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Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

Flute in the Summer Woods – Robert Morgan

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on June 16, 2012| 2 Comments »

Everything I love changes me, and if I can be true to love I will welcome the changes.

Hear the veery in the deep dapple-dark forest.  Hear the descending double-voiced yearning so airy and earthy, old when these broad poplars were jade-and-honey flowers in their mother’s hair, old when these smooth mossed stones had just cracked from their father’s face.  Sit in the silence of light retreating and perhaps the spirit-bird will join you, a momentary apparition of brown leaf shadow and speckled dusk.  With bright eyes it will accept you, hop once, fly, and in the next moment you will hear again, ancient and aching, Audubon’s flute.

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Audubon’s Flute

Audubon in the summer woods
by the afternoon river sips
his flute, his fingers swimming on
the silver as silver notes pour

by the afternoon river, sips
and fills the mosquito-note air
with silver as silver notes pour
two hundred miles from any wall.

And fills the mosquito-note air
as deer and herons pause, listen,
two hundred miles from any wall,
and sunset plays the stops of river.

As deer and herons pause, listen,
the silver pipe sings on his tongue
and sunset plays the stops of river,
his breath modeling a melody

the silver pipe sings on his tongue,
coloring the trees and canebrakes,
his breath modeling a melody
over calamus and brush country,

coloring the trees and canebrakes
to the horizon and beyond,
over calamus and brush country
where the whitest moon is rising

to the horizon and beyond
his flute, his fingers swimming on
where the whitest moon is rising.
Audubon in the summer woods.

Robert Morgan.

[Collected in Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry, Sally Buckner, editor.  Carolina Academic Press, 1999.]

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Last Saturday I walked beside the creek and up the mountain with my sister while each veery called to the next that we were on our way.  Today Linda and I drive to Durham to meet my teacher, the first time in over thirty years, and to gather with his students gathering from fifty states.  Already we’ve been cataloguing the changes.  What do I love now that I didn’t love then?  How have I been true to the loves that entered me years ago?  Before the noisy afternoon, I take a moment to listen.  And when my bones are old as stones, trees, moss, how will my voice be recalled?

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Robert Morgan was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina and grew up on the family farm in the Green River valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  He is currently the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell but has returned to North Carolina many times as visiting professor and writer to Davidson, Duke, Appalachian State, and East Carolina.

The Veery (Catharus fuscescens) is a small thrush of deep moist woods, chestnut brown with a speckled breast.  All thrushsong is melodic and haunting, but to me the veery is most magical.  On a quiet afternoon you clearly hear him singing harmony with himself, the doubled notes possible only with an avian syrinx (unlike my limited tenor’s larynx).

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Bear !

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on June 12, 2012| 2 Comments »

June 1, 2012

This is Dan Lawler at Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  May I speak to Bill Griffin?

Hi, I’m Bill.

Listen, Bill, it’s about your back country permit.  You’re not going to be able to stay at Cosby Knob Shelter on June 9.

What is it? Too many hikers?

No, too much bear activity.  A bear tore up a couple of hikers’ . . . packs.  We’re closing the shelter for a month or two until he gets the message and moves on.  Those Cosby Creek bears – ha, ha – they give us problems every spring.

Ah . . . well . . . that’s fine.  I’m not all that fond of sleeping with bears.

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July 23, 2000

Today Mary Ellen and I embarked on the Great Sibling Bonding Adventure.  My sister and I spent a week backpacking the Appalachian Trail from Springer Mtn., GA to Deep Gap, NC, something shy of 100 miles.  Growing up separated in age by six years we never spent much time together, never had a lot in common.  Now we’re sweating up every steep ridge together, eating out of the same pot, sleeping in the same little tent.

Along the way we count the birds and name the wildflowers, and make up names if we don’t recognize them.  We make supper in pitch dark at Gooch Gap.  We make up funny songs (“Nothing Like a Log” to the tune of “Nothing Like a Dame”).  We make it to Muskrat Creek Shelter on our last night and celebrate Mary Ellen’s thirty-eleventh birthday with a stale cake I’ve stashed in my pack all week.  We make friends.

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June 8, 2012

Now it’s Friday morning and we’re cinching up our hip belts at Big Creek ranger station to head into the back country again.  Last month Mary Ellen called me and said she was overdue for some big brother quality time.  We broke out the trail maps and chose a non-old-guy-destructive three-day loop in GSMNP.  Since we’ve been shut out of Cosby Knob by the bears, we’ll hike 5 1/2 miles to Walnut Bottom and spend both nights there, Big Creek chuckling beside us.  On Saturday we’ll hike a ten-mile loop that takes us up to the AT and right past the bear-haunted trail shelter (and while we fill our bottles from the spring there we’ll keep whistling the entire time).

We’ll name every flower, tree and shrub — in twelve years damn if Mary Ellen hasn’t learned them all, right down to the Latin binomials.  After supper we’ll hang our food up high, and while dusk settles into Walnut Bottom we’ll sit on mossy creek boulders, sip mint tea with powdered milk, and wonder if the bears have discovered unattended dinners on the Tennessee side of the ridge.  Or if at this very moment they’re watching us from within the dog hobble and rhodies, just waiting for full dark . . .

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Bear

If you hear me, it will be a nut falling
from the buckeye.  If you hear me,
it will be a dry branch
seeking earth,
it will be slender fingers
of mountain ash waving praises
to the ridgelined sky.

If you see me, it will be a shadow
only one breath deeper
than twilight.
If you see me, it will be the twist
of heart that skips
a beat, the stark
of pupils gone abruptly wide.

I am mist that enfolds the laurel.
I am stone that reclines beneath black hemlocks.
I am a rumor at Maddron Bald,
a tremor at Mt. Guyot.

Raven is mistaken – this Ridge is mine.

And if you hear me, it will be the rising chest
of the mountain and its timeless slow
exhale,
and if you hear me
it will only be because
I didn’t hear you first.

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Afterword

In some twenty years of backpacking the Southern Appalachian mountains and Great Smokies, I’ve encounered a bear exactly once.  Mike Barnett and I were hiking without the noisy accompaniment of teenagers.  We’d set up camp one evening and I had walked back up the trail to spot some birds.  I’d been standing completely still for about twenty minutes, waiting for a Pileated Woodpecker I’d been hearing to show itself, when I heard a soft crack behind me.  I figured it was a buckeye falling.  Crack again.  I turned.  Slowly.  Twenty feet from me a large black mass with a pointed nose was staring towards camp where Mike was fixing supper.

And where did that happen?  Cosby Knob shelter.  That night I wrote the first draft of Bear in the AT log book and next morning left it in the shelter.

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and a p.s. . . .

Hey Sister — I’m looking closer at all the wildflower photos we took and I believe we saw BOTH lesser and greater purple fringed orchids!   (Platanthera psychodes and grandiflora).    —    your Bro

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[Bear first appeared in the journal Cave Wall, and was the first poem I wrote in the collection Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary (March Street Press, 2009.]

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Red Bird – Mary Oliver

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on April 28, 2012| 4 Comments »

April 27, 2012 – first scarlet tanager of spring, Elkin, NC.

If I had an hour and good binoculars I could spot him, but I know he’s there.  There’s no other song like his, just exactly like a robin with a 40 pack-year smoking history.  He always arrives about a week after the big oaks in our neighborhood have fully leaved, and then he hangs out way up in the canopy.  I’ll come back tomorrow when the sun is high, follow my ears, and when he lunges from the greenery for a moth or a beetle, I’ll have him.  A red like no other red.

Last week Linda was drawing at her desk when Saul ran in from the next room.  “Granny, I seed a red-headed woodpecker on the bird feeder!”  He pulls her into the den and there is indeed a woodpecker on the feeder, a male downy, patch of red at his nape.  “Good, Saul!  That is a woodpecker.  But a red-headed woodpecker has a head that is red all over.”  About fifteen minutes later Saul is back.  “Granny, see this red-headed woodpecker!”  And it’s head is red all over.  A bright fiery cardinal.

Red birds.  So startling!  So noticeable, so eye-catching!  Is the northern cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, the state bird of seven out of fifty because it’s so familiar and recognizable or because it is exotic, unbelievable that something so bright would allow itself to be seen by mortals?  I remember the first time I actually saw Piranga olivacea, the scarlet tanager.  I’d heard plenty calling and singing but never spotted one.  June 17, 1994, I was visiting my brother-in-law Skip for a weekend at his place in southern Ohio (off the beaten path doesn’t half do it justice).  Mid-morning with the binocs, about to quit because of warbler-neck (cricked back searching the tops of trees for spots of color), and there he was.  Perched high in brightness, not even attempting to conceal his flame.

Just to share a moment of that creature’s living breath, to see something in clarity and commonplace that up until that moment has been so elusive and so desired, it is to feel the earth, nature, creation expanding around me and I am a single cell in the body of God.  And if the sun is shining tomorrow, I think I’ll walk around the block and try to see another.

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It’s been almost a year since I last saw a scarlet tanager.  It’s been about a year since I last read Mary Oliver’s book, Red Bird.  I need to return to both.  Scarlet tanagers aren’t rare, although one has to go where they are to see one.  And look up.  Mary Oliver’s poems don’t seem rare.  So conversational, so commonplace.  Being alive is not particularly rare.  Six-plus billion of us Homo sapiens are engaged in it today. Out of the one-thousand four-hundred and forty minutes in each day, I don’t pause to consider many of them rare.

Shouldn’t I?  Read this poem with me.  Read and let us, you and I, share a moment of each other’s living breath.

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Red Bird Explains Himself

“Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow
and I was the song in the summer leaves, but this was
only the first trick
I had hold of among my other mythologies,
for I also knew obedience: bringing sticks to the nest,
food to the young, kisses to my bride.

But don’t stop there, stay with me: listen.

If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed,
and thus wilderness bloomed there, with all its
followers: gardeners, lovers, people who weep
for the death of rivers.

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body.  Do you understand?  for truly the body needs
a song, a spirit, a soul.  And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable
beauty of heaven
where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.”

from Red Bird, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, © 2008 by Mary Oliver

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