On the mountain, The neighbor's dog, put out in the cold, Comes to my house for the night. He quivers with gratitude. His short-haired small stout body settles near the stove. He snores. Out there in the dark, snow falls. The birch trees are wrapped in their white bandages. Recently in the surgical theater, I looked in the mirror at the doctors' hands As he repaired my ancient frescoes. When I was ten we lived in a bungalow in Indianapolis. My sister and brother, my mother and father, all living then. We were like rabbits In the breast fur of a soft lined nest. I know now that we were desperately poor. But it was spring: The field, a botanist's mirage of wild flowers. The house centered between two railroad tracks. The tracks split at the orchard end of the street And spread in a dangerous angle down either side. Long lines of freight for half an hour clicking by; or a passenger train, with a small balcony at the end of the last car where someone always stood and waved to us. At night the wrenching scream and Doppler whistle of the two AM express. From my window I could see a fireman stoking The open fire, the red glow reflected in the black smoke belching from the boiler. Once I got up and went outside. The trees-of-heaven along the track swam in white mist. The sky arched with sickle pears. Lilacs had just opened. I pulled the heavy clusters to my face and breathed them in, suffused with a strange excitement That I think, when looking back, was happiness. -Ruth Stone
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by Stephen Dunn It was back when we used to listen to stories, our minds developing pictures as we were taken into the elsewhere of our experience or to the forbidden or under the sea. Television was wrestling, Milton Berle, Believe It Or Not. We knelt before it like natives in front of something sent by parachute, but when grandfather said “I’ll tell you a story,” we stopped with pleasure, sat crosslegged next to the fireplace, waited. He’d sip gin and hold us, his voice the extra truth beyond what we believed without question. When grandfather died and changed what an evening meant, it was 1954. After supper we went to the television, innocents in a magic land getting more innocent, a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock, the end of our enormous childhood. We sat still for anything, laughed when anyone slipped or lisped or got hit with a pie. We said to our friends “What the hey?” and punched them in the arms. The television had arrived, and was coming. Throughout the country all the grandfathers were dying, giving their reluctant permission, like Indians. I think I might have to go here before too long. Especially lovely at the golden hours--just before dawn and just as dusk begins. I took these on the Providence/Boston train a few months ago. I loved it…Carlos my nice Uber driver who picked me up at the Warwick bus stop as the bus (just like Pgh) never showed up. What a sweet guy…you always hear these stories. In this case he did Uber as a second job as he’d just had a second baby. Then the ride to Boston (they never even collected tickets!)
I found people to be very kind in the station. Lots of Hispanic people in RI now. I’m sort of afraid of RI toughness now, but it also feels very familiar, along with all the mills you pass on the train, big and small, with all the ghosts. Old post from Facebook. I am in the process of looking at these and buckling down to see what I have to say, and how. Chanterelles When it gets lighter out I will look for chanterelles in my back yard, which is all woods. I live in the country of ravine and stream, steep slopes, fallen trees, limited horizons. All streams run to the river. The landscape now beginning to withdraw into itself, trees bare in spots already. The yellow desiccated leaves. On some mornings, there is a sere feeling of November. I am back already to grabbing stove wood in the early mornings. Cursing my improvidence in not having ordered more. I’m on a waiting list, begging, but they have good wood. I like the hardscrabble climb up the ravine’s hill, which I used to do with my springer Barney, who ran ahead and then stood and mocked me from the top of the ridge. In daylight, things seemed quiet and empty up the hill, but I know better, seeing the gnawing at the base of trees, small holes in the ground, piled leaves. The evidence of nocturnal visitors who are everywhere at night in back, you see in winter all the prints…deer, raccoons, foxes, the fisher who has knocked off most of the neighborhood cats. I see a cute little tabby prowling around these days, and hemakes me nervous. I like the ascent in dead leaves, I like looking down at the flat land by the stream which in summer is verdant, lovely and green. I like the plateau where the chanterelles grow, poking out from the carpet of leaves. My walk will be loud, the leaves crackling under my feet. I will look up at the sky glimpsed through tree canopies and see azure, and the feathery clouds. And I will be alone in all this, because children no longer wander through woods, no longer hide and shriek, as even I did, growing up in Providence. In seventeen years here, I’ve seen children hike through these woods only a handful of times. So I will have to be the child, attend to the woods that exist only to live. I will have to be the one who is surprised. And today I will be, for this mile or so of woods is beautifully discombobulating; a few hundred feet from a back door, one looks around and barely sees houses, only ridges that go off into the distance, more streams, and more hills. When I am ready to return to my desk, I will turn around and suddenly find the entire landscape of the street different. The houses themselves will be altered, appearing huge and precarious, like something on the west coast, the kind of optimistic structures, built on slopes that disappear in mudslides. Seeming solid and strong from the street, my neighbors’ houses will be unfamiliar when viewed from the rear, their angles confusing, like dream houses in another life. I never know where I am in these woods. It’s very strange because I have a good sense of direction. But there I am relieved of direction, of the endless locating of myself, thinking of what I should do, how I must appear. I am not frightened; I find the confusion the woods bring to me liberating, exhilarating. I will clutch a basket of chanterelles. I will miss Barney, who used to guide me home—or rather, be visible by the door, since he was impatient and morally flawed. Not at all the kind of dog to trot protectively by my side. Instead I will look for a marker, Betula papyrifera, the fallen birch cantilevered across the stream. Then slosh across skipping stones, papery bark for a January fire held in my other hand. I so love this...
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes that a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things I can't bear without a friend, I can't love without a sister. The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age: the landscape, like a line in the psalm book, is seriousness and weight and eternity. What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great. If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names. When we win it's with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when the wrestlers' sinews grew long like metal strings, he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music. Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight) went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. --Translated by Robert Bly |
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May 2024
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