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Posts Tagged ‘nature’

Triangulate – Jenny Bates

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Forest Bathing Trail, Grassy Creek, imagery, Jenny Bates, Mountains to Sea Trail, nature, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry on May 14, 2021| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Jenny Bates]

Yellowthroats sing from three compass points. Who triangulates whom? One sings, flits, sings and a farther one answers, flits, answers. I stand motionless in the mud beside the lake’s lazy inflow. I want a bright bird to fly from his thicket and show himself to me.

As I stare into the leaves, still no success with my x-ray vision, something moves beside me. Down low. A muskrat six feet away is swimming upstream utterly unconcerned. I turn only my head. It reaches up the bank for a tasty green, swims some more, jeweldrops of water on its whiskers. It stops to scratch its nose. It swims on.

I look up and a yellowthroat is watching me.

. . . . . . .

Triangulate: to discern your true position within the vital features that surround you.

After a couple of weeks with Jenny Bates’s books I learned not to read her poems to ferret out their meaning but to read to enter the poetry. Stare at the Pleiades in the night sky and they slip away from you; look slant and the Seven Sisters reach to you from the darkness. Let a line of Jenny’s verse slip into your awareness with eyes half closed, fortuitous inadvertency.

An intimate acquaintance / that leaves nothing but / earth.

I learned not to read Jenny like a field guide but like I read the breeze greeting sweat on my back when the trail stretches uphill, like I read the sun’s flagrant liason with blackberry blossoms.

Bent twig alphabet, language mist-twist
revises with no sequels, no chapters that leave-off.

I learned to read Jenny not like a genealogy of contracts and progeny but exactly like a genealogy of creatures and connections and the family of the one.

The bee does not claim originality as it takes
something from every flower.

. . . . . . .

3 poems by Jenny Bates

. . . . . . .

Merlot and Thyme
++++ with a Hummingbird Chaser

I uncork old resting places, no maps needed.
Just strange-tongued travelers of
++++ bird, wine and spice.
I sip Merlot, write in cloud-light
++++ missing mother’s voice
Conversations become riddles, coaxing the truth
out of her children, eventually.
Thyme and tarragon fill the clear jar
in front of me: I smell her there
++++ in herbal comfort.
No still dark corners to hide in her memory,
she emptied her children like clearing a table
set by despair, without lingering.
With an edge that never dropped off.

Hummingbirds have no brink to pass to their young.
Wisps of winding birds tousle leaves, jiggle air under
++++ diving, dancing, levitating.
Homing devices, trade routes birthed into them.
Swift and common lessons to grow by. Shade brings
++++ less frantic maneuvers.

I wear pink and grey – the first colors I liked
++++ as a child.
My grandparents farmhouse in Northern Michigan
was grey with pale pink shutters.
Dove colors for a delicate landing grandmother
would say. I hear mom in the background talking to
bees, kittens, mule, land. For a city girl, she could
ambush nature, then heal its wounds.
++++ No time was distant then.

. . . . . . .

Engagement Rings

Morning insect yoga.
Grasshopper extends himself
in heat-stretching air.
Jumps into space, disappears.
No fossil fuels, no footprint.
Fly stuck to a metal merry-go-round,
a centrifuge so man can stick to
ceilings in his quest for flight.
Prometheus moth wings dismantled,
grounded, still-payment for
bringing man fire.

I walk earthling steps, marker-less,
circling your grave.
Mob of ants scurry in loops,
larvae in pincers turn you from
solid to liquid to solid again.
Jealous in my exile,
++++ lucky ants get to spend time with you
you continue in unending generosity.

The angel tree had sung a copperhead
right out of his skin.
I bring it, fresh and warm to my
neighbor who sculpts it into
suspended twists.
Hung it through a metal ring
at the studio door.
Bow Tie markings coiled to dry,
venom empty, benign husk.

Heat draws new flycatcher parents
to drink from your round water bowl
filled each day to the brim.
Parched squirrel’s half cry bubbles out,
scampers then hangs in shade relief.
Skinks run full speed in swirling chase
across the deck.
++++ don’t come out of the nest too soon . . .
++++ ++++ don’t fall . . .
the newly hatched chick yawns,
bellyful of ground up ants.

. . . . . . .

How to Spell Sorrow

It’s beautiful, your words,
but I’ve read better in the eyes of my dog.

In spider webs and spider spaces.
When hummingbirds leave, you feel it –
empty air without fashion.

You put more sweet water out anyway,
wait for Buddhas and fools.

You wonder about ellipsis of Truth
wrapped in coyote calls.

You watch a groundhog prostrate like a saint
on the gravel drive – surrender play or
cooling his belly on the stones.

you see a murder of crows line their toes
straight and tight along the split rail fence.

Gripping the wood like text on your arms
becoming the word on your hand.

You curl your fingers into your palm
twist and spell – Sorrow.

. . . . . . .

“Merlot and Thyme,” “Engagement Rings,” “How to Spell Sorrow” by Jenny Bates from her book Slip, Hermit Feathers Press, September, 2020

Jenny lives in the North Carolina foothills and is an animal whisperer and helping hand at Plum Granny Farm, an organic local farm in Stokes County, North Carolina.

. . . . . . .

Header Artwork © Linda French Griffin

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More Life, Please — Denise Levertov

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Denise Levertov, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature, nature poetry, poetry on May 7, 2021| 4 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Denise Levertov]

. . . Who can utter the poignance of all that is constantly threatened . . .

Toward the end of March Amelia and I explored the vernal pool near Dutchman Creek and discovered frog eggs with hundreds of newly hatched tadpoles. We visited a couple more times to watch them grow (no legs yet!). Week before last I was walking along the creek on my own and decided to check their progress.

I edged through the muck and grass, taller now, leaned over the little pool, and counted all the tadpoles. There were exactly zero. None. Well, I did scare off a few big second-year tads, but all of the little black wigglers were gone.

I stared a long time. Plenty of water. A little algae, weeds and water plants. Maybe they were all hiding under leaves. I leaned all the way down. What is that in the water there, arc of a cylinder covered with hieroglyphics, almost stepped on it? I poked with my stick and a 3-foot long Northern Water Snake shot sinusoidal through the water then veered back towards me and disappeared into a hole, I guess, because I never could spot it again.

Hungry snake, OK, gotta eat, but did you have to finish off every one? Isn’t there some sort of ecological balance that guarantees next year’s balmy spring evenings on the porch listening to peepers, tree frogs, and the long mellifluous trill of the American toad? I guess the older, bigger tads were experienced, too wily to be caught, better at hiding themselves in the silt, so maybe a few will indeed live to sing. I don’t think I’ll be telling Amelia about the snake any time soon, though.

. . . . . . .

This afternoon I walk down to the creek to see what’s become of the pool after a two-week dry spell. One year it dried up altogether. Still plenty of muck; grass and weeds even higher. The pool has shrunk but as I thread my way closer there are two big plops and a swirl of silt slowly settling. And there they are: brand new, a couple of hundred little black tadpole wigglers, freshly hatched.

More life, says Nature. More, please.

. . . . . . .

Three poems by Denise Levertov

bring the planet / into the haven it is to be known

. . . . . . .

Web

+++++Intricate and untraceable
+++++weaving and interweaving,
+++++dark strand with light:

+++++designed, beyond
+++++all spiderly contrivance,
+++++to link, not to entrap:

elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined:
shaking, changing,
++++++++++forever
+++++++++++++++forming,
++++++++++++++++++++transforming:

all praise,
+++++all praise to the
+++++++++++++++great web.

– Denise Levertov

. . . . . . .

In California: Morning, Evening, Late January

Pale, the enkindled,
light
advancing,
emblazoning
summits of palm and pine,

the dew
lingering,
scripture of
scintillas.

Soon the roar
of mowers
cropping the already short
grass of lawns,

men with long-nozzled
cylinders of pesticide
poking at weeds,
at moss in cracks of cement,

and louder roar
of helicopters off to spray
vineyards where braceros try
to hold their breath,

and in the distance, bulldozers, excavators,
babel of destructive construction.

Banded by deep
oakshadow, airy
shadow of eucalyptus,

miner’s lettuce,
tender, untasted,
and other grass, unmown,
luxuriant,
no green more brilliant.

Fragile paradise.

. . . .

At day’s end the whole sky,
vast unstinting, flooded with transparent
mauve,
tint of wisteria,
cloudless
over the malls, the industrial parks.

the homes with the lights going on,
the homeless arranging their bundles.

. . . .

Who can utter
the poignance of all that is constantly
threatened, invaded, expended

and constantly
nevertheless
persists in beauty,

tranquil as this young moon
just risen and slowly
drinking light
from the vanished sun.

Who can utter
the praise of such generosity
or the shame?

– Denise Levertov

. . . . . . .

Tragic Error

The earth is the Lord’s, we gabbled,
and the fullness thereof –
while we looted and pillaged, claiming indemnity:
the fullness thereof
given over to us, to our use –
while we preened ourselves, sure of our power,
wilful or ignorant, through the centuries

Miswritten, misread, that charge:
subdue was the false, the misplaced word in the story.
Surely we were to have been
earth’s mind, mirror, reflective source.
Surely our task
was to have been
to love the earth,
to dress and keep it like Eden’s garden.

That wold have been our dominion:
to be those cells of earth’s body that could
perceive and imagine, could bring the planet
into the haven it is to be known,
(as the eye blesses the hand, perceiving
its form and the work it can do).

– Denise Levertov

all selections are from The Life Around Us, selected poems on nature, by Denise Levertov, New Directions Books, 1997

. . . . . . .

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was a naturalized American poet born in England. Her first book of poetry was published shortly after World War II; she moved to the U.S. in 1948 and became influenced by the Black Mountain Poets and William Carlos Williams such that her writing ultimately came to express a uniquely American voice with a world vision. Her poems are often strongly ecological and political. She writes in the forward to The Life Around Us: As I have quite frequently found myself obliged to skip back and forth from book to book when reading to audiences composed of people whose work and vocation was in ecology, conservation, and restoration, it was suggested that I put together a selection of thematically relevant poems, which would be useful not only to the many earth-science people who, I have found, do love poetry, but also to the general public.

Poetry Foundation
Academy of American Poets
Works by Denise Levertov
Chronology of Denise Levertov’s life

. . . . . . .

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Earth Day – Coevolution

Posted in Art, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Coevolution, Earth Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, Galway Kinnell, imagery, nature, nature poetry, poetry, Robert Frost, Sharon Sharpe, Yusef Komunyakaa on April 30, 2021| 2 Comments »

[poems by Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Frost]

April 22, 2031 – Rover Shēn zhī (Deep Knowing) prepares to analyze its 50 meter drill core sample from the Martian south polar ice cap. Strata of grit, water ice, mineral dust – wise Rover’s AI chooses to begin by studying a faintly pigmented layer at 17.5 meters. Very promising.

Yes, there is life on Mars.

And this is what the Rover does not discover – a single species of microorganism spending its long cold days and nights in solitary, independent, utterly lonely metabolic isolation.

Instead Shēn zhī’s electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, and biochemical probes reveal several varieties of cell structures not unlike Archaea from deep ocean sites on Earth, a dozen species that mirror bacteria isolated from Antarctic cores, crystalline nucleotides indistinguishable from viruses, even twisted proteins – prions. All of these merrily feed and feed upon each other in homeostatic bliss, coevolved for a billion years: an ecological community.

. . . . . . .

an offering from Sharon Sharp . . .

Daybreak

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still; and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

“Daybreak” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014), from The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature, ed. Christopher Merrill, Peregrine Smith Books, Salt Lake City, UT, 1991

. . . . . . .

Life is community. Even you, homeostatically blissful Human, are a community of bacteria, protists, tiny ectoparasites in every pore, even Archaea in your gut. I feed my Archaea a cup of Greek yoghurt every morning and they are so serenely blissful. If you could count all the cells that comprise the unitary psychosocially distinct and identifiable YOU, less than half of them would be human cells. You and I couldn’t begin to live and remain healthy without those wonderful gut bacteria. How much more so mycorrhizal fungi and diatoms. Life is beautiful.

Earth Day is about the web of all life on planet Earth; no single organism remains completely solitary, independent, or isolated. If, through our actions or inactions, we create an Earth that makes it impossible for a certain species to survive, then our own species is that much impoverished and our own survival that much diminished. If, by our attention, understanding, and reverence, we permit the web to grow, extend, deepen, thrive, then our own species thrives. And thriving is defined only partially by strength, health, and numbers; for a human being to truly thrive also involves participating in the epiphany of connection to all living things. Community is life.

. . . . . . .

Crossing a City Highway

The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask
the approaching day hides behind
& from, the coyote nosing forth,
the muscles of something ahead,

& a fiery blaze of eighteen-wheelers
zoom out of the curved night trees,
along the rim of absolute chance.
A question hangs in the oily air.

She knows he will follow her scent
left in the poisoned grass & buzz
of chainsaws, if he can unweave
a circle of traps around the subdivision.

For a breathy moment, she stops
on the world’s edge, & then quick as that
masters the stars & again slips the noose
& darts straight between sedans & SUVs.

Don’t try to hide from her kind of blues
or the dead nomads who walked trails
now paved by wanderlust, an epoch
somewhere between tamed & wild.

If it were Monday instead of Sunday
the outcome may be different,
but she’s now in Central Park
searching for a Seneca village

among painted stones & shrubs,
where she’s never been, & lucky
she hasn’t forgotten how to jig
& kill her way home.

“Crossing a City Highway” by Yusef Komunyakaa, Poetry, January, 2016

. . . . . . .

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

“The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

. . . . . . .

[Bad news for Shēn zhī: an unanticipated feature of Martian metabolism is that the cells require elements from Groups 8, 9, 10 of the Periodic Table for electron transport during energy transfer – they “eat” iron, cobalt, nickel, and rhodium. Within a few weeks many of the Rover’s critical microconnectors begin to fail. EarthLink in Ningbo goes dark. Bits of Shēn zhī drop to the Martian substrate. The Rover ultimately pinpoints the cause and transmits a warning: “Do Not Come Here.”

Unfortunately its message is garbled and received by other Martian Rovers as, “Come Here!” Within fifteen years they have all arrived at the southern plateau and become fodder for the Martian ecological community.

Which thrives.]

. . . . . . .