From the Thoreau Project

Apology To Henry

Your were, you claim, born in the very

 nick of time. Time being what it is,

my distant friend, your proposition will

be difficult to defend. What clues did

Past give you that marked Time's passing ribbon,

so you'd know this was your day, July, twelfth,

eighteen seventeen? What had you heard beyond

your mother's heart beat, family voices, organ

music muffled by her flesh? What had you felt

beside your mother's warmth, the womb, your first home,

that had convinced you Concord would be

the most estimable place in all the world?

In retrospect you could renounce past events

through which you would not have to suffer but

those I fear don't count, nor events to be

for you'd not claim to foresee nor control

the Future. But I'll accept what you said

this same day. Friends! Society! I have

an abundance of that I rejoice in 

and men too that I never speak to, and since

what most call bareness and poverty 

you would say is to me simplicity

you'd ignore what you could and with the rest 

"make do", so any nick would do. But for place,

if city bound, I think you would have moved soon.

And I add to this a few lines young friend, Edward Emerson, gave us at the end of his book of remembrances: lines from "your early prayer".

Great God I ask no meaner pelf

Than that I may not disappoint myself;

That in my action I may soar as high

As I can now discern with this clear eye,

And next in value which thy kindness lends

That I may — greatly — disappoint my friends

Howe're they think or hope that it may be

They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.

ABOUT READY TO GIVE UP ON BLOG STUFF

I visit so seldom I have trouble even entering my own blog and just entered three poems then wiped them out, apparently, trying to preview them. I'll do it once more. Hope Google doesn't keep changing its system!

Answering Reznikoff

Yes, I know it's true

the mower's no poet

who deflects his scythe

to save the flowers for

he knows they all are.

Yes, it was after years

somewhere else some other time

post-me/post mortem

when I read those lines — and yet

Reznikoff knew

about John Baker and I how we'd

manned a most improbable

aircraft observation station

in a vacant field

in a Maine town with nothing

anyone would bomb.

Where the only enemy planes

were on a wall poster

just a year before John even with

a metal plate in his hip

in the infantry lay open-eyed

having seen

his first German planes. I write

after long years but

there is no forgetting — although

long years may turn

forget to accept. Where planes

like meteorites 

flown by men like John and I

still fall 

from the innocent sky. Fall to earth

where all flowers die.

Inadequate Portent

Suddenly for no reason beyond

the molecular fire that burned

in my brain in that moment more

than sixty years ago I recall

the first time I saw even a picture

of what was called in earlier days

a woman's private parts on

the inside of a locker door

in our barracks in Fairbanks

facing me legs drawn back

spread knees up the lips of

that vertical mouth the names

of which I'd eventually learn

bare but not smiling in that

sudden patch of pubic hair

the school-yard expressions 

of pussy and muff-diving

not understood suddenly

having palpable substance

as the locker door slammed 

the whole affair no longer

than it takes to read a line

of this and I was twenty yet

I remember this sixty-seven

years later so it must have been

a hot little glucose brain-blaze

and I should have started then

to learn more not waited till now 

to know lips can show soft

curves that say I'll smile soon. 

BELATED SEASON VISIT TO MY NEGLECTED BLOG

Well, someone reminded me , again, that I have a blog. I've been busy scribbling on the new project, a  MS to combine poems I've written with references to or influenced by Thoreau — combining them with autobiographical entries in prose. To let you know (you faithful few) that I'm still here, here are two poems which have nothing to do with that project. They're just poems recently written or revised. Seasonal: autumn's end a distant hope of spring.



Free Fall

Every snowflake is unique, we're told by
those who can not possibly know — "every"
being an infinite term. But a perfectly
safe contention since error guarantees
results will vary even in repeated measure
of the same, the real shape the average of
repeated mistakes.
But lets leave knit-picks aside
for, on this mid-October, sunless, windless
morning there is as yet no snow, I stand
and watch oak leaves fall. Each leaf, bent, stiff,
in dying, falls uniquely to a common fate —
well, a singular end — and each seems free
to fall its own way: glide, twist, tumble, spiral .
Each pathway of descent, inscribed, would add
another fiber to a random woven screen
to shield us from regrets of the season's
passing.
  I turn to science and propose my
hypothesis: that, as no two snowflakes
share the same shape, no two oak leaves ever
follow the same path in falling —  and my excuse
for standing here is testing my hypothesis.
My paper will be titled Free Will Falling.



Maple Syrup Season

"What's worth more — or was it less? — Uncle George
would ask, "a fart in a wind storm, or a
piss hole in the snow?". It's odd what's recalled
when it might be just as well forgotten.

For several days of maple tapping weather
I've stepped outside at dawn. The sun has inched
its way north to clear the notch in the eastern
hills across the frozen pond by dawn which

makes us think of spring despite the snow
piled along the walk where I stand in robe
and slippers near the wood pile. The sun's light
gives only light as I watch the piss hole grow,

remembering today how unaccountably
we recall some silly childhood phrase or joke
like the title of an imaginary book,
The Yellow Stream: the author, I .P. Freely.

What is worth more, the certainty I assign
the sun's slow ascension. the will with which I
act out the ritual of seasons, or the
lemon-custard yellow flowering on snow?

And why just these random, seeming useless
memories? Why indeed, to paraphrase
Thoreau, should these things make up my world
as I stand here, glad the wind's not blowing?

BLOG BACK FROM VACATION

WELL, NOT REALLY. I just forgot about it again. Too busy putting together a combination prose and poetry construction in anticipation of Thoreau's 200th in 1017, if I live that long. Here is a sample.

THE BEGINNINGS

When did I first experience the writing of Henry David Thoreau? I can't be precise with date or even year for it must have been nearly eighty years ago, as was my first experience with poetry — poetry beyond the not to be depreciated nursery rhymes. Both experiences occurred in the one-room school where I had the luck, the blessing, to spend seven years with the guidance of that most remarkable teacher, Miss Pitts, Miss Ruth Pitts. So a book of poems and prose celebrating the influence of Thoreau's writings, I now realize, should begin with this one-room school and Miss Pitts. You should have some sense of what that school was like. This poem may help although it was not written for this specific purpose,.

                The School

One room, eight rows of desks, a wood stove.

Boy and Girl entry-cloakrooms right and left.

Boy and girl shovel-out back-houses right

and left rear: Naples school number seven

in the old county atlas. When I went there, 

age four and a half and a bit more, green

as a summer grape, it was The Lord School.

Named for the family that had settled there.

From the window by the sub-primary row,

a short row behind the wood stove, I could see

the Lord place across a frost glazed pasture.

We were pretty much on our own there, Miss Pitts

and maybe twenty kids. There was electricity 

but no running water, no telephone. If someone 

fell or was sick Miss Pitts dealt with it.

I was alone in the sub-primary row. We lived

a mile away but I didn't know anyone there.

Where I sat is all I remember of my first day

of seven years with Miss Pits at that school —

except that I wet my pants. Too shy, I suppose,

to raise one finger, walk past those strange faces 

all the way to the back-house door, past

all seven rows. It must have been a long day.

The poem, as a piece, fits, and that's how this book will be built. Put together with mostly existing pieces, poems, blended with bits of bridging prose, not wholly planned and constructed. I do not claim, nor do I desire, to be a Thoreau scholar. There will be no pretense of an adequate biography of Thoreau. Those who know Thoreau's work and life will realize I have  failed to mention many aspects which they may feel are significant.  I hope they will accept my word that this is not due to error or ignorance,  I am only including  what I feel has a specific and memorable effect on my work.  It is a record, as memory serves, of my personal response to Thoreau's work with such biographical notes I thought interesting or relevant. Just my responses with only my word to serve as validity — which you may find not always dependable — as no memory is.

It was in one of Miss Pitts classes that I first remember meeting Thoreau. Was it 5th or 6th grade? I'm not sure but we were assigned a section of Walden, the section in the chapter titled Brute Neighbors generally referred to as "the battle of the ants". A good choice to engage country kids in reading. 

The Pitts farm was about a mile north of The Lord School on the same road which, a mile south, passed my home. Miss Pitts's brother, Loton, was a Bowdin graduate, a rare item in our town at that time, and was the postmaster. And, it was said, he wrote poetry. He did, for I have on the shelf his book, Wild Mad Acres, which he presented to my mother when it was published in 1939. A critic, I assume, would say it shows the influence of Robert Frost. The poems must have been written, and others as well, while I was a student in his sister's classes. Which may explain why, in addition to Longfellow, Whittier, and Poe, we  met Robert Frost at the Lord School. In, probably 5th or 6th grade, a girl class-mate and I were assigned an oral presentation of the dialogue from Frost's Death of the Hired Man. I must have been terrified. All my life I have avoided, denied opportunities to take part in a play. Even as being just the voice of a puppet in one of John Tagliabue's plays, even though completely out of sight, I suffered serious stage fright.

I visited Miss Pitts, then a retired school principle, when she was in her eighties, about the age I am now I suppose. "I remember you, Robert," she said sharply. "When you finished you work early I'd give you a jar and you'd go down to Wiley's swamp behind the school and collect things." 

So the outline of my future life appears  in those seven years in that one-room school with a wonderful teacher: poetry, biology, an interest in  and feeling for Thoreau. Perhaps even my freedom from alleges also, those  years in school with no running water, eating off my desk, in the yard, the embracing woods with an mix of equally unwashed class mates. Ants or course, through not necessarily battling, show up in my work from time, as in this poem, slightly modified from my book, Reading Nature, published in 2006.

ANT SENSE

These desert ants didn't have the wealth 

of neurons homing pigeons draw on,

yet they knew where they had been and

came home again by different ways

from the ways they went (if you'll

forgive the awkward phraseology).

Each ant apparently retained a map

of the rocky, rough terrain where any pebble

blocked their view. Following their map

and not their nose (or more properly,

their antennae or their tarsi) used

their little heads to find their way home.

Those tiny ganglia we're so reluctant

to call brains can read the maps and then

tell six legs which way to go, and when.

To leave us wondering how many transistors

could dance upon brains smaller than

the heads of those proverbial pins.

FORGOT AGAIN!

YES. I FORGOT THE BLOG AGAIN. DID ANYONE NOTICE?

Poems generated through visits to my wife, Vicki, at Clover Health Car may explain the forgetfulness.

INTERSECTION

Pressing the green button

while pushing 

the right wing

of the wide double door 

I gain entry

to the next unit

which seems to be

a four-way intersection for 

wheelchair traffic

at the rush hour

although almost no one 

is moving

as if I happened into

a still photograph.

Apparently there's no penalty here

for being asleep 

at the wheel

and nurse pedestrians move freely

ignoring cross-walk restrictions.

I came as a taxi man to put

my wife's chair

in motion.

As usual she knows exactly 

where

she wants to go

but as usual

neither of us has the fare.

BACKGROUND SOUND

In the Dublin Place common room

several women sit silent, sagging a bit,

perhaps asleep, in their wheelchairs.

One smiling lady follows her walker

aimlessly around the room. One woman

calls loudly for help, another, sunk

deep in an over-pillowed chair cries out,

repeatedly, and an unwanted analogy

crowds into consciousness: triage.

My wife sirs silent, uncomplaining, but

admitting to me her pain. On the wall

the TV plays endlessly, tuned too low 

for me to hear, ignored as are the birds

singing vainly beyond the window. 

ELLEN EMERSON REMEMBERS

A note about the relation between Henry Thoreau and Emerson's second wife based of her daughter Ellen's memoir.

Ellen Emerson Remembers How Her Mother's

        Chickens Came Home To Roost

When winter's frigid weather first set in

mother thought of her chicken's featherless feet,

found cotton waste which she wound tight around

the slender beam on which her chickens chose

to roost. When spring came she found she could not

tolerate her hens held captive in pens

as she could not tolerate enslavement

of humans. They were set loose to find their

own way back to roost. When the hens, following

their natural inclination, scratched up seeds

in her garden, she called on her good friend,

Henry Thoreau, who made for each hen a pair

of neat leather boots, gently disarming

• the offending feet. And when, in the end 
• it came time to slaughter the innocents
• she decided to give up raising hens.

We are told, when a neighbor's barn burned, Mrs Emerson comment shocker the onlookers: "At least the rats escaped."

There have been academic speculations that Henry may have been falling, or had fallen in love with her. Those notes suggest they might have made a match.  If I remember I have a bolo I'll have some comments on their correspondence later. Summer is hear. A very large snapping turtle just dug up all the softened ground by the shore where I had just planted seed.

What's Happening When Nothing is Happening?

Here's a poem set in motion if not inspired by an article in Nature. If nothing else it sup pests neurobiologists have a sense of humor.

Default Zone

    Here, said the guard, is the speech center.

    We were touring the brain. Through the open

    door we peered in but did not enter

     the suddenly cavernous hall

    where all the worlds answering services

    could be poised to respond with all

    words waiting to be expressed. As we

    passed a narrow, unmarked door, I pointed,

   asked, and the guide said, it's just the

   default zone for introspection.

   Not concerned with the world out there,

   active when we're not paying attention.

   It works best when it's left alone

   as it has a mind of its own.

Are we approaching the neurology of meditation?  Meditation as a goal, an objective, a phenomena in its own right? We're certainly not just unraveling complexes of words, not a time to call for Wittgenstein. We can't get there by trying to think hard about nothing.

Genuine meditation, if there is such: would it correspond to a state in which the default zone/system would be maximally active? Is the next question: is thai a state to be saught, to be desired? To be aware yet perceiving nothing?

The Tie That Binds Us Stretches Thin But Is Holding Still

Diminishment

Death was not supposed to be like this.

A stroke or seizure, a fall into unconsciousness.

A bed-bound patient, compassionate shadows hovering.

These alternatives we could, almost, accept.

But not this unadorned, undignified diminishment.

One day you're an unmanned sloop cast adrift.

The mist thickening, the fading figure on the shore

so familiar it might once have been you.

Life should not have been like this. Diminishing

if not afloat, afoot, as you walk without sound

down an endless corridor of doors, all open,

all identical as perspective disappears.

At least that's how it appears to us whose

footsteps still resound, who can yet turn around.

We hope you're unaware you cannot turn now.

From Time To Time I Read Some Poetry

But, I confess, not often that by others. Not, I suppose, as often as I should but time is limited. What I read often depends on a citation in some review, maybe in The New York Review, one of the few such journals I see. In one not many months ago I ran not a reference to Louis MacNeice and  his Autumn Journal. Off went an e-mail order to Amazon. Yes it should be read. It stirred the following from me.

Death Without Cause

"...take it...on trust that living is

The only thing worth living and that dying

Had best be left to take care of itself in the end."

Louis MacNeiceˆ

Death just happens, it needs no cause. Being born

parents tried to explain by

displacing myth with analogies about bees,

flowers and, sometimes, birds

whose eggs needed seeds. But apparently

death needed no cause. 

One day your brother came to your school,

said "Father has died and

I'm taking you home."Home where the event

must have ben mentioned.

I don't remember. Someone may have cried

but I don't remember. There

must have been a funeral, I must have been there

since I was fourteen. I know

where he's buried: the name and date in stone.

I've stood there alone

and wondered why I don't know. Death just

happened, needed no cause —

at least I don't know it. You might ask why

I didn't ask. Perhaps I did.

It's the answer that's missing. How would I know

when I didn't know he'd been ill?

Back at school I do recall someone saying: "He

took 'it' remarkably well."

I didn't know what else to do. Dying took care

of itself in the end.

What! Two In a Week? And From Last Night?

I seldom offer poems spontaneously, more often working on a revision of something written two years before. So why not be different now and then? Vicki hasn't been sleeping well recently and we often find ourselves up in what most consider the middle of the night This is an impression from last night, with only typographic changes. (Well. almost only!)

  Idea of February

Viewed from the sofa at four-thirty AM

on this mid-winter day the picture window

is as blank and black as the turned-off TV.

The outside world has gone away, what once

was a frozen pond, a ridge-top deckled

ragged with trees, just isn't there. Nothing is

except a few lights which may be the suns

of some other worlds. But every time I raise

my cup to take a sip the lamp beside us,

the cup itself, the window pane, conspire

and send me a message, just a flash that could

be from "out there", hopelessly sent

from some other beings desperate to know

if they are alone. I suppose I should be suddenly

encouraged, but knowing the inflexibility 

of time and the speed of light, they'll never know

so what does it matter how many other worlds

there may be?  We still feel alone here on this

old settee. We doze for a while and when we wake

the sky is suffused with a pre-dawn cream

which the ice on the pond glows in echo. Only

the ridge line still holds night''s black Those lights

which might have been stars resolve to street lights

dimmed by the trees. A fingernail paring

of the dying moon, hanging over where we know

the water tower will be, seems neighborly. 

We doze and we wait for the promised sun.

Birthday Month

     My granddaughter recently asked, "Why do you think there are so many presidents born in February?" Ignoring for the moment that I too was born in this month (and just survived to be 86). As a biologist the answer came easily: "BECAUSE ABOUT NINE MONTHS AGO IT WAS SPRING."

Born just between Lincoln and Valentine, my mother said I just escaped an even odder name then Robert Maurice (pronounced Morris) Chute (pronounced as chew, not shoe).

Being personal, here is a personal poem. (And, S.P., I will try to post more frequently.)



Remembering What You Don't

How much do you remember
     of that year
when you were little more than four
     and how much
is what you've been told by
     someone older?
There's no call to feel guilty even
     if it was
that year, that summer, your last
     grandparent died.
If you'd been older I'm sure
     you'd remember
not only her death but her — her
     existence.
My brother Phil did but
     he was ten
and I'd always been six years
     behind him.
Was she sick, couldn't hold me,
     as grandmother's do?
In memory, which can't
     be true,
why do I feel her
     cold disapproval,
her arms stiff, her bosom
     starchy?
Had I told myself this or
     had someone older?

Forgotten Again!

Yes, once more I totally forgot about this blog. No need to treat you to a list of the distractions nor do I have a convincing explanation of my lack of concern. So here is a poem that recently appeared in ECHOS, that elegant journal from "the county". It purports to portray an aspect of my personal history. As most such ventures much of it is fictional. I have ice fished. Once with Uncle George. Once with my son David (now in California) but the details: what George said to me, men pounding their knees, my seeing them now, floated in with the wind to enhance my memories.


Past Is Present

I tell my son about ice fishing as
my uncle told me before the days
of the power augur, snowmobiles,
thermal boots, insulated underwear.
Telling him, as Uncle George told me,
to always tie a cord to your chisel
or lose it in the mud twenty feet below.
You let your bait kiss the bottom, then
raise it a true king's yard — that's
the distance from your nose to
finger tip, arm stretched wide. If your feet
get cold, George said, raise you knee,
pound it with your fist: one — two — three,
then do the other one. I tell my son
but he's in California, a continent away,
and I'm standing on the ice watching
strangers, for I don't fish anymore.
Far down the pond I imagine I see
a man, leg raised, pounding his knee.