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.