5.2.2001

The cat sits on the aquarium, looks
out the morning window.
His tail drapes down the glass,
curls and waves as birds pass by.
A dozen little rainbowfish surround
the image of this black tail,
school with it as it plays against
transparent mystery.

The cat is seeing birds, whose images transform into curls and twitches of his tail, which in turn become movement in a school of fish, and the whole series becomes squiggles on my computer screen which will shortly fly electrically across the planet. What can these small fish be seeing? The Mother of Worms? Simple novelty? I have no clue, but the sequence charms. Transparent mysteries are as directly in front of our eyes as they are the fishes'—all we do not perceive or whose presence we do not guess.

5.3.2001

Dry as a dragonfly wing
Ladybird emerges from her winter crevice
in the kitchen cabinets, walks
slow across the counterstone to sink,
where she strolls the rim,
as I admire her colors
bright as when she went to sleep. I hope
she doesn't see above her on the windowsill
a sister's husk dome down, belly up
with tiny black legs clenched.
She findsthe water drop I place before her.
After, we travel to the tulip bed
where I trust she will be fed.

Encounters with tough little survivors can evoke compassion, no matter how many legs. We are all in life a community, each with the same problems: water, food, a place to be. Our response to small sharers of our homes is too often violent, which with each repetition diminishes us. Generosity of spirit enlarges us. Life requires killing; the issue is balance.

5.4.2001

I dreamed last night two springs ago,
the day I walked an English garden path
and came upon three kids playing on
a strong sculpture of a donkey, bronze I think,
that looked somehow familiar, totemic
in its donkey strength and stretch.
One child calmly rode, one embraced the head,
one ran his hand up and down gouged ribs.
Nanny sat a nearby bench,
beneath an ancient flowered apple.
In dream I was again amazed when I saw
the donkey was Picasso's.

How should we respond to art? How should we be allowed to respond to art? I won't pretend to know, but I do know how touching sculptures rewires the sense of touch and with it, form. I am inordinately pleased that in a garden at Dartington Hall, Devon, a small bronze donkey is allowed to welcome children.

5.7.2001

Lichens drink rainfall
swell green
and release the water bears
who lumber microscopically
across a vast terrain
released to life again by rain
from the state of tun, invulnerable
to cold or heat or drought,
the toughest life on earth.
As long as there is rain
the water bears will unroll from tun
and through moss and lichen lumber on.

The multitudes of life are just below our sight. We forget that we are macro-life, enormous compared to almost every cousin on the tree. John Keats said, "The world is full of magical things, waiting for our eyes to grow sharper." And our eyes have. Perhaps our real importance is to be Earth's eyes; perhaps our charge is to grow them sharper, so we can truly see the interwebbed multitude that is the whole.

FYI: Tardigrades, or water bears, are incredibly resilient critters. In their dormant ‘tun' state they are unfazed by temperatures as low -272C or high as 151C; X-ray radiation 1000x times the human lethal dose; vacuum; 6000 atmospheres pressure (about six times the pressure in the deepest ocean trench. When a piece of dried-up moss which had been kept in a museum for 120 years was wetted, tardigrades successfully recovered from their tuns in the moss.

5.8.2001

The book says orioles are blackbirds, but
yesterday's flames of orange burn open my eyes.
Two pairs arrive, demand food and do receive
oranges, up from the tropics like themselves,
bright travelers well met upon my deck, black beaks
plunge into halved oranges (I licked the cut sides first).
They eat orange sections in sequence, neatly
round the circle, one by one, and I plunge
into eating grapefruit as a child, learning
from my mother to eat the sections
round the circle, one by one,
like these ignited blackbirds eat
the clockface orange of sliced suns.

As I write, a male sings from high in an oak, in a song duel with the male beyond the pond. Orioles are so outrageously beautiful in spring that they are almost too much for
winter-drabbed eyes. I am delighted that their careful way of eating oranges connected me to my mother's memory. Everything really does hook up, large and small, old and newly seen, tongues of oriole and child, sweet and sad.
So, why on earth would orioles eat orange sections in sequence round the circle? Delight in sweet rounds of mystery.

5.9.2001

In a yard of graves I met a tree
Methuselah,
old when Francis Drake spilled wine
on the long oak trestle here, old
when King John considered here
the arrogance of barons.
Far older than these graves,
this yew cast shade that pierced me
with its shafts of light
I met this tree, this yew
sacred to the druid,
this ancient tree of churchyards,
old master of rebirth so rich with time
my throat can't close on it.
With my face on bark
I embraced this tree, but it holds me.

The presence of old trees is palpable. Martin Buber, in "I and Thou", discussed the "thouness" of trees. In another place Buber said, "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings… He who truly experiences a thing so that it springs up to meet him and embraces him of itself has in that thing known the world..."

5.10.2001

Speak to earth, use your every voice,
speak to all her beings;
praise the lives of green
and all the lives with legs,
praise the lives who dance in air
and all who float and swim,
praise the diggers and the delvers under soil,
praise the spores and praise the seeds—
now close your eyes to see
the tiny wrigglers everywhere,
the simpler ones who came before.

When you greet a beetle on your hand,
your words praise earth.
When you rescue from the street a woolly bear,
Praise earth with your chuckle from its tickly feet.
When you lift your eyes to hawks,
your lilting heart is praise to earth.

If we speak well to earth,
she will fill our ears and eyes with secrets,
she will fill our dreams with healing images
she will fill our hearts with joy to share.

I've tried to say things simply here, clearly, without artifice. If this piece strikes you as foolishly mawkish or god awful sentimental, unclench your gluteus maxima.

Lately I've found myself speaking more and more to other beings-- the ant traveling the sink, the blown tulip, Mama Woodchuck. I hope these are not just senior moments; I prefer to think I am recapturing the freedom and especially the willingness of the child. Regression to a simpler time or state is the very hallmark of many therapies (!) or maybe I am just stepping back before I leap. (Yes, I know, senior moments.) Validate your natural normal willingness to speak to everything; it helps us feel connected. It helps us hope. Flow with what is.

5.11.2001

Cats on windowsills
chatter at the orioles on oranges
in voices piteous and plaintive
as carnivores can find.
Three tails lash intent.
They brim so with bird!

Predators are so nourished by the moment, so incredibly within the present—they show us a wholeness that we probably lost the moment we conceived of time. Our envy is sadness-tinged, for each of us repeats our species' journey into consciousness as we grow past childhood. But we do find joy in the almost-memory of being so complete. Look for your selves within your cats or dogs.

5.14.2001

Unfolding leaves of butternut
tangled green by dawn
say all I dream
of spring and opening.

Sometimes a single image offered by earth pierces us and stays. These brief moments of seeing truly are significant and should be shared. To render such images in words requires careful word choice, rhythm and time. It also takes a little arrogance to think it possible to do. But all we can do is make the attempt to share. Ideally, such small poems drop into a receptive mind as a pebble into a pool, and ripple for a time.

5.15.2001

I wake in blessed quiet,
unsilent quiet
of susurrant breeze, calm
of bird song, wandering trill
of treefrogs, lull
of all concern, the quietude
of blue violet and trillium white
which speak now of waking
in the youth of life,
in that blessed bed.

Nature's dawn sounds do not intrude on inner peace; they deepen it. These are the sounds of my personal dawn, the sounds of waking green. This is one of those occasions when we live within a stream of ancient human consciousness; people have felt this kind of waking since before we walked upright. Entries do not require action. Often they are simply celebrations.

5.16.2001

She bumbles into every window, hovers
before openings, crawls into cracks again, again
until her palace place is found.
She is urgent and profound, for
within her abdomen, dynasties are quickening.
These sisters are no ordinary wasps,
they are young Queens of May,
dangling gawky legs before us
until they find their place to lay.

There is nothing more determined than a female searching out a safe place to bear her children. For paper wasps, the first necessity is for a hidden place where she can raise her first workers, who can then go out into the world to rasp wood fibers off, swallow them and bring them home to build the hive's first spiral out of magic paper. The wasp queens' urgency is connected to our May poles and our Queens of May. Insect or mammal, all lives dance within the same imperatives.

5.18.2001

It began beside the pond, a wilding elm.
When it died we dropped it, topped it,
trimmed branches, tipped its bulk into the pond,
where it resides, locked in ice all winter,
free to windroam in the year’s thawed half.

After April iceout
before duckweed, the log
floats all jaunty on ripples and reflections

In May, how many turtles can fit on a log?
An old game in the pond.
Sunlight gleams on propped shells, hints of plastron red.

One May, wood ducks stand on the log
in the center of the duckweed pond,
one male on each end, one female neatly in the center.
the splendid males face the pond’s opposite shores,
refusing sight of the other.

Late May, Green heron crouches to
hunts tadpoles from the fat end of the log.

Last June, Mama Wooduck on one end,
Seven ducklings spaced along the log beside her.

After storm the log is stranded in mudflat.
Turtles don't care.
Two days on, in the absence of storm, the log
slowly turns in the middle of the pond,
phoebe perched on the high end.

An intimacy with season and cyclic time is a gift to self given by experiencing specific changes or transformations over time. Through phenology (periodic biological phenomena correlated with season), the floating log has become a presence in my spirit. Adopt a nearby tree or perennial plant, or a wet meadow/temporary pond, and record specific, regular impressions over time. Beings and objects so regarded take on a sort of life and even personality, as if our attention quickened them. When we cast our deep attention upon any outside thing this way, we are enlarged.

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