Needing the West

While driving from Elko, full of gratefulness after spending the night with a friend at her lovely, lovely home but feeling a little tired, a little headache-y, (the fourth day of driving catching up with me) I thought (even as the sky expanded and exhaled light) am I done with the West? And then I was suddenly back into pines and wide meadows and extra sky, and I stepped on the Playa at sundown and the heat that it had absorbed all day pushed back at me, like a lover’s embrace. I shook off that feeling with a laugh. I am not done with the West (the same way I am not done with Rome or Paris) or those small towns that dot the way from there to here. The ones that sit like comfort on the tongue, Plush, Adel, Paisley even the wild buck of Winnemucca. Coming out of Humboldt County Nevada into Oregon on the Warner Highway I stop and took a picture of the Welcome to Oregon sign. Twenty years ago, when Jerry retired, we came this way as we headed to Klamath Falls. We stopped at this sign and took a picture. Issac was eleven, Justine would have been nine. The day must have been as warm yesterday because they were in short sleeves and shorts. Jerry is in the background, hamming it up.

When I realized the other morning as I was driving (that I would be going that route) I nearly had to pull the car over and cry. Twenty years. Twenty years. I may have just been full of history and longing as I had been listening to Warlight by Michael Ondaatje for the past few days as I drove. I kept playing the last chapters starting from The Street of the Small Daggers, I’ve read the book twice and I’ve read this section more than twice and now I’ve listened to it at least seven times. It feels like a writing class is happening as you read/listen: this is how it’s done. It’s the same way I feel whenever I reread the Molly Gloss story Lambing Season: this is how it is done. It’s how you get so caught in the story and scene and character that you forget you are not in it, of it. I’m sure there’s some scientific term that would explain why this happens, how; for me it is just magic.

So, I am here at Playa for a few days watching the lakebed and the light, the birds and the light, the sky and the dust and the shimmer of water in the light. I’m not looking for comfort or rest. I’m looking for good writing, I’m searching for magic.

Here’s a poem from yesterday morning before I got into my car for one more day’s drive:

Behind me is a dog not mine.
A fire in front – not mine a well –
a window filled with mountain views.
The sky becoming daylight.
After a day’s journey, I journey
once more, into a day
that will be filled with sun
and Spring heat. When I arrive
in late afternoon I will walk
once more upon the Playa
under the great open sky
and sort my thoughts
for the work I must do.

Church

Quiet and quiet still

Under the pine I build the altar
leave a prayer for something wild,
leave an offering, listen for the first
star, say goodnight to the birds
set the camera on the soft needles
of the pine hoping to catch a god,
a night dwelling sprite or just a hungry,
being wandering through the yard.

Then six pictures (and in five shots) close and closer
and then just to the edge clearly: the fox.
Accepting the offering, sharing the darkness
with the ghost house and the streetlight.
The quiet night quiet still. Offering accepted.
Prayer answered. And then, the sixth picture
the last, the night dwelling sprite, her mask and
ringtail prominent, too late for the snack
desecrating the altar, knocking the camera
down, no worship here.

Something shifted

Between 0730 and 1030 on Tuesday the 22nd, one of the old lilac bushes collapsed. This was the cardinal seat. Though I do note the cardinals are still out there sitting in it. I was able to pin down the time by careful scrutiny of my yard cam photos. At 0730 five cardinals were on the deck and in the background two lilacs; two pictures later,1030-ish, the bush is down. We had a lot of rain this past week and some gusting winds. The loss of anything green is sad; I guess that emotion is enough for losing a bird throne. Whenever I look out the window a bright red king is still there: observing the world from a different height, admiring the view and it still keeps them safe from hawks.

Last night when I was closing curtains a hawk glided from a tree and swept along about a foot off the ground over the lawn and slowly around the neighbor’s house. It felt like it too had heard the news from Ukraine, that maybe peace will return, that right now I can quit this yard and go tend my own problems. Not that a hawk could have a heart as dark and hard as Putin’s, but still, something (felt) shifted, however briefly, in the world.

The forsythia out my office window is blooming, rioting in yellow. I love when the cardinals come to add a little zest of color, a pop as the home shows like to say. I was coveting the colors in the yard behind mine, the forsythia there has been bright yellow all week but now this one is catching up. Today we are to have more rain and heavy winds, possible thunderstorms, typical end of March stuff. (Side note, goldfinches have been visiting this week.)

Speaking of March stuff, I have been watching women’s college basketball like a fiend. I do not think I’d seen a whole game in over two years until the tournament got underway and since I have spent hours (hours!) watching and learning the players and remaining [almost] neutral in my cheers. I have been a UCONN fan, since the days we lived in Connecticut. I love that Coach Auriemma was so happy for his team after the last win (2 overtimes!), but also how he became so emotional with the responsibility of coaching and getting these players to his program on a promise he has made. But then, any of the teams still left are interesting and so, so talented. The game on Friday night between UCONN and Stanford is going to be fantastic. I do like both teams and both coaches. And I agree with the ESPN commentator yesterday that women’s college basketball is 1000 percent better than the men’s: nuanced, faster, tougher; the majority of the women are not going on to play after college so, for many, this is it.

BRAD CLIFT / THE HARTFORD COURANT 1995

A mocking sort of rusty call

From the window grackle chat, sparrow gossip, cardinal chide, a blackbird sings, so close I should see her. Before sunrise this morning a wren was close and loud. A few days ago I wrote:

The smallest bird
destroys morning
with her great song.

The trees here are quickly putting out lots of new growth, the maple and the ornamental pear are showing their colors. A few of the trees in the neighborhood have creamy white and pink blossoms already. When I look back at my Instagram from a year ago (2021), we’re at the same place. Going back another year (2020) the same; 2019 the same flowers are blooming. We moved here October of 2018. Going back through time like that makes everything look normal.

Today, on NPR, a story about a death in Ukraine of a 96-year-old man who survived four (four!) concentration camps during WWII and has been killed in Putin’s “denazification”. I always pause when I hear some circumstance of death that seems (that makes me imagine) every breath was parceled out at birth. I do the same when I hear a story that makes it seem every moment in a life had  been choregraphed to get a person to the exact second a plane hits a tower, a crane falls, a river floods. But there isn’t anything mystical or fateful about it, death is sped along so often by man’s ponderous horror. In Boris Romantschenko’s case, manufactured lies of full of horrors. 

Grackle’s have a distinctive cackle, a mocking sort of rusty call. They’re big and shiny birds, with yellow eyes, their feathers are iridescent colors of purple and dark teals on black. The talk a lot, when together they are loud. Often one or two will have their beaks toward the sky while they shout out the day’s news. Today they seemed especially animated, especially loud in their telling. Today they seemed to have heard all the other hard news of the world, the shame and sorrow that is just reaching us.

Something peaceful, neutral

The flowers outside are the only thing that has a little tameness about them. I didn't rake leaves last fall, letting whatever creatures need to sleep (and eat) amongst them have peace. I think my neighbor behind us may have been a little cerebral about it all. He and his wife were out picking up branches and pinecones during a heavy wind last week; they’ve mown their lawn once already. I'll start cleaning tomorrow. I saw Olive the ground hog today, that's my spring. She was paused on the lawn, slim from her sleep. She headed toward the woods near the little ravine. If she needs water that’s where she’ll head, I imagine. Down there it’s always damp. As you walk through the neighborhood there are places you hear water running. A groundhog has to drink. She has shown up just as one of the pears went bad, think of the odds of that? I cut the pear up and left it for her. She will be my friend, little brown flat cat.

Speaking of little brown cats, here’s my neighbor’s cat from the other day, she was out not being very hidden while watching birds and when I knocked on the window she came over to the door until I stepped out to say hello. She makes the rounds (we are on a cul-de-sac, lol) daily. I did see her go under the deck the other day and it made me wonder if Olive was around and they seem to have some sort of interspecies friendship/enmity going on. Now that Olive is back it will be interesting to see what happens this year. Something peaceful, neutral.

A little knowing*

Today is sunny, warm, But there is pondering on many things. Here are the daffies welcoming the sun back and a poem from early in the month. It came from page 29 of Segues A Correspondence in Poetry between William Stafford and Marvin Bell. "The world's wheel, alrighty, *a little knowing and presence and a long build-up that sends up our long ideas of what is natural, while we turn through "excess" that is only being, trees that are only treeful awaiting our seeing,..." (Marvin Bell)

                                        If a tree stands in the forest
                                        and no one hears it sing in the wind,
                                        is it a tree? If the shadow falls
                                        upon no one who can tell us
                                        is it shade, is the tree
                                        alone? If a tree stands in the forest
                                        and no hand, no human hand
                                        ever touches or draws
                                        close a leaf or needle to smell
                                        or taste or take an afternoon
                                        resting beneath as sun and cloud
                                        pass over, mottling through
                                        those leaves or needles
                                        or branches, if no one stays
                                        on the ground at the tree’s base
                                        listening to what is above
                                        what sings or crawls or looks back
                                        is that person ever alive?

Miscellaneous weak hand poems and miscellaneous birds

Here in the quiet of snow
day pauses, it too loves the hush,
the quilted whisper of flake
against flake, ice nestling ice.
Light swallowing the night.

The quiet and chill seems
all I own somedays,
all I should want to own.
I gather them both like marbles
and covet their perfect clear
and singular beauty.

The night and its comforts
are often visited by the twin
demons of regret and sorrow
those two argumentative sisters
who rule only their world
but meddle in mine. They’re
like those two orange tabby cats
gorgeous and poised
in the afternoon
sun who then run through the 3AM
darkness and bite your toes.

The moon shifts its place in the sky.
Of course, I know it isn’t the moon’s
shifting but mine. My world tilting
back into other alignments
but even with the lengthening days
(the shortening nights) something
feels off. The moon’s brilliance
is charming but needs so much
darkness to shine.