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Bear !

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bear, Bill Griffin, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, nature, nature poetry, Snake Den Ridge, wild flowers 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.

. . . . .

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.

. . . . .

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 . . .

. . . . .

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.

. . . . .

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.

. . . . .

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

. . . . .

[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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The Fire Out of Reach

Posted in Imagery, tagged birds, family, father, nature, nature poetry, poetry on May 15, 2011| 1 Comment »

[for the first post in this series of four, see May 8]

Years ago, before I’d reached my fortieth birthday, I remember talking to a friend who was looking pretty darn glum about his fiftieth. “Oh come on,” I said, “Just think of it as the half-way point.” I couldn’t understand why that didn’t cheer him up. Now my own fiftieth has got dust and flyspecks on the binding, and apparently I still haven’t memorized its aphorisms. If it’s impossible, as must seem obvious to any rational being, to put right all the mistakes I’ve made, why do I keep looking back? Why do all the possible futures unfolding out of my particular Heisenbergian uncertainty seem to have edges of creeping tarnish?

In this second section of my poem Leave and Come Home, I am struggling with uncertainty. Will our future relationship, mine and my son’s, be bright as the Firethroat or remain out of reach? I think of my own Dad, turning 85 this year. So much of our communication in my younger years was subterranean, never quite reaching the surface. How much angst did I cause him with my long hair and Grateful Dead? (Some other day I’ll share about how Linda helped us re-learn how to hug.) So much I didn’t know about my father, and so long before it occurred to me that I didn’t.

Several year’s ago Aunt Ellen (Dad’s sister) was going through boxes of papers from their parents’ home and discovered a letter Dad had written to his Mom from Boy Scout camp. He must have been thirteen. He had just passed the requirements to earn Birdwatching Merit Badge and was describing the birds he’d identified. Wait a minute! Big Momso is the bird watcher! You sneaky Dad, you, looking up into those branches all that time and never telling me what you were seeing. Well, I’m telling.

. . . . .

Leave and Come Home

Horseshoe Island, Newfound Lake, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota

Last night a pair of Bald Eagles scrawled their wild script
along the silver lake. We lay on high rocks above the water, waited
for the final stars of our adventure to ignite.
Only Hermit Thrush spoke – silence
unaccustomed from our Scouts but habitual
for Josh and me.

This morning I leave him to goad
the younger ones to break our last camp –
when he leaves for college will he goad himself?
I follow the island trails, aim field glasses high
as if the warblers I’ve learned this trip might bestow
some special unction. When I pause they gather
in low branches and cock their heads, a query
I can’t answer. They leave me there.

Almost finished now, this last solitude, this last trail that has tried
to lead back to my son, close enough to hear
the tink of scrubbed pots; high in the spruce
another unnamed voice reedy and ascending
into emptiness. I search, it flees; I scan, it eludes until
on a gray limb in the gray-green canopy with a gray moth
in its needle beak it blazes: Firethroat. Blackburnian Warbler.
And if I rush to camp and pull Josh back in time
will we look up and share the prize
or stare into empty branches?

. . . . .

[Leave and Come Home won the 2009 Poet Laureate Award of the NC Poetry Society. In four sections, it covers fifty some years of being a son and father to a son. Each section covers a different geography, the sighting of a different warbler, and a new phase in our relationship as a family. I posted section 1 on 5/8; I will post section 3 on 5/22 and section 4 on 5/29.]

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Gulp air and shout!

Posted in Imagery, tagged Ammons, biophilia, imagery, nature, poetry on March 31, 2011| 1 Comment »

When does the person who writes poems become a poet? How does ministry to dead things – meter, slant rhyme, caesurae, enjambment – draw breath on the page? How to clothe with flesh those dry syllabic bones?

Beats me, but I do desire it.

I lust for the warm flesh of an image impossible to resist. A stanza that gulps air and shouts, cries, laughs. Just a couple of perfect lines that when anyone reads them they have to whisper, “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”

Here’s the closing stanza of my favorite poem, Hymn by A.R.Ammons. In the preceding stanzas we’ve been transported ” . . . past the blackset noctilucent clouds . . . up farther than the loss of sight,” and then encountered “sporangia and simplest coelenterates . . . going right on down where the eye sees only traces.” Now Ammons bring us home:

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

I can feel these images drawing me deep into the bark, the sap, the separate leaves. There’s science and biology, and then there is the spiritual connection that gives them meaning — my ant-soul the shout, the cry, the laugh. Earth and sky. Cell and organism.

The separate leaves.