"Almanac" by Lois Parker Edstrom

My grandparents owned the land,

worked the land, bound 

to the earth by seasons of planting 

and harvest. 

They watched the sky, the habits

of birds, hues of sunset, 

the moods of moon and clouds, 

the disposition of air. 

They inhaled the coming season, 

let it brighten their blood 

for the work ahead. 

Soil sifted through their fingers

imbedded beneath their nails 

and this is what they knew; 

this rhythm circling the years. 

They never left their land; 

each in their own time 

settled deeper. 

"Almanac" by Lois Parker Edstrom from Night Beyond Black. © MoonPath Press, 2016.

"Looking at a Lizard" by Barry Spacks

Aboriginal rock art, Northern Tablelands, Australia

Photo: Don Hitchcock

My only purpose this moment

is looking at a lizard.

Does he know he’s not alone?

He breathes with tiny push-ups,

his skin all hairline caverns

soaking up the sun.

I doubt, alive, I’m liable to get

closer to timelessness than this,

looking at a little lizard breathing.

"Looking at a Lizard" by Barry Spacks from Shaping Water. © Gunpowder Press, 2015.

"Asphalt" by Al Ortolani

The road crew hired temps

between semesters

to stand beside the hopper

shoveling. The foreman

disliked college students.

He never learned our names,

referenced us by the tools

we carried—Skip and I

were Shovels, scraping the hot

mix into the conveyor.

Ronnie the college drop-out

advanced to Rake.

He followed the paver,

flicking the screed ridge

to a smooth seam.

All summer I shoveled the city

streets, made-do with whatever

shade I could catch. Each day

at five, we cleaned the tools

with diesel and putty knives.

Then we sprayed our boots,

kicking our steel toes against

a bar of rail line. We wet rags

with the diesel and scrubbed

our hands and faces.

Then I drove home, a towel

on the seat, another on the arm rest.

I hung my work clothes

on the fence behind the house.

They appeared capable

of walking off on their own.

"Asphalt" by Al Ortolani from Paper Birds Don't Fly. © NYQ Books, 2016. 

"The Daylight Is Huge" by Amy MacLennan

Sunrise on the Summer Solstice, seen from North Shore of Lake Superior

at Gooseberry Falls State Park, Minnestota,

Photo by Stephen G. Weaver

The daylight is huge.

Five a.m. and the sky already

blushing gray. Mornings so full

of blue the clouds almost sheepish

as they wisp over hills.

High noon only happens in June,

mid-day a tipping point, the scale

weighed down on both sides

with blazed hours. And the evenings—

so drawn out the land lies stunned

by that shambling last light.

"The Daylight is Huge" by Amy MacLennan from The Body, A Tree. © MoonPath Press, 2016. 

"Warbler" by Jim Harrison

Yellow Warbler fledgling, from NestWatch

This year we have two gorgeous

yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.

The other day I stuck my head in the bush.

The nestlings weigh one-twentieth of an ounce,

about the size of a honeybee. We stared at

each other, startled by our existence.

In a month or so, when they reach the size

of bumblebees they’ll fly to Costa Rica without a map.

"Warbler" by Jim Harrison from Dead Man's Float. © Copper Canyon Press, 2016.

Preface to Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Notebook with trial lines for Leaves of Grass, ca. 1847-1854

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Preface to Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

"Marriage" by Jim Harrison

Confederate veteran and veteran of the Union Army shake hands at Gettysburg. 

I just remembered a serious argument.

On my seventy-fifth birthday I had the firm sense

that I was a hundred seventy-five. She disagreed.

“Look at your driver’s license,” she said. I said you know

the state of Montana took my license from me. She

went to my briefcase and got out my passport.

“You’re a mere seventy-five,” she said.

I said, “How can you trust the government

in this important matter?” I went to bed

after a couple of drinks believing I was a hundred

seventy-five. In the morning I felt

only seventy-five and apologized at breakfast.

I’d lost a hundred years and felt light,

younger, more energetic. As a boy I saw in Life

magazine photos of the Civil War veterans. I don’t

think there are any left, are there?

They would have to be a hundred seventy-five.

Sometimes I remember aspects of that damnable war.

"Marriage" by Jim Harrison from Dead Man's Float. © Copper Canyon Press, 2016.

'Ripe Cherries" by Athena Kildegaard

"A Harvest of Death" Gettysburg battlefield, 1863, Matthew Brady (?)

                                                                      I read that the men,
                                                                      on their way to Gettysburg,
                                                                      stopped along the road
                                                                      to pick and eat ripe cherries.

                                                                      That the fruit should not
                                                                      go to waste.

                                                                      That they should take
                                                                      such pleasure before battle.

                                                                      That the oldest among them
                                                                      should shake the trees
                                                                      and the youngest gather
                                                                      the fallen fruit.
                                                                      That they should aim rifles
                                                                      with the taste of cherries
                                                                      against their teeth.

"Ripe Cherries" by Athena Kildegaard from Bodies of Light. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2011.

"Strawberries" by Paul Martin

Une Fraise de Carpentras, John O'Grady, 2013

It’s ripe strawberries that bring me

to my knees in the garden this morning,

impossibly big and red as those

on the covers of gardening magazines in January

and almost as sweet as the small wild ones

my brother and I picked up on Best’s Hill,

eating more than we dropped into the coffee cans

our mother fitted with wire handles.

If a cloud moved across that blue sky

casting a shadow, I didn’t notice,

the snakes we were warned about

never appeared, and who could see,

even in that brilliant light,

beyond the quiet hills all the way to Vietnam

and the war he’d carry back with him.

Heads down we browsed through the field

until we were filled and drowsy,

sprawled next to each other in the warm grass,

juice smeared across our T-shirts,

our mouths and hands.

"Strawberries" by Paul Martin from Closing Distances. © The Backwaters Press, 2009.

"6" by Gary Snyder

"Fresh Blackberries" by Jodi McKinney

“In that year, 1914, we lived on the farm

And the relatives lived with us.

A banner year for wild blackberries

Dad was crazy about wild blackberries

No berries like that now.

You know Kitsap County was logged before

The turn of the century—it was easiest of all,

Close to water, virgin timber,

When I was a kid walking about in the

Stumpland, wherever you’d go a skidroad

Puncheon, all overgrown.

We went up one like that, fighting our way through

To its end near the top of a hill:

For some reason wild blackberries

Grew best there. We took off one morning

Right after milking: rode the horses

To a valley we’d been to once before

Hunting berries, and hitched the horses.

About a quarter mile up the old road

We found the full ripe of berrytime—

And with only two pails—so we

Went back home, got Mother and Ruth,

And filled lots of pails. Mother sent letters

To all the relatives in Seattle:

Effie, Aunt Lucy, Bill Moore,

Forrest, Edna, six or eight, they all came

Out to the farm, and we didn’t take pails

Then: we took copper clothes-boilers,

Wash-tubs, buckets, and all went picking.

We were canning for three days.”

"6" by Gary Snyder from Myths and Texts. © New Directions, 1978.

"Horses" by Jim Harrison

Faith. Katya Hannula

In truth I am puzzled most in life

by nine horses.

I’ve been watching them for eleven weeks

in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven

on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places

hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question

to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another

in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,

sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music

and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech

to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear

creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives

on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which

we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses

in their sweet-smelling silence.

"Horses" by Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason. © Copper Canyon Press, 2011.

"Hay for the Horses" by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night

From far down San Joaquin

Through Mariposa, up the

Dangerous mountain roads,

And pulled in at eight a.m.

With his big truckload of hay

          behind the barn.

With winch and ropes and hooks

We stacked the bales up clean

To splintery redwood rafters

High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa

Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,

Itch of haydust in the 

               sweaty shirt and shoes.

At lunchtime under Black oak

Out in the hot corral,

--The old mare nosing lunchpails,

Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--

"I'm sixty-eight" he said,

"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life.

And dammit, that's just what

I've gone and done."

From Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder, published by North Point Press.

Copyright © 1958, 1959, 1965 Gary Snyder.

____________________

From The Writer's Almanac:

An Interview with Gary Snyder Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco. As a teenager, he wrote articles for the mountain-climbing club’s magazine and his high school newspaper, and then he went to Reed College, where he started reading Asian poetry. In the summers, he worked in logging camps, on trail crews, and as a fire lookout in the mountains. In 1955, he worked at Yosemite National Park on the trail crew. He said: “I had given up on poetry. … Then I got out there and started writing these poems about the rocks and blue jays. I looked at them. They didn’t look like any poems that I had ever written before. So I said, these must be my own poems.” They became his first book, Riprap (1959). That same year, he read with Allen Ginsberg at the famous October Sixth Gallery Reading where Ginsberg read “Howl” for the first time, and the two poets became lifelong friends. Snyder became a hero of the counterculture when Jack Kerouac published the book The Dharma Bums (1958), whose hero, Japhy Ryder, is based on Snyder. For over a decade, Snyder spent most of his time studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. He has published more than 20 books of poetry and prose, includingAxe Handles (1983), Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997), and Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He has also translated poetry, taught English at the University of California, Davis, and is respected environmental activist and thinker. Snyder has lived in the same house since 1970. The house was built by hand on a 100-acre plot of land in California’s Sierra Nevada. His most recent books include Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014) and This Present Moment: New Poems(2015). Read the interview →

Ted Kooser Interview

Jim Harrison has been a popular poet on this blog. His recent death prompted a spike in blog hits as people sought out his poetry.

One of Harrison's poems I had posted just days before his death is "Kooser called from Nebraska to say he'd found..." Maybe some wondered who the "Kooser" is immortalized in Harrison's poem.

Well, here he is, fellow-poet and friend Ted Kooser. The Writer's Almanac recently posted this interview. You'll find Kooser to be another voice speaking from the calm quiet heart of the chaos around us.

Ted Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. Like Wallace Stevens before him, he took a job in the insurance business, where he worked for many years. He would get up early and write poems for an hour and a half before he went to work. By the time he retired in 1999, Kooser had published seven books of poetry, including Not Coming to Be Barked At (1976), One World at a Time (1985), and Weather Central (1994). He resigned himself to being a relatively unknown poet, but he continued to write every morning. Then, in 2004, he got a phone call informing him that he had been chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He said: “I was so staggered I could barely respond. The next day, I backed the car out of the garage and tore the rearview mirror off the driver’s side.”

Kooser served as U.S. poet laureate from 2004 to 2006, one of the first poet laureates to be selected from the Great Plains, and during that time, his book Delights & Shadows (2005) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He also began a weekly newspaper column called “American Life in Poetry.” His goal was to introduce simple poems about ordinary subjects to people who might not otherwise read poetry. He lives on a 62-acre spread near Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge. His latest collection, Splitting an Order, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2014.

Read the interview.

"For a Friend Lying In Intensive Care Waiting for Her White Blood Cells to Rejuvenate After a Bone Marrow Transplant" by Barbara Crooker

"Woodland Spring" by Morna Rhys

                                                    The jonquils. They come back. They split the earth with
                                                              their green swords, bearing cups of light.
                                                    The forsythia comes back, spraying its thin whips with
                                                             blossom, one loud yellow shout.
                                                    The robins. They come back. They pull the sun on the
                                                              silver thread of their song.
                                                    The irises come back. They dance in the soft air in silken
                                                              gowns of midnight blue.
                                                    The lilacs come back. They trail their perfume like a scarf
                                                              of violet chiffon.
                                                    And the leaves come back, on every tree and bush, millions
                                                              and millions of small green hands applauding your return.

"For a Friend Lying in Intensive Care Waiting for Her White Blood Cells

to Rejuvenate After a Bone Marrow Transplant"

 by Barbara Crooker from Selected Poems. © Future Cycle Press, 2015.

"Kooser called from Nebraska to say he'd found..." by Jim Harrison

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found

a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned

country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam

trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers

shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings

before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom

you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump

when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.

Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night

I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn

an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.

Some complain but I love this night music,

imagining that some of the railroad cars are from

my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled

to my favorite, "Route of the Phoebe Snow."

To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.

"Kooser called from Nebraska to say he'd found..." by Jim Harrison from Livingston Suite. © Limberlost Press, 2005.

"Molly the Brave" by Jim Harrison

Photo: Jean Gregory Evans

                                                         Molly was the bravest
                                                         In April she would swing out
                                                         over the river on a rope
                                                         tied to an elm branch. There was still
                                                         ice along the bank and one day
                                                         her body was found down by the weir
                                                         with a bruised head, which meant she hit ice.
                                                         One summer evening she hugged me in her wet
                                                         black bathing suit after I brought her a milk shake.
                                                         My blood became hot and moved in all directions.
                                                         When we caught frogs to eat their legs
                                                         she said, ”We are animals.” And on the hill
                                                         by the river we illegally picked trillium.
                                                         All the boys wanted to marry her.
                                                         We kept putting the wildflowers she loved
                                                         on her grave. More than sixty years
                                                         later I see clearly--that no one gets over anything
                                                         least of all Molly by the river,
                                                         swinging up through the air—
                                                                                                                    a bird.

"Molly the Brave" by Jim Harrison from Dead Man's Float. © Copper Canyon Press, 2016.

"Blue" by Elizabeth Poliner

"Birch Island, Southwest from Lookout Point, Harpswell" by Henry Isaacs

Great Island, Harpswell, Maine

Clear windy day and

the ocean’s waters rush ahead

singing.

In the distance off the low islands

the white splash of waves.

The clouds,

huge white puffs, stationary

in the bluest

air, seem unreal,

as if imported

and tacked up

by some grand producer.

Oh, the blue

we live in, bright sky

blue, glossy silvery

ocean blue—the blue

we’re permitted:

our essential bed,

our daily blanket—

it’s our home, this life in,

through and around

blue—by plan or chance,

by any account

a wonder, a miracle,

day like today,

the water busy,

noisy and constant

as if no amount of praise

were enough

for our blue, brilliant world.

"Blue" by Elizabeth Poliner from What You Know In Your Hands. © David Robert Books, 2015.

"January" by Baron Wormser

“Cold as the moon,” he’d mutter

In the January of 5 A.M. and 15 below

As he tried to tease the old Chev into greeting

One more misanthropic morning.

It was an art (though he never

Used that curious word) as he thumped

The gas pedal and turned the key

So carefully while he held his breath

And waited for the sharp jounce

And roar of an engaged engine.

“Shoulda brought in the battery last night.”

“Shoulda got up around midnight

And turned it over once.”

It was always early rising as he’d worked

A lifetime “in every damn sort

Of damn factory.” Machines were

As natural to him as dogs and flowers.

A machine, as he put it, "was sensible.”

I was so stupid about valves and intakes

He thought I was some religious type.

How had I lived as long as I had

And remained so out of it?

And why had I moved of my own free will

To a place that prided itself

On the blunt misery of January?

“No way to live,” he’d say as he poked

A finger into the frozen throat

Of an unwilling carburetor.

His breath hung in the air

Like a white balloon.

Later on the way to the town where

We worked while the heater

Wheezed fitfully and the windshield

Showed indifference to the defroster

He’d tum to me and say that

The two best things in this world

Were hot coffee and winter sunrises.

The icy road beckoned to no one,

Snow began to drift down sleepily,

The peace of servitude sighed and dreamed.

"January" by Baron Wormser from Mulroney and Others. © Sarabande Books, 2000.

"To the New Year" by W.S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

"To the New Year" by W.S. Merwin from Collected Poems: 1996-2011. © The Library of America, 2011. 

"Monopoly: 1955" by Barbara Crooker

We start by fanning out the money, colored

like Necco wafers: pink, yellow, mint, gold.

From the first roll of the dice, differences widen:

the royal blues of Boardwalk and Park Place

look down their noses at the grapey immigrants

from Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues.

My grandparents coming from Italy in steerage

measured their gold in olive oil, not bank notes

and deeds. The man in the top hat and tuxedo

always holds the good cards. The rest of us

hope we can pay the Electric Company.

We know there is no such thing as Free Parking,

and Bank Errors are never in our favor.

In the background, Johnny Mathis croons

Chances Are from the cracked vinyl radio.

We played for hours, in those years

before television, on the Formica table,

while my mother coaxed a chicken,

cooking all day on the back burner, to multiply

itself into many meals. The fat rose to the surface,

a roiling ocean of molten gold.

"Monopoly: 1955" by Barbara Crooker from Gold. © Cascade Books, 2013.