its the birthday of W.S. Merwin.

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

-W.S. Merwin

the saturday song.

for zuzu, through our duration.

Here's a woman, brought by northwind, brought by northwind, pulled by waters, washed ashore by waves of oceans, drifted here on rising billows.  When but I begin my chanting I'll sing seas to mead and honey, bottom gravel all to saltgrains sands of sea to beans uncounted.  Just by once my girdle tying, just by once my shirt on taking, once by fastening my buckles, once my feet in shoes by thrusting.  Rise, my nature, off the earth now, lift my sin from ground beneath me, lift my sin from ground beneath me, Fay from underneath the aspen.

Letters from the Outside, #50

Autumn heralded in with chainsaws and the sound of acorns falling onto trucks in the driveway. Roadside bunting of Goldenrod flowers. I put on some Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and water the plants. I seek the sun like an old cat, sensing its wane, its growing scarcity.

September, traditionally treacherous month, melted butter on the ledge from which by my fingertips I hang. A sudden spate of social occasions, unexpected reunions of long yesterdays spectres. The project delievered I find myself reading again, and the walk. Perhaps it requires a certain frame of mind; an acceptance, or surrender, to things As They Are. Early september heat of what feels more like Indian Summer, sitting soaking in the light of a sun the wane of which we sense in our animal bones.

Ribbed crippled old dogs in the bed of feedstore pick-ups, a texas polka band on the radio playing “in heaven there is no beer.” my Tithonia blooms, and the Wolfsbane buds and everything so late to the party this year, theres no time left for ripening in the cycle. Theres a grief in me as old as I am, and it keeps me from attending to these letters of yours, for fear of filling the pockets of pages with stones. My strawberries are profuse with blooms. I find the cats at play with winsome prey and it steals my appetite, all the senseless suffering of the world condensed into this moment, which cannot be salvaged nor saved, and I turn away. It has rained and rained.  The garden is mud and the bewitching smell of Tulsi, ancient and sweet.

Roadside Goldenrod, Jewelweed and Sumac in her red flocked fall coat, the ground thick with Hickory nuts, culverts running with rainwater and frogs, while I stand in a dense expansion of sunlight in the center of a circle one southward Monarch makes time to cast around me. The cows graze their quiet way in the shade of the windbreak til the tip of the peninsula thins into a shady grove, and follow the sun across the creek to haybales and evening home. I unpin my hair and let the wind have his way with it. In the sky, a rainbow serpent, or a swan. The farther I go the closer I come to understanding how finely-tuned I was when I was born. How years of abuse and neglect have left a callous as ugly as it is numb. How does one exfoliate a soul?

The old woman plants a patch of black-eyed-susan where the plastic lamb used to be and replaced the mirrored gazing ball with one of driveway oilslick dragon tchotchke hues. Fairy cathedrals of Cleome in the garden where one of the relocated roses offer pink rannuncular assemblages of petals, regressed back toward some ancestress hardy and more fragrant than the rarified hardware store hybrid it arrived as. The moon a pearl in a bowl of fog, and the nights are not yet cool enough to keep the crickets from their recitations.

A day of revelations, Full Pisces Moon the sunlight warm goldenrod honey bright butter colored waves along the shore of the road miraculous backlit hawkweed the wild dappled Apples, pregnant bellies of orchards of seed, Chestnuts gestating in their seamless spiny pods and the smell of Concords. Foxgrapes ripen on the vine. Offerings to the Pine, second station of Mary, and I gather dense resin in a maple leaf, and in surrender am offered this significance: Pathkeeper. So I ask for guidance to find that Path and tend it true.

I am sitting outside in the late morning sun and can still feel the weight of my walking bag against my body. “You arent carrying that bag anymore.” Grant me the strength to put down the satchel of ghosts. To reclaim my open heart and my soul. The past is not a place we can ever go again, it is a purgatory, and thief of the living. Hold onto Wisdoms souvenirs and let the wind and rain and sun scour the rust away.

I hang laundry, patch a blanket. I pick tomatoes, cucumbers and squash, walk to the crossroads where the wind blows and the leaves fall and the dog trots through the tall grass dew-spangled and deer-trod. In her dream I am as I am, petticoated in earth and sunset and the dusky lustre of winegrapes against greek leaves and tendrils set in wood or sugar green. A house of marvels and laughter escaping forbidden from the heavy door, out into the wondrous, waiting world. These dreams are a gift, little candles in the window sitting vigil for the wandering soul.

I bake a hotmilk cake, oatmeal cookies, and then put together a stroganoff for supper. By eight the yard is dark, and the rain comes with a bolt of lightning which turns the darkness around us inside out to white. The Calendula petals dry, the Blackberry cordial brews. I should have picked that Tulsi on the full of the moon. I am as I am and Great Goddess when will I stop apologizing?

Grateful I am evolving, my satellite soul traveling the spiral of All That Is, unfolding to a flower and ripening to a seed in endless cycles akin to infinite others and entirely significant, always forward, never straight. 

We Love You.

 steven jesse bernstein.


"...her mood disappears and is replaced by a wet church steeple...angels roasted on porcupine quills..."

this ones for ripton.

"...He read poems from a stage with a live rodent in his mouth, its tail twitching as baseline punctuation. He tried to cut his heart out in order to hold it in his hands and calm it down. He once urinated on a heckler and tended to throw things: beer bottles, manuscripts, drumsticks, his wallet, a sandwich."

Letters from the Outside, #49

Chicken roasting, Lammas bread rising, I sit on the threshold after a fruitful, feverish Zuzu Birthday Project session and listen to the lovely sound of our garden drinking in the steady, gentle rain. Mad weather, oscillating wildly between sunshine and shadow, thunder rolling around the edge of a cerulean sky buttressed bright with clouds. The days have been full of rain, and the nights cool. So the tomatoes, like the corn at the crossroads, are where july should have found them. And without light or heat, these tropical fruits wont ripen, or grow. The cabbages, however, are flourishing, waxing moons of pleated leaves that catch the night rain in their skirts, and the dew.

 

Some notes from the road: O.D. On the sidewalk where I started, they strap him to the gurney and stand around the garbage can shooting breeze. Anabaptists headed south for harvest of their own farms, and I change seats after the smell coming off the stubby, rough-handed man across the aisle hits me, and my heavy bag fortuitously fails to detonate a plastic ziploc of spew someone was thoughtful enough to seal. I thought it was really interesting that because of these Plain Folk, who eat slabs of velveeta on generous wedges of iceberg one woman keeps in a old blue suitcase, the bus would not be offering a movie on the overhead screens.

Filthy haunted restrooms where everythings strictly drip-dry. The one driver who took nine or ten swings at backing out of the gate before we moved along into open spaces, curly-headed faun clouds in a sky people are photographing with their phones. The unmolested woods of Sovereign People territory exuding comfort and sanctuary. Border Patrol, dead serious and self-contained, one hand on the gun. The little Amish girl babbles Deutch and licks the windows.

Light on the lake water that comes from a sun, red as a freshly forged nailhead shattering in the cool of the thruway treeline and filling the bus with a steam of darkness. A teen preacher in the seat behind me, whispering scripture and doctrine in a honed, hypnotic liturgy that shrinks the world to the unlikely pair of us and I invoke the names of Lilith and Mary while he spits his chew into a plastic pop bottle.

Seems less a bus station than a disaster relief area, drawn, exhausted people wrapped in tattered blankets, shuffling in slippers, clutching plastic bags of what they managed not to leave behind. Two in the morning a woman and child herded off by tall, blank-faced men in neutral suits into the black-hole anonymity of a witness protection program. Or so im told by a number of these purgatory dwellers, and my own story soon gets back on board and slides quietly away into a greasy neon night. I visibly startle a lanky looming Jamaican with my use of the word, “patois.”

Knoxville the absolute nadir of this 80's Bowery-era add-a-bead haul, if you dont count the smell of the Chattanooga station, which persuaded me to take my chances in the rocketing porta-potty at the back of the bus. A woman performs her morning prayers somewhere behind me, “Thank you, jesus” audible at regular intervals, matter-of-fact. I have not eaten for six-hundred miles and the turkey croissant I eat in a manner reminiscent of hyenas at an impala carcass in Atlanta is nothing short of miraculous. Thank you, jesus.

The kid sitting behind me plays with my seat and clicks his footrest rather dramatically one setting at a time before releasing it to strike with a clang against the base of the chair. He tires of this folly, and contents himself with kicking at the back of it and rocking the entire seat back and forth, those first tentative parries with an stalled vending machine. I read a street sign for Beaver Ruin Road, and know im getting closer to where the Rosemary is a grand Faerie Queen garbed in green needles and flourishing in this climate to the size of foundation shrubbery. Where the Scuppernong arbor is a dappled chapel of serrate leaves on woody vines and the ceiling vibrates with the music of insect friction and the one large garden spider waits in the center of a web three feet across in the corner, shaded and waiting.

There is a Fig tree and Angels Trumpet and a duck so heavy-bred for flesh it cannot fly. Where the sunlight is a tangible thing, atomized lead apron on your skin, and theres a loaf of Sunbeam on every table in every chicken joint in town. Where the muddy rivers glitter with mica and pyrite and theres armadillos now im told, drifting north with climate change, and the lonesome holy feeling of the georgia Pines. Where theres a woman who lives with her dogs and an English Sparrow where we walk the creek split road with a herd of cows retuning home at twilight and the pygmy goats traveling tetherless along the red clay track and I ate good barbeque and behaved badly, desperate for the shibboleths, the Unspoken Rules that only arrive with time, of which I hadnt any. We love you.

well, here goes.

the saturday song, for both of us.

for Golden Boy, on his first Pennsic.

Letters from the Outside, #48

A long stretch of hot bright days, the beds and garden get extra water, and then last night it rains and rains, lightning stitching hillcrests to the roiling sky around the valley, heralding another week of forecasted record temperatures.

I reluctantly pluck the Calendula heads from their stems to concoct an infusion, the Coneflowers rise to their prime, and the Delphinium have shed their petals to reveal the ripening seed, successfully primed by the seduction of violet skirts and pollen, intoxicating. One Tulsi self-sow by the French Melons, like a miracle. And the joy of discovering three Tithonia self-sows that should be two-hundred times their size by now.

The heat is foreign to me, this high, relentless heat and humidity that gives one the sensation of being slathered in glue-stick. I realize its a wee rabbit living in the bramble thats been at the beans, which, I just now realize, are of the pole variety, which I am not prepared for. Therapeutic weeding session reveals several Tulsi re-seeds beneath the beans.

And the sky lowers slowly and the grim rumble of the thunder that rolls slowly around the wet lip of the valleys wineglass like some distant and approaching doom, gaining that metal treble with proximity, the kiss of the cooler front, great green boughs whipped to a silver roaring and consummated in rain. The vastness is often dizzying, and im tharn in its midst.

Sunday, we returned to the waterfall where we were married, where on the very spot inexplicably grows in the middle of the streambed a tree, and swam like palsied dogs and sat under the falling water, letting it beat us clean. It even shed the amber callous of a second-degree burn I received by attempting to shift a conflagrant stump with my my naked phalanges. The world there is beautiful, all the stones have stories. I see, over many years, how someone, or everyone, has worked with the Earth toward a beautiful compromise, steps worn into precipitous ledges, and a sapling slowly grown parallel above it, offering assurance to the less nimble as the path reaches its most narrow. There is a green and sweet smelling peace to be found there, among the Nettle and the Fern, and a nursery of Hemlock and a wee peeper, penny sized. Artemis-breasted Mayapple fruit, electric emerald moss on fallen logs, dogs tractoring up where no path will ever begin. Countless marvels for the Open Heart.

It has been dry, and the rain, falling gentle and steady, is welcome. Heading out to double-check I havent left anything out in the rain I shouldnt have (again), I end up pulling Redroot and Purslane from around the Roses, and it feels wonderful. I emerge from under the hood and accept the baptism of rain as a Sign of Unconditional Love, followed by a benediction of sunlight through which Cowboy and I pick our way like pack mules up a gullycreek, chaotic with rocks run down from The Rest Of It, vertical miles of the East Hill, like wild horses funneled through a chute with no corral.

And the last perilous scrabbling onto a flat open space walled like a water glass narrowly broached by slate steps, crumbling, spangled with light off the water whispering through cracks in the flat black terraced ascension toward the fabled Great Reward. I lose my Presence, my self, in thoughts of the future, of returning down the packed silt cut bank backwards, irrational panic exposing that glorious Will to Live when I ran out of ersatz exposed root railing, and I dont even see where I am or let it in or breathe. But my steadfast mountain goat companion led the way and when I ran out of root to hold onto, was compelled to fall back and slide slightly to the next exposed offering and Cowboys hand clasped around my wrist, divine concentration of Love and Truth and Well-Being, and we were back on the rocks as the rain started to pour down.

With these days of rain, the lawns have gone green and growing again; its been lovely, this long rest from the roar of mowers. Late July, I see how Summer is arcing above the unconfined pastures, Corn sprouting its fountain crown, and each seedpod spilling pale green silks, each paired to its kernel, a gossamer umbilicus.

Pulling weeds in the darkening, wincing at the difference where the manuring didnt reach, how cracked and implacable it is. So it asks, and shall receive. Its been so hot I havent been walking, the walking that feeds my mind and soul and body, and I feel its salubrious ether leaving me in a slow leak. Darwin said it wasnt the strongest that survive, its those most adaptable to change. Those willing to release their Qi like water, quiet patience for the slow deep places and a twinkling song for running among the rocks. Life-Bringer, Primal Environment, Ocean Mother of Us All, Soul. We Love You.

for me.

its the birthday of Tom Robbins.

“Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here.”