Poetry As It Happens….

People sometimes ask where a poem comes from. In my experience, every poem has its own way of entering the world. If you scroll down this page, you will find the stories of poems – the poems and how they came to be. While these notes point toward the genesis of a poem and the freight the poem carries, readers don’t need to know any of it. If at this moment I am capable of reflection on a process of sorting images and words, it might be thought of like ransacking a pile of laundry to find the other sock. It may be the lost sock is irretrievable, or it may be somewhere knotted up in a pant-leg. Or it may be sleeping on the side of one of the fins of the washing machine. And so the poem limps along with one sock. Blessed be the sockless foot that walks on the grass or the sand, or in the mud -- no sock, no shoe. And that foot is the one that knows what the poem means. As for the horse – a horse missing its sock? that’s the poem, a horse that knows where it wants to go. Like myself (the writer), I hope you (the reader), will come along for the ride.

From In the Cities of Sleep

Solastalgia

Once we were earth
was beautiful
was water  
flowers
under sea
in forest even
here
blossom and bee all shaped in lovely
and dancing in flit and suck and honey
and languid-limbed we brought forth
and died back
in our season and lived again
in the long line of mother to mother
earth
to seed to flame of spring --
in balance did we
in balance
and beauty.
Once we were.
Was beautiful.

From In the Cities of Sleep

February Freeze

One February morning we found
three dead birds in the orchard

not a mark on them, frozen in flight
flying at night to keep warm,

you thought, wings beating the dark
till they dropped like fallen stars

their bones turned to ice.
I thought of those birds again

when the Eritrean who
spent seven years seeking legal entry

to Switzerland before he stowed away
in the wheel well of a Boeing 737

was found frozen, fallen
to an English village street.

From In the Cities of Sleep

Swan Bone…

the bones of birds
being hollow
for obvious reasons
it might be obvious also
why the first flutes
found thousands of years after
the pentatonic melodies they played
in the lives of Homo Sapien
Neanderthalensis
and Homo Sapien Sapiens
perhaps while dancing

perhaps while there was chanting
around them, perhaps
while the dancers
moved in circles
perhaps while someone else
shook a rattle and someone
struck a drum, and a boy

in the circle of dancers
thought of the clouds of swans
traversing the autumn –
their hollow wing-bones
lifting and falling
above a swirl of yellow leaves
that smoked the sky
with gold–

VANISHING

Trellie would take off like a shot once we entered the woods, but that afternoon she stopped up ahead on the other side of a fallen log. By the time I reached her, she had a bone in her mouth. A tiny vertebra.

It had been a fawn. There was only a little sinew holding the fragile joints together. The fawn’s bones had been through the winter and were white against the redwood duff and pine needles.

Drop it, I said, and Trellie let the bone go. It landed between the two widest thoracic ribs of the hull of her, I thought, fully realizing why we speak of a ship’s “ribs.” And so the poem began. I listened.

the intact hull of her
beached on duff, prickly
oak and pine needles

There are fragments first. A poem will often begin that way – a word or a phrase overheard in my mind, a kind of Ariadne’s thread leading from the murk of unformed feeling toward a word leading to another word as my mind begins to hunt for what has caught its attention. What is the story these bones tell? The question is really about belonging.

Good dog, I mutter, crouching over the bones. A coyote has left his scat, reddish with madrone berries, around the small pile of pits -- pearling through. I cock my ear to the inner voice.

the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
ignoring the heap of dung
red with madrone berries,
pale pits pearling through.

As a process of meaning-making, the poem emerges from an interaction between listening and what is heard. Initially there is no meaning to my perceptions, just a slight disorder of bones that arrange themselves like a rush of musical notes forming wordless patterns of repetition and symmetry as I recognize the skeleton of a fawn -- skull, spine, ribcage, the delicate bones of legs (one missing), the knob and crook of knee where the coyote left his scat. Even as I recognize a fawn, my alertness deepens. What am I looking for? There is something larger and intangible contained in these bones.

Perhaps as a seer augers a casting, or a shaman watches the smoke rising from a ritual gift of fat thrown on the fire, I look for what has caught my deeper attention. If I can find it, I will know something otherwise lost to me.

I imagine the fawn crossing the meadow to enter the woods, her spotted body further dappled by the forest light, and she stays with me, though Trellie and I walk deeper into the trees. I turn the bones in my mind, recollecting the details, as Trellie darts in and out of sight. I whistle for her when she disappears, and she bursts back onto the trail, tail wagging, black fur carrying bits of brush.

A few days later I encounter an asymmetrical parallel – a fox dead on the road with a plastic bag somehow caught on its body and swaying in the wind. It’s a moment of shocking contrasts – a beautiful wild animal and a plastic bag, both glimpsed from the window of a car, one among many, speeding toward town.

the fox -- its narrow bloated body
on the road, a plastic bag
snagged on its foot

Road-kill is common, and the grief I feel is familiar, though foxes are seldom hit. The snagged plastic bag is something else. Like jigsaw pieces from separate puzzles, the fox and the plastic bag don’t belong together.
Belonging.

It occurs to me -- the discovery of relationships in the making of a poem is how I find my own belonging.

Trellie is denned up under the dinner table when the evening light angles through the hawthorn branches in a way that reminds me of how a poem pushes into awareness through a dim unknowing. The dead fawn, the road-kill fox and the plastic bag are connected by my vague unease; to plum that uneasiness is to unravel the mystery of what lures me into the poem.

Paul Shepard said the modern mind misunderstands the impact of the absence of wild animals. The plastic bag ballooning from the foot of the fox says something about the quality of our loss. It underscores the sacrilege of the road-kill in a particularly post-modern desecration. Will we wonder at our loneliness? And there it is, the poem has given itself in a final question. I have no answer.

“Vanishing,” first published by Canary, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry and may be found in Insistent Grace.

LAKE TROUT

I had been to pick up a book at the library. It was fall, after the time change, when sunset comes early, and I decided to stop for a cup of tea. I chose a local greasy spoon I sometimes go to, because I never run into anyone I know there. It’s the kind of place with burgers, breakfast any time, heavy white cafeteria mugs and Lipton tea bags. I would have to ask for honey.

I sat by the window watching the evening gather itself and listening. The poem had been growing in my mind almost without my knowing. That is what had led me into the café instead of back to my car to head home. By the time the waitress brought my tea and the bowl of miniature cream cups with the pull-tab tops, I was absorbed in that familiar process of inner listening. The feeling of the poem had begun to shape itself into the first two lines.

Those northern salvelinus mate
only on stormy autumn nights

I could hear the words as listened, feeling my way in the uncertain terrain of poem-making.

The magic of fish had seduced me a year or two before, after the Dunsmuir Spill in the upper Sacramento River. I went to the spill site to bear witness. It was a chemical spill and the wild rainbow trout in that stretch of the river had all been killed. My grief had given way to an urgent curiosity I followed into the realm of fisheries science, where I learned about the reproductive habits of lake trout.

Sitting by the window, the lights of passing cars coming on in the dusk might have reminded me of the glimmer of fish schooling past. I was already half-way somewhere else; because it was autumn, and autumn is spawning season for lake trout.

. . . low
in the liquid layers like black glass

What would happen next was unusual in the world of fish. The male would make the redd, preparing a place for the hen to lay her eggs.

The male rubs the rocks clean
to lure the female
in the glistening dark

Storm clouds racing across the moon and lightening cutting the sky over the dark water of a lake were intensely compelling images. I felt alive in two worlds. Not the café and the cold lake, but the lake and some entranced place of my own. The two worlds were colliding, which is what gave birth to the poem.

. . . and I dream of it

I felt myself sink with the spawning pair . . .

below and apart from the world of human desire . . . .

I rose out of the poetic dream like a diver rising to the surface, understanding the ecstatic quality of their instinctive act, a kind of insight that carried its own luminosity. Our mammalian human world was not the only place of desire and ecstatic fulfillment.

The poem reaches out to the reader to share my passionate preoccupation with the biology of fish. Here, it says -- here are these cold-blooded creatures seemingly so unlike ourselves, whose lives are lived invisibly below the surface – just as the inner life of a poet is lived below the surface.

Apart from scientists and fishermen, fish hold little interest for most people. The poem offers the possibility of changing that, of connecting with another life form that has evolved over eons a distinctive highly developed mating pattern.

The meeting of two fish, male and female, the meeting of human and animal, the meeting of scientific knowledge and imagination, and the meeting of poet and reader -- the poem is a series of connections. It reveals the complicated ecological interweaving of air and weather and season with the behavior of fish. What began as a scientific report becomes the insistence on an intimate erotic alliance between the lake trout and the poet -- and by implication the reader.

The streetlights had come on by the time I finished my tea. I drove home with the lines of the poem scrawled in a notebook I carry in my backpack. Try reading it aloud to yourself. Slowly, to be there -- with them, under that storm sky, when the days are short and darkness carries us deep into the dreaming place.

SOLASTALGIA

For many years before my town grew beyond small town into high-end real estate with fences around Private Property, I used to walk at night, sure of myself, sure-footed, I knew every trail through the fields and orchards where I walked in all seasons through the apple trees. I knew every fence and where I could climb through, every deer trail and coyote den and creek confluence and fish hole. Walking I felt myself part of that world of animal and season and weather and the very air with its scents of the summer fields, the winter-wet ditches, the autumn fog, and the warm-damp of spring.

Before the Pandemic. Before the upside-down turning of the seasons. Before the break-up of the Polar Vortex, and before I had ever seen the ordinarily cyclops hurricane form two eyes in its center. Before the world seemed to be coming apart at every turn, I listened in the dark for cicadas in summer and frogs in winter and spring. I heard the hush in the dark grass that announced the presence of possum or skunk. I wrote what I heard, and I listened with my very skin, and I saw with my whole body what watched and what waited in the dark for me to pass by. I walked in all weather, joyously in the rain, wearing rubber boots and my hooded slicker, sleeveless in shorts on the rare warm September nights when the fog didn’t come in. Even my body smelled of the land – the tarweed and my salty sweat in summer, apple blossoms in spring, the cold marsh mud come winter. I loved the land and it loved me back, blessing me with belonging.

Many of the poems written over those solitary walks appear in Insistent Grace, published in 2021, a few are in Her Body, forthcoming from Main Street Rag, and “Solastalgia” is found in my newest book, In the Cities of Sleep, out earlier this year [2023]. This poem emerged in a stream of words in a voice I had not heard before. But it speaks of a time when our belonging was unmitigated. We all belonged to Earth, alive inside her interwoven natural systems, part of everything. The word solastalgia refers to the experience of no longer feeling at home where we live, and it implies the lost belonging I feel in the places where I once felt so utterly at home.

FEBRUARY FREEZE

La Nina gripped us in her winter fist. A cold current swept up the coast all the way from Terra del Fuego, and for months the warm wet storms of the western Pacific were blocked by a high-pressure ridge. Bearing steadily down from the north, the jet stream carried the arctic cold into every cranny of the house.

One morning we woke to a world white with frost, pulled on our boots, and trudged out into the orchard. The trees were bare. The last windfall apples long since eaten by the deer and coyotes or cidered back into soil. Our breath hung in the morning shadows, and the frost crunched under our steps. “Look,” I said –
                                there on the ground was a Townsend’s warbler, yellow feathers bright against the dark winter earth between the leafless apple trees. We bent and turned his frozen body, his tiny feet as delicate as lace. Not a mark on him.

A little farther in our ramble, the sun now just slanting through the redwoods that bordered the orchard, and there before us, the gleam of gold of the soft face-feathers of another warbler! Another mystery. No mark, no disturbance of the glossy feathers to indicate the cause of death. Farther still, on the far side of the orchard, yet one more feathered migrant fallen to earth, unmarked, rigid in cold and death. Frozen in flight we decided, migrating at night as they will.

When I read of an Eritrean man who stowed away in the wheel well of a jet after failing a seven-year struggle to gain legal entry to Switzerland, I thought of those birds. In the high altitude of flight, the man had frozen to death and dropped like a stone when the pilot lowered the landing gear heading into Heathrow. I imagined him falling as the birds had fallen. Not a mark on him, I heard an inner voice say. And so the poem began.

SWAN BONE

In the before time, before history, when time was measured by light and the 28 days of a woman’s harmony with the moon, when the world was alternately gripped between paws of ice or warmed into sleek coastal marshes and wide dry inland savannahs, there was music.
I had read about the carbon dated Neanderthal flute with its four holes carved in the thighbone of a cave bear 60,000 years ago. There were other flutes derived from different animals: a mammoth tusk, a vulture bone, and one carved from the hollow wing bone of a swan.
It was the swan bone that stuck in my mind so that later, not thinking of bones or flutes, but overhearing my mind wander, not knowing where it would lead me, I jotted down these words: The bones of birds being hollow followed by for obvious reasons. And then my mind swung to an image. I heard the whistling notes of a flute and someone drumming. There were people in a circle, swaying and stepping with the rhythm, and there was an adolescent boy, one of the dancers, who looked up, or remembered looking up at a wedge of swans as they shadowed the earth in autumn migratory flight -- one boy, dreaming into the flight of swans, just as I listen dreamily for the calls of geese crossing my own autumn sky.
This unfolded in my mind’s eye as I gazed absently out the window of my study, when just at that moment a gust tugged a rain of yellow birch leaves from their stems and they floated down, a golden flock of their own, bright against the dark of the afternoon.
I was myself, watching and listening to my mind, following the words as the poem revealed itself; and I was there – a Paleolithic youth 35,000 years ago, daydreaming into the flight of swans and glowing golden leaves swirling to earth while a drum and a bone flute made music.

From Insistent Grace

Vanishing

The grief and sense of loss we often interpret as a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. - Paul Shepard

Heart, lungs and gut gone to the gnaw
of insects, the intact hull of her
beached on duff, prickly
oak and pine needles, coyote scat
in the crook of her knee --

the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
ignoring the heap of dung
red with madrone berries,
pale pits pearling through.
She noses the foreleg
where scraps of hide cling to bone.

Imagine the first flick of tail,
ripple of skin under summer flies,
and how this fawn died.
The woods are full of stories
in rotting trunks, cool shadows
and bones like these, whitened
by winters she hadn’t seen.

But what of her stays with me?
Days later in my lumpy green chair
by the window, cat curved
around my feet on the ottoman,
the dog denned under the table,
teacup on the sill, and I think

of the fox -- its narrow bloated body
on the road, a plastic bag
snagged on its foot, ballooning
beside blood slicked fur.

Will the silence of their absence rise
above the din of cities? Will their ghosts
stumble through strip malls and suburbs
looking for lost meadows, jostle
at the on-ramps distracting drivers
with a sudden vague unease?

Will our grief surprise us?
Will we wonder at our loneliness?

“Vanishing,” first published by Canary, has been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize in Poetry and may be found in Insistent Grace.

From Insistent Grace

Lake Trout

Those northern salvelinus mate
only on stormy autumn nights low
in the liquid layers like black glass

The male rubs the rocks clean
to lure the female in the glistening dark
and I dream of it, the white shaft
of lightening, a moon
and fast clouds, his
iridescent scales, the elegant
caudal fin she fans
as she waits, the way they
half-sink
together, instinct and ecstasy
in that cold place

below and apart
from the world of human desire
surfacing through sleep