The Goose's Gift

Post 5
Sunday, February 23, 2013

Sound led me today. Not the bright and emphatic sun. Not the green shoots beckoning from the yellow grasses. Small, dark shapes bulleting above me, black punctuation against the February sky. Like any good end stop, I'm encouraged to follow the punctuation and I go toward the trees where these small, expressive birds are nesting. I stand with my elbows on the top board of the front paddock, facing the road. Like so many of our fences, these boards are weathered, a kind word for their deepened lines. I am reminded how often I write about wooden borders in my poems, the lines of fences tracing so many blank pages before I have put a single strike through a "t". If I dreamed and enjoyed it, I know wooden boards would be the boundary and also the goal.

I rarely dream, nightmares or otherwise, and never find the experience particularly enjoyable. I have skipped over passages in books where the author chose a dream to illustrate confusion or metaphor. I want to read between the lines of real experience, not headspace. I dream early in the morning, when I am awakened and then drift back to sleep. This morning I was awakened by the rhythmic alarm of a goose honking, the best sign that spring is near. As I fell back to sleep, I recognized that the next few hours would have hidden meanings and recollections. But when I woke, I remembered nothing of what the goose gave me.

 The birds are cacophonic. I realize the birds I've followed are further than I thought, but the sound is acute. If I am still and drown out the cars that are occasionally passing, I can hear individual songs where before was simply music. There are more than twenty robins in the pasture in front of me, their orange breasts still emphatic with the color of the ground. They are not yet bright against green grass, signatures of the spring reveal. The transparency of new growth; what was background becomes forefront. I kneel down and shuffle some of the grasses aside. They knot together, weaving low to cover the ground and survive the snow. I smudge the dirt between my fingers and pull on some of the green shoots. The dead leaves are classic crayola colors, burnt sienna and raw umber. I can't name their trees, what came before their torn and crinkled edges.

The wind brings a chill and when the sun is covered, I'm chastised for my premature celebration of spring. Each animal has its way of surviving, or at least lasting. I would like to be under the woven grasses when it snows, or tucked in the veins of a fence board. I would like to be buried and emerge. Such a glorious season of generosity. What does spring grant us? The shattering red of a cardinal in a waiting forsythia? A robin's tiny claws unbuckling from a tuft of crab grass? A lone goose perched on gray shingles with the sun on its dark beak? It give us dreams we can't remember to write of, but when we wake, there is ellipsis after ellipsis flitting across the sky.

Back Pasture

Post 4

Sunday, February 10, 2013

2:33 PM

My back is against the red siding of the arena, the sun against my cheek as it starts to set. The shadows are stark under my pen. The snow is bringing back the edges, making little brown oases that from the air, must look like pockmarks on the face of each property.

The rushing sound is not water. Instead of a current through liquid, the hushing is through air, metal and rubber hurtling on and above asphalt. I’m familiar with the sounds of the road, even if I can't see the vehicles from the house. I can hear the thick diesel engine of the mail truck as it rumbles past the fence and pauses in front of our black mail box at the end of the driveway. The yellow school buses have a distinctive growl as they slow and pull into the parking area of the township building across the street. I can tell when my mother drives her Ford truck down the driveway, especially in autumn when her departure stirs the fallen leaves. The ice on the driveway that has persisted after Saturday’s storm makes for good security, the crackling an announcement of visitors.

But in the trees, the sounds give over to the warmth of the day and the presence of the sun. The ice slowly gives way and stains the tree limbs darker, the excess water dripping slowly down to the snow in the shadows on the ground. I love this back pasture and its fortress of trees. I have always thought of it as the moonlight pasture, although that is my private name for it. In the summer, tiny speckles of light pop and fade against the wall of trees behind the fence, the fireflies congregating in the deep darkness behind our biggest outbuilding. We pasture horses here rarely, for the grass is rich and quickly mown down to nubs by their teeth. The ground has rolls in it, like an unmade bed, and in the fall, these striations are covered by a thick layer of dusky, aubergine leaves. Today, the quirks of the field are hidden under the whiteness of the snow persisting in its shaded location.

A brief moment of quiet on the road. The silence is peaceful and then deconstructed by the twittering of birds. I hear an owl with its lowly hooing. The shadows of the grey-brown trees are long and distinct on the white ground. What makes a ground holy, I think. What dictates respect and awe for a place? I think if someone else were to sit as I am, on this worn railroad tie with their face to the sun, they would not find these muddy, wet fields to be extraordinary. They would simply be sitting in a backyard with run down fences and some horses grazing a few fields over. As with people, beauty is not the only assessment of worth. The Alaskan tundra is breathtaking but the beauty contains hidden and not so hidden dangers for humans, the same with desert and the sea. There is something to be said for veiled loveliness, something I've also found occasion to celebrate in people. When I was a teacher, I always found the quieter students to be the ones I kept my eye on, their smiles when everyone else was finished laughing, their occasional quick blinking or fixed stare when everyone else was dull and day-dreaming. 

This spot of ground is like that for me. I find this backyard beautiful because it is mine and I know the memories it holds, concealed significance. It’s a muddy, occasionally dilapidated section of land, but I find it worthwhile. I wonder if part of the reason we are able to destroy whole swaths of land is because our perception of its value is limited to our own experience there. If it can give us gas or oil now, then what matters its value to the tenants years ago? I find this to be disrespectful and short-sighted, but I’m sentimental. My mother has the choice to preserve this land because to her, it’s a place to watch wild turkeys and count the deer. It matters to her because of the wildlife she loves. She wants to protect their habitat and in a way, she is preserving the life she made for herself here even though it’s time for her to leave. It’s a small gesture in some respects, but it’s the right choice for our family. Our honorable, visible road.

Concave is the Bowl

Post 3

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

11:58 am

I’m pond-side at my home, warmer weather today and bright. One summer, long ago, when I held hidden hurts tighter, I stood at the edge of another natural curve, rimmed with taller, West Coast pines and no clear way down. I had come for the blue water, based on a picture from a book that told me to go there. I had seen the photograph and ignored the print—long hike down, no swimming, long hike back up. I never put my hand in that blue clarity but water is always in my plans. The cure for anything, said Isak Dinesen, is sweat, tears, or the sea. I’ve spent exhaustive years with each and now I’m home, sitting on another kind of edge beside water, a spare coat draped on the stone bench, warmed.  

With each post, I’m migrating clockwise around the house. To my right are the two red buildings, arena and barn, wood fences. The house is behind me on my left side. Directly in front of me is the kidney-shaped pond, perhaps forty yards long at its current depth and fifteen yards across. It is spring fed, but I don’t know where that spring begins or if it even still exists. We have been known to top it off with a hose in hot summer months, when the grass cracks underfoot, desperate for drink.  Now the pond is passably full, enough to survive the winter.The curtain of ice is beautiful and nearly smooth, gray and opaque with white veins. The cold weather has been slowly freezing it solid and skate-able but I haven’t yet found a spare moment to find my skates and sit on this bench to strap them on. I used to play because that was what time was for. I didn’t have to make time to be exhilarated.

I turn slightly and look out beyond the pond, to the pasture past the pine trees and then the road. Hondo and Simmie are not grazing in their pasture but standing and thinking horse thoughts. Hondo, the black and white paint, has moved to the edge of the fence, noticing me. He is rigid-still, ears pricked forward and curious.  I can hear spring birds today, the sudden warming drawing them out. They are tentative tweets, but joyful. Every being celebrates a reprieve from what is deserved.  I try to whistle in imitation but the tone is not right, the clear notes not as sharp as the whistling deep in the trees. They answer me but I’m not sure it is a response. What are these sounds I’m trying to produce, whee whee whee? Trill, trill, trill. What foolishness to capture the song of a bird in letters and printed ink.  I try again and the bird is silent. How can I spell the silence in the absence of a bird’s song?

I have other worries. I do not know the names of these trees. This ignorance is developing as a theme, a growing concern since we are only now waiting to hear the final word from the township before contracts are signed.  I think I believed that describing the woods would be enough of a farewell, how they look, how I feel when looking at them, what lives beneath them. No, not close enough. I’ve touched these trees, broken and felled them down but have I actually known the bark under my hand? I claim this land but is it fair to feel such loss when I don’t know sugar maple from sweetgum? On this bench, looking out at the trees along the rim of this property, I’m convicted of this sense of ownership I don’t deserve.  How deeper could the goodbye be if I was intimate with this place.  I need to develop my point of view, up close to the bark, the grasses, and the sandy beach of the pond. I want to be a credible witness to a place I treasured as home, saying goodbye with the heft of a strong handshake between friends.