The cover image is like a series of boxes by Joseph Cornell–each box like the mullion of a window. The effect of the respective landscapes is surreal, skulls, birds, arm chairs, gothic hallways, stars that are like the staris in dreams going ever upward…
In the morning I smoke an imaginary cigarette, return to youth, recall a certain girl.
By noon I’m taller or shorter according to the witches of memory,
We are at the mercy of magic, don’t laugh. Outside, high in the oak
A black squirrel raises an acorn in its paws.
Though I am sad, I honor innocence,
Soft cousin of appetite,
The one with weak eyes.
Something is happening to me. The mind, mine, is obedient to the seasons and I’m suddenly very Finnish. Autumn comes like ice to a pond. Last night it was 40 degrees in Syracuse. I slept deeply.
By day I’ve been reading the poems of Risto Rasa and translating a few. I like the stoic and quirky wisdom of Finland’s poets–this and the economy of Scandinavian poetry. Here are bits:
**
you touch my hair
saying: Great Crested Grebe
among reeds
a floating nest
**
You sew
I study your statistical method
Your formula sheet is a map of stars
I use
the seahorse’s coordinate system
**
The gardener cherishes a black flower–
sad napkin: it is a Lepidopterist’s poem
**
Night,
day’s
print.
**
brightest reality:
a walking song
before the vast migration
brings back memories
**
in the open attic
a pregnant woman
hangs laundry
a vision of
this woman
as a child again
I do not take a single step
ahead of her
**
In the first shadows of autumn these poems feel like refugee graffiti–quick sketches of the heart.
Like any middle-aged man or woman I find myself puzzling over the mysteries of my late father. He was a scholar and his subject was the Cold War seen through the lens of Finnish realpolitik. Later in life he became a college president. He died 12 years ago and he remains an enigma to me because he was jovial with strangers but silent inside his own house. This morning I wrote a short poem or a draft of a poem about his nordic solitude:
Tracks
Winter, you committed me to loving my father
and though he was cruel, he knew the snow of night.
When lights came on and windows blazed,
his radio roused from obscure physics
and played Mahler–what a thing!
I argued with force for news of the day
but your hour had come,
the penitent notes were yours.
How do you say something like: he was weeping on the inside? That his thoughts remained fixed on points in the past? He was not a man of nostalgia. He was more a practical refugee. The refugee knows that the past is not prologue, its too dark for that. The past is the perilous front of a lost battle.
These days we would say he was depressed but I don’t think this is true. My father lived by a manifesto of bitter fragments. His childhood as an immigrant kid during the great depression had been hard. His parents were unloving people–his father was a lutheran minister in the deeply conservative Finnish laboring communities in Minnesota and later in Massachusetts. Fun, the having of it, was out of the question when he was growing up. Then what? He went straight into WW II. Then he went to Harvard and got his Ph.D.
Some people have no talent for happiness which is why they live vicariously in the music of silence. That is the story of my father. There might be more to the story but he left no record.
My father was a man of deep winter. I think in his silence he was also a man of humble discoveries. That’s what surviving is about. I will never know enough about his secret animals.
When I was too young
To know better when the days went
Unplanned and even the exquisite flowers
Were nameless I knew
To find the lutier’s house
Where Segovia shopped—
Where a thin light
Lit the instruments
And hinted of unplayed music.
Last night I dreamt I was under an orange tree. And under that tree I was reading a book. And in the book? More orange trees. More versions of me. More books. And there was a friend in the dream, one of those oneiric undisclosed friends, foggy, but you know he’s a pal, and I said to him: “Take that Wallace Stevens!”
Now, morning, I’m drinking coffee. I don’t have a sunny chair, but I have sun on the inside like any good Finn.
Back to my dream: it’s rare for me to have literate dreams. Usually I’m being pursued by the Three Stooges and I’m running through a construction project wearing only my underpants.
Since only the dreamer can change the dream, avec Carl Jung, etc, maybe the next time I have the Stooges dream I should imagine I’m Nijinsky. Nijinsky dancing through chaos in his tighty whiteys.
That’s obviously the ticket.
**
Once, thirty years ago, I stood under a tree with a magpie’s nest. I talked to the emerging magpies. This was in a a park in Helsinki. I was wearing a business suit. When you talk to magpies you click your tongue. Together we made wonderful tones, the bent man and the wooden birds of pure appetite. Strangers walked by, thought nothing of it, it was Helsinki after all…
**
I do not want my day to be filled with stuffed, categorical imperatives. I want just a corner of a page bearing Beethoven’s final giddiness.
Today was Charles Bukowski’s birthday. All kinds of things have been said about him but for my money he was a poet first and foremost, and more especially, he was a poet of what could very well be described as obsessive projections of nostalgia.
Forget the alcohol and the miserable, even execrable efforts to find love, Bukowski’s world was always about the stars in space and the unshakable beauty of Beethoven on a cheap radio, the symphony heard while alone late at night.
Photo: It’s a gray day but that doesn’t stop this big yellow lab from bounding in and out of the lake to play fetch with a stick.
I sought one love or another, like the great poet, always using up whole days, months.Then the dog, the big dog came into my life. Love seeks you. I knew that. I’d read it in a book. But Corky had to punctuate it. Dogs are punctuation marks with the god stuff inside. That is what a dog can do. She can take apart the omens, reveal what’s right before you.
–from “What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Life with Guide Dogs” forthcoming from Simon and Schuster 2013
A faded green field, tall grass and weeds, a few trees. And a movement—bright white. I slowed the car. Light made physical, bodied: an all-white deer. White from head to toe, two slightly pink ears. It grazed in a herd of other deer, the one white deer among a dozen. I stopped by the side of the road, tried unsuccessfully to take a photo: white blur, faded green grass, tall weeds.
Since moving to the Upper Peninsula, I’ve seen dozens and dozens of deer—while driving, while running trails, hiking. Every time, I gasp, slow down to watch them. Their slight but muscular legs, the way their ears twitch with the slightest sound, the way their eyes look soulful, take my whole body in. Once, while running along a quiet road, I came upon a doe eating. I stopped, stood quietly, only a car-length away. Her mouth ground back and forth, I could hear the dry twig in her teeth. I reached out my hand, palm up, as if that showed her I meant no harm. And she stood, watched me, kept eating. Her ears twitched constantly but she showed no sign of running away, totally unfazed by my presence. It felt like magic to be so close to a deer, to have her watch me too. When I finally walked away, I wished her well, safety.
But a white deer—even more rare. Even more at risk from predators, hunters. Totally without camouflage—except, I guess, when it snows. I sat by the side of the road and watched it move, white body among a herd of brown. White light made physical. And I wished it safety, that the herd would keep it safe. That they’d move as one around it. That they’d help it live a long life.
In the meditation world (at least in the limited bit I know of meditation), I was practicing loving kindness, sending loving kindness to another being, wishing another being safety, peace. I know this sounds crazy—to expect that thinking kind thoughts for another will change anything. But it also sometimes feels just right—and sometimes feels like the only thing we can do anyway.
Because what do we have but our thoughts and the herd to keep us safe? The herd we build around ourselves, the herd we trust to do the best it can. How else can we move through the world successfully? Maybe I’m stretching things a bit, romanticizing nature—something I’m loathe to do. Growing up, my mother always told me, “Mother Nature isn’t kind.” And she was right. The Earth couldn’t care less that we’re here—it’s just moving along through space. So what do we have? What light?
Maybe only our own kindness. Holding others with the highest regard, whether or not we know or like them. Maybe the beauty of a single white deer, grazing. Maybe calling on the herd to keep it safe. Calling on the herd to keep each one of us safe, to help us live in peace.
(ADAPT)
August 14, 2012
DENVER, COLORADO– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] When President Obama visited Denver on August 8th, Colorado ADAPT was there with a message for him — Nothing about us without us!
The Department of Labor is in the process of writing new federal labor rules that will affect how attendant services are provided. Though the changes would hurt, even devastate, folks in the disability community, we were not consulted about the proposed changes.
When we learned that President Obama was coming to the Auraria Events Center in Denver to talk about women’s health care, Colorado ADAPT saw an opportunity to deliver our message directly to the President, and jumped at the chance! A group of us got tickets the day before the event, and the planning began.
Because literally thousands of people were expected to attend the event, we wanted to get there early and did! The first three people in line were all ADAPTers!
Entire article:
Colorado ADAPT Sends Message to President Obama — Nothing About Us Without Us!
http://www.dimenet.com/hotnews/archive.php?mode=A&id=7550;&sort=D
Planet of the Blind 