Considering that
looked like this and that it was a balmy fifty-plus degree day, it’s no wonder Nisqually Wildlife Refuge looked a lot like this
when we pulled into the parking lot Sunday.
What was amazing, though, was that you could still manage to find an
standing right next to the main trail, silent witness to all that is beautiful in nature.
Yesterday was an absolutely clear, cold, windy day here in the Pacific Northwest and I’d originally planned on walking Nisqually since the loop trail opened this week, but the cold East winds made me postpone that until next week. Instead, I walked the local beach for an hour bathing in the sunshine, no matter how cold the air.
The wind-driven waves were so high I could barely see the ducks in the
Sound much of the time.
In fact, the best part of the day was watching the gulls riding the high wind, skittering overheard, sunlight glinting through translucent feathers,
or hovering mid-air, suspended in high winds, suspended in time:
For a while I envied the high-flying gulls able to soar hundreds of feet simply with the tilt of a wing, followed by an equally impressive dive all without a single flap of the wings.
Soon, though, merely being able to share their flight, their joy in the cerulean blue skies seemed like flight enough for one day.
I’ve been tapped by Joseph Duemer
of Reading and Writing to reveal if I had any images of famous people in my studio, study, office, or workspace. And since I’m in the mood for an easy blog entry today, I decided to participate in this meme.
I’m fascinated by the fact he has Janis Joplin, Jackson Pollock and Ho Chi Minh in his space. Unfortunately, I can’t compete with that. I’m afraid if I had any images of anyone other than family in my space, it still wouldn’t be as interesting, or as revealing, as that combination.
I can’t remember ever having a picture of someone I admired up on my walls, perhaps because I’ve never been much into “heroes.�
The only images in my den are of my children and grandchildren. My walls are covered with pictures of crows, a picture of a boatman on an alpine lake in china, a wood carving from Thailand, a large clay abstract, two handmade kaleidoscopes, a caricature of “Webby Gone Hiking“ given to me by a student upon my retirement, a beer mug from the 2nd Battalion 34th Armor Division, the unit I went to Vietnam with, and various carvings of my own.
Oh, yeah, and bookshelves covered with CD’s and books.
I’m looking forward to seeing if other members on his list have images of famous people in their areas.
And if you happen to be looking for an easy meme for a Friday entry, I’d been interested in seeing if other bloggers I read regularly have images of famous people in their work space:
Wenda, alan, harry, and rb
UPDATE: Harry, kenju and I may have failed this meme miserably, but rb of such stuff more than makes up for all of our failures. I’m not sure I want to know just how conventionally drab my workspace is.
David Wagoner has a new book of poetry out already, so I thought I’d better finish The House of Song, copyright 2002, that I bought right after it appeared on my local bookstore’s shelf. Wagoner is so prolific that I sometimes doubt I’ll ever finish his latest book before the next one comes out.
I still think Wagoner is a vastly underrated nature poets, and I’ve even gone so far as to refuse to buy collections of “nature� poetry that don’t include at least one of his poems. I also suspect, and have probably said it here before, that if he weren’t so prolific and didn’t write on such wide-ranging topics that his nature poetry would receive more of the attention it deserves.
Despite the fact that he’s probably my favorite contemporary poet, even I’ll admit I could easily do without a great many of the poems in this book. I’ve finally accepted this as the price I have to pay for the poems that I do love because if he didn’t write so prolifically I’d have to wait years for the poems I do love because I so seldom get to read “poetry� magazines.
I’m surprisingly fond of the poems about his young daughters in this collection, but my favorite poems are still the “nature� poems. It‘s a close call between “My Father and the Hydrostatic Paradox,� where a father discovers just how hard it is to stop the flow of water, “For a Mockingbird,� where the narrator frees a mockingbird he buys in Mexican market, and this one:
WAITING OUT A STORM ON A DESERTED FARM
The door of this farmhouse
Has fallen out of its frame
Flat on the sunken porch
From threshold to first step,
And the gutters and downspouts
Are giving away their share
of a cloudburst. The shake roof
Is down on two cornerstones.
One side of the wire fence
Was a garden once; the other,
A pasture full of brambles
And burrs, now come to call
The garden theirs, and roses
Have crawled over and under
The fence to cultivate
The weeds with another wildness.
The man who gave up here
Dug fifty-six postholes
And filled them with quarter-splits
Of unseasoned cottonwood,
Then strung them with two strands
Of No. 2 barbed wire
To hold the lightest touches
Of snow and meadowlarks,
To bear with the full and empty
Talons of saw-whet owls,
And left them there to whistle
In the wind from the North Pole.
But glistening and glinting
Green in the hard rain,
Six of those posts have sprouted
Branches and put out leaves.
The poem is so simple, so realistic, so zen-like that some readers might not think it’s poetry at all. It’s so photo-realistic that you could almost imagine the same ideas being conveyed in a series of slides. But they couldn’t, of course, unless someone had thought ahead fare enough to take slides before the farm had been abandoned.
No, this is the kind of juxtaposition of images that lends itself perfectly to poetry, as in a good haiku. There’s no need for philosophizing or moralizing because the last image reveals itself in the context of the poem.
Perhaps it helps if you’ve already read Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur� or held similar thoughts, but it’s not really necessary if you allow the images to rub against each other and reveal themselves.