,
Jen
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
Talkin' Tigers... 12/11
Dear Cub kids,
In 1933, a little boy named George was born in Germany. As George grew from baby to boy, from youth to adult, he found his salvation in animals, and they found theirs in him. Life took him from the forests of Germany, all over the world, from Alaska to Africa, from India to China, and many, many places in between. On December 2, 2011, George stood with other wildlife protectors on a stage in Mumbai, and accepted a Sanctuary Lifetime Service Award for services rendered to the wild world.
But though George Schaller is being honored for his life’s work, his life and his work are still unfolding.
Here is just a snapshot of George’s adventurous life…
At 14, George and his family left Germany and moved to the United States. During his senior year in high school, George took an aptitude test to help him choose his direction in life. The results of the test pointed George in the direction of interior decoration. But instead of pursuing a life in carpets and curtains, George went to the University of Alaska to study zoology. During summers of fieldwork, George canoed the rivers of northern Alaska, surveying birds. Later, George would compare his summers in Alaska to his childhood years in German forests, conceding about himself, “Essentially, I never grew up.”
Upon completion of graduate studies of Alaska’s caribou, an older scientist asked George a fateful question: “Would you like to study gorillas?” No one had ever studied living gorillas in the wild; they were considered too ferocious, too dangerous. The only things known about wild gorillas had been gleaned after they had been shot. George changed that, moving into a cabin in a flower-sprinkled mountain meadow in the Belgian Congo in 1959. During a year-long study, George discovered and studied eleven gorilla groups and several lone males, and the ecosystem in which they roamed. He achieved what others had thought to be impossible: he studied gorillas on their own terms, alive and fearless in the deep jungles of central Africa. His gorilla studies revolutionized field biology, showing that supposedly dangerous animals could be studied in the wild with little risk.
By 1963, George had a Ph.D. in zoology, a wife, Kay, and two little boys. The family had just begun life in a new cabin, this one in Kanha National Park in India. For three years, as his baby sons grew, George studied tigers, the deer they preyed on, and the beautiful forests and grasslands that sustained them. Embarking on the first systematic, scientific study ever attempted of tigers and their prey, George wanted to unravel the secretive lives of tigers, to learn what effect predator had on prey. While Kay and the boys went looking for tigers on elephant-back, George walked the rolling grasslands and forested ravines of Kanha, sometimes coming face-to-face with his striped quarry as it stalked the herds of sambar, barasingha, chital and blackbuck. After studying the life of Kanha for three years, George realized that tigers were “good” for their prey species, keeping their numbers at levels the ecosystem could sustain. George was among the very first scientists to document the symbiotic relationship between hunter, hunted, and ecosystem.
From India, George and his family moved to Tanzania, studying the lions of the Serengeti, to Pakistan, Nepal and the Himalayas to study the snow leopard, to Central China to study the panda, to the Tibetan Plateau of Western China to study asses and antelopes. He broke new scientific ground everywhere he went, learning about species previously thought impossible to study on their own turf. Everywhere he went, George inspired and enriched the work of fellow field biologists, and looked for young scientists to encourage and mentor.
George’s passion for wild animals and places led him to recognize that they must be protected, and that science could do that best. As fascinating as science is, George said everywhere he went, it must not be undertaken for itself alone, but to ensure the protection of all living things. His insistence that field biology be wedded to conservation might just be his single most important contribution – it led to the protection of over 190,000 square miles of wilderness around the world, an area the size of Spain!
Where in the world is George Schaller today? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that wherever he is, planet Earth is a better place.
Your friend,
Jen
P.S. If you would like to read more about George, I highly recommend: A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts, by Pamela Turner.
Talkin' Tigers... 10/11
I had NO idea how amazing trees are until I read a bunch of books about them. Of course, trees made the books about trees that I read! It’s great to read about single species; I have a wonderful book about oak trees… and it’s also a lot of fun to read books about all trees.
People often use trees to represent nature itself. They play such a large part in our thinking, our mythology, and in our economic and aesthetic lives. Children around the world grow up learning about and experiencing the everyday comfort to be found in a tree.
The very first book with which I struggled as a beginning reader was A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry. Here are a few lines from the book, a copy of which I still have on my shelf:
Trees are beautiful. They fill up the sky. If you have a tree, you can climb up its trunk, roll in its leaves, or hang a swing from one of its limbs. Cows and babies can nap in the shade of a tree. Birds can make nests in the branches. A tree is good to have around. A tree is nice.
Trees are foundational to humans. In the pre-kindergarten class taught in my neighborhood, the 4-year-olds study the seeds of trees. My 16-year-old is spending a few months in Vermont studying environmental science. The first book the students read, in an apple orchard surrounded by tree-clad mountains, was The Man Who Planted Trees. On the bookshelf at my right shoulder is Valmik Thapar’s little gem, Tigers & A Banyan Tree. A tree is planted in the memory of my mother in a park near my childhood home.
Have you heard of Wangari Maathai? She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for environmentalism and social activism. Worried about the industrialization of her native Kenya, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, spending decades mobilizing women to plant 30 million trees.
Trees were victims and victors of epic struggles in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s vivid imagination, “ents” were trees that spoke and strode from one place to another. In the “real” world, trees cannot run or hide or swat at attackers. But they do have defenses, from their armor-like bark to chemical compounds they make to repel invaders. Trees can warn their neighbors of insect attack, stimulating them to synthesize their own repellents!
The roots of trees in a community may mingle and even fuse, enhancing the trees’ communication and exchange of materials! David Suzuki explains it poignantly in Tree: A Life Story. “No tree is an island; it is a communal citizen and derives the same benefits from cooperation, sharing, and mutual effort that any living creature receives from participating in a fully functioning ecosystem.”
Did you know that trees allow fungi to take up residence in their cells, in return for which fungal cells produce substances that defend against bacterial infection? Fungi and tree roots grow into each other until they become almost a single organism, a compound life-form called mycorrhizae, meaning fungus-root. Very few plant species grow without a fungal partner (there are 90,000 known species of fungi!).
Here’s the relationship: Fungi are incapable of manufacturing their own food because they don’t have chloroplasts as other plants do. But to reproduce, they must have sugars, so they penetrate the roots of trees taking sugar from their hosts. The relationship isn’t one-sided, however. If it were, the fungus would be a parasite and the tree would eventually die. No, the fungus returns the favor. In return for the sugar it takes, its vast network of mini-roots called hyphae provides trees’ root systems with access to nutrients and water that they would not otherwise be able to reach.
The enormous mat of fungal hyphae in the soil beneath trees vastly increases the volume of soil a tree is able to explore, making Tolkienesque ents of them all, capable of amassing far more nutrition from the soil than their stationery stance would suggest!
When I walk in a forest, or within just a small community of trees, I know that in the soil beneath my feet is a universe of fungal hyphae nurturing and sustaining the trees, as they are nurtured and sustained by the trees.
Will wonders never cease? Not if you fall in love with nature!
Your friend,
Jen
Talkin' Tigers... 2/12
My latest letter to readers of Cub...
Dear Cub kids,
There are creatures in my home.
I know I am supposed to be bothered by this. The “extermination” business in America is a gigantic industry. People call “the exterminator” when they see a single ant on their kitchen counter. Cockroach – don’t approach, mouse – out of my house, fly – good-bye.
I do prefer not to live with swarms of anything, including people. But if a mouse finds its way into my apartment, I find a way, hopefully before my cats get busy, to capture it calmly and gently, and release it outside. But my gosh, the effort, the expense Americans go to to try to ensure that they live in hermetically sealed spaces in which all other species are banished, is nothing short of extraordinary.
Take the humble stink bug. A member of the insect “superfamily” Pentatomoidea, in the Heteroptera suborder of the Herniptera order, there are apparently some 7,000 species in this family. I have stink bugs in my apartment. These little creatures are related to insects known variously as “shield bugs” and “jewel bugs.” The kind I have are apparently non-native, having arrived from China (so many things “made in China”!), in some shipment of something or other in the mid-‘90s. Since that time, they have become something of a pest to fruit farmers, as well as to homeowners of the type that flip out whenever they encounter an insect in their tightly-sealed, pesticide-sprayed domiciles.
Stink bugs are so-called because they have glands in their thorax that produce a foul-smelling liquid, used defensively to deter potential predators. The smell can also be detected when the bugs are crushed. Now, people do NOT like animals that employ “bad” smells in their defense, but, hey, if you lived in a world of giants that took pleasure in eradicating you, wouldn’t this seem like a sensible way to protect yourself?
The stink bugs in my apartment (on a good or bad day, depending on how you think about it, I probably see three or four), are known as brown marmorated stink bugs, or Halyomorpha halys. The dignity conferred by the beautiful Latin name is overkill because these are intrinsically dignified “bugs.” They are very small, about 17 milimeters long. They are a nice brown-ish gray color. They have short, elbowed legs, two, nice short antenna. They have a small head, and their body is shaped like a tiny shield.
Really, they are quite charming. But homeowners deplore them, and according to the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, they are “becoming an important agricultural pest in Pennsylvania,” since they, like people, enjoy the taste of apples and peaches. They also have a fondness for blackberries, sweet corn, field corn, soybeans, tomatoes, lima beans, and green peppers. Nice vegetarian diet!
The Penn State entomology website says: “These insects are not known to cause harm to humans, although homeowners become alarmed when the bugs enter their homes and noisily fly about. The stink bug will not reproduce inside structures or cause damage.” The website warns that pesticides used against stink bugs are ineffective and may lead to the arrival of other, more “problematic” insects, so waging chemical warfare against stink bugs is not advised. This has not stopped countless extermination companies from advertising their anti-stink bug services on the Internet, however, or homeowners from railing against the tiny insect, and begging each other for tips on how to rid their homes of their deplorable presence.
Well. What is it like, living with stink bugs? The few I see each day seem to do the following: Sit. Walk extremely slowly. Fly, slowly, and with an impressive heavy, buzzing sound for a second or two. My cats were initially mildly curious, but now completely ignore them. I put one outside once, on a chilly winter day, but when I noticed two hours later that it had not moved from the spot I had put it, and seemed stunned by the temperature, I brought it back in to my pleasantly warm living room, leaving it on the broad leaf of a plant. It revived.
That is about all I have to say about stink bugs. They look quite prehistoric, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are fossil stink bugs indicating exceedingly ancient origins. They are really quite decorative, in their humble, brownish-gray way, and their cousin, the emerald-green jewel bug, is a ravishing beauty. I do not mind sharing my space with them. Why should I? We don’t bother each other. They remind me, when I am indoors, that nature will not be denied. Thank goodness for stink bugs. Having avoided harming one, I have yet to smell one.
Vin et sine vivere. Live and let live.
Your friend,
Jen
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Haikus for Julia
From pole to pole
We stop for eggs
Our mute friends' offering.
~ Jennifer Scarlott, 2/9/12
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Haikus for Julia
Blithe spirit.
Her sweet collie self,
Dominates brooding shepherd.
~ Jennifer Scarlott, 1/27/12
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
Directive
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
~ Robert Frost, 1946
Friday, December 9, 2011
Wonder
A 22-month-old tigress photographed in November 2011 in India's Bandhavgarh reserve... startled by a floating leaf, perhaps mistaking it for a snake?!