Goshen Summer 2007 #1

Cottonwood seeds drift through the air on their parachutes of fluff. Gravity tugs them down, but they are light enough that the air currents bat them about on their way down, sometimes sending them up again for a spin. Large, dry, warm-weather snowflakes.

It's been 2 weeks since I've returned home from Soul Mountain, still holding onto the determination to make writing space here amidst the family, which also means space for contemplation, and permission to enter contemplative realities without feeling like I should always be doing a hundred thousand other things first. I've found a good perch in an upstairs bedroom, used by Jonathan when he's home from college, and gradually I'm taking over this room, shifting his bedroom/guest room to my smaller, darker study downstairs, which is good for sleeping, but not very good for writing. At Soul Mountain I realized how important a morning view of the day and the world outside was to my writing and meditation. Otherwise, I'd never pause to see the cottonwood seeds, or the dark green shadows in the fully-leafed trees. And this upstairs bedroom has a view of sky and trees and lawn, and the neighbor's house, which does not suggest more work to be done, as a view of our yard would.

I fear disorientation, drift, as yesterday I misplaced my journal--my faithful companion at Soul Mountain. The cottonwoods seeds, aimless and graceful as they appear, sooner or later reach or don't reach their target soil--only one in a thousand will actually take root and produce a new tree. So I am driven back to this blog and a search, again, for a lost space, some fertile ground in which to root daily words, some of which may eventually grow into something more.

Lilacs in May at Soul Mountain

Soul Mountain # 20

Woke early to watch the sky through an eastern window, a drama of dark clouds sweeping across a pale gray background. I opened my eyes again to streaks of rose, then to patches of celestial blue. Time to rise and pack, carry home memories of this time and place.

At mid-morning rain spatters the pond outside my writing window. I'm nearly packed and am just putting a few finishing touches on this blog before I leave, knowing that another world will engulf me when I return. But I hope to remember the co-ordinates of this soul place in soul space.

Soul Mountain # 19

One of Connecticut's most mysterious phenomena is the "Moodus Noises," seismic tremors that occure near the place in East Haddam where the Salmon and Moodus Rivers flow together. The Pequot, Mohegan and Narragansett inhabitants of this region considered these noises to originated from the god Hobomoko, who sat below Mount Tom. The Indian word for the noises was "Matchemadoset" or "Matchitmoodus," which means "Place of Bad Noises," and the local tribe had special interpreters for the noises.

Of course, when the Puritans came to the area in the mid-1600s, they attributed the Moodus noises to Satan. Connecticut at the time was also very active in Witch Hunting. There must have been a lot of cultural chaos, and natural phenomena seemed to be interpreted in terms of the settlers' and the Indians' fears. Today, it seems to me that these noises are far more benign--especially for those listeners who wish to hear the rumblings of mother earth.

This afternoon Tonya drove us to Moodus, and we searched for the place where we might hear the spirit voices. We stopped in the town of Moodus at a gas station, and I asked people about the noises until I found a woman who seemed to know something. She said that they were all around the area, but that there was no one place where we could go to hear them. She directed me down the hill, to a boat landing, and we set out in the car to follow her directions. We wound down a long, curvy road towards the water. Finally we found the entry point labeled "Salmon River," and drove into a huge clearing ringed by cottonwoods next to the wide mouth of the Connecticut River where we found a few fishermen. We all agreed that there was something special about the place, and felt a tingle in our bellies. My imagination heard whistling noises, but then again, it's impossible to tell, with the background hum of airplanes and vehicle motors from the highway exactly what is a moodus noise and what is noise pollution. The river view was broad and full and lovely, and the cottonwoods whispered tales from times past, when they were deemed sacred, lodge poles for an invisible tent above us.

As of tonight, Ching-In and I have completed our reading of each others' work. Her reading of my essay was so helpful last night, that I finished another one this morning, and then went back and wrote a new, stronger ending for "A River Tale." I finished critiquing her poetry manuscript this afternoon, and she responded to mine this evening. It is affirming to be read and understood by another. Both of us are writing about women characters/speakers who strive to break through the myths and stories and losses they've allow to define them in order to become creators of themselves, at peace and poised for deeper adventures as an integrated person. It will be a thrill to see each others' books in print.

Soul Mountain # 18

Sunday Morning. Woke from a long deep sleep to bright sun, a clear blue sky, the pond's eye open, everything in clear focus. Last night I finished a typed first draft of my story, now called "A River Tale." It took a long time to type it, basically because I was still writing as I typed, adding whole new passages. My motivation now at the end of the residency was a deadline that Ching-In, the other resident, and I had given each other to finish drafts of our work so that we could read each others' writing and give feedback. I'm really looking forward to both reading and being read. A fitting finale.

If mind is the residue of incomplete thoughts, perhaps this story I've come back to numerous times in my writing life is a very large, incomplete, undigested thought, and working it through will remove the "carbuncle" from the passage of my creativity, the deep underground reservoir from which the voices emerge. (Metaphor borrowed freely from a legend about the Moodus, a place of underground voice, near where I am staying.) Listening to the spirits.

Soul Mountain # 17

The week of fragrances is in full bloom. Apple blossoms and lilacs have opened and the air is full of their scent. It's a heady time, when the body wants to step out, break into blossom.

Every day as I look into the trees around the pond I see and recognize more birds. It feels as though my eyes are growing sharper, that soon I'd be able to gaze up into the green and see into the life of birds without binoculars. The pond is a bird's playground in spring, as full of courting, pairing, and mating as any college campus in the same season. Geese, ducks, a pair of red-tailed hawks, catbirds, warblers, robins, sparros, finches, swallows. The hawks and snapping turtles add an edge of drama to the scene of nesting, bringing out the protective behaviors of the parent birds. A few days ago I sat at my computer before the pond window and looked up every so often to see two Canada Geese strolling with their fluffy little gosling as it learned to peck in the soft earth around the pond for food. One would stand tall and keep a look-out, while the other pecked at the grass, and the baby toddled after it, imitating every move.

Today we saw a whole flock of turkey vultures roosting in the trees on the road to Soul Mountain. They are the clean-up crew. After something nasty and predatory happens, they come around to clean up the leftovers. Tanya stopped the car in the middle of the road and called up to them, but they stayed in the trees, shy of us and our big shiny white bird of a vehicle.

Soul Mountain # 16

A relief to be back in the writing groove at Soul Mountain. Every day I walk out to the river and then return to my room, take out my computer kayak and paddle by myself through the rapids of thought. The writing is beginning to accumulate, the shape of the imagination emerging in language.

Soul Mountain # 15

River Spirit

While I sit on this rock in the river
and write, a fisherman casts his reel
from the opposite bank. I look up
and we exchange smiles. Has he guessed
how I'd almost entered the body
of my younger self, long dark hair flowing
over slender shoulders, shifting back and forth
on my perch to claim the full scope
of river views: Upstream so I can see
what's coming, then downstream to measure
the liquid speed of time. A turn of the head
and thirty years have passed.

Soul Mountain #14

After Rosemary's visit, I took a quick field trip to New York on the Shore East Line from Old Saybrook to New Haven, then on the Metro North from New Haven to Grand Central Station. Trains are a smorgasbord for people-watchers like me--eavesdropping on families, businessmen, and high school kids dressed for the prom. I also love reading on trains, and today read all of Linda Gregg's "Chosen by the Lion" and Mary Karr's "Viper Rum," along with her essay "Against Decoration" on the long journey into the city. My destination was a poetry reading at the Brooklyn Historical Society in honor of the publication of "Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn," an anthology edited by my friend Julia Kasdorf and fellow poet Michael Tyrell. Unfortunately, my memory slipped, and I ended up all the way down at the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway, instead of the Historical Society. So by the time I'd taken the subway up to Brooklyn Heights, I'd missed the reading. However, I didn't miss Julia, and I had a pleasant evening out with her and Michael and a few friends, listening to funny stories about the readings and celebrating the great labor of love--sometimes unrequited--that anthology-making is.

Train sketches:

Full-grown clean-shaven young men in shirtsleeves, ties stowed in their pockets, enter the train in the unexpected May heat, talking amongst themselves about high school friends, football, ice hockey minor leagues they one played in, colleges they and their friends attended, young warriors set to the task of making money, so that in 30 years they can still pay the Visa bill of someone like the sleeping blond across the aisle, dark glasses over her eyes.

A slender 40-ish woman with dyed red hair and a short black and white print skirt stands propped against a pillar on the platform, reading "Eat, Pray, Love," her slim, tanned knees winking althernately at me as she tightens and relaxes her quadricep muscles, a habit well-hidden by longer skirts through the years and now revealed, perhaps unconsciously, by fashion.

Soul Mountain Retreat # 13

On Wednesday, Rosemary Starace drove down from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to have lunch with me. I showed her around Soul Mountain, then we drove to Old Saybrook for lunch at an outdoor cafe where we both picked up a bit of a tan sitting in the brilliant sun. I met Rosemary on the WOM-PO (Women's Poetry) Listserv. She's a visual artist turned poet, and she has been instrumental in putting the WOM-PO anthology into physical form. I've proposed a panel for next year's AWP on the creation of this collaborative anthology in cyberspace and have actually been trying to meet as many members of the editorial group in person as possible. It turned out that we have many things in common, not the least of which is the art backgrounds we bring to writing. Rosemary developed her work as an artist when she attended the New York Feminist Art Institute. She told me their motto was "Where artmaking arises from self-understanding and content inspires form." She's taken several writer's workshops with Jane Hirshfield, one at Tassajara. We both have the Tassajara bread book, and shared that memory as well as many others about our journeys in art, cooking, and poetry. It was good to meet a soul mate, and I bought a box of paints on our walk around Old Saybrook.

Soul Mountain #12

I used to see 20/20.
Now, without my glasses
I can't discern the exact
lines of the fiddlehead's curve
but the stalks glow against
the mottled earth.
Spring leaves appear
as tiny green lanterns
hung on the branches, as
red confetti strewn
among the tree tops,
dappled shade in motion
shaping the light.

Soul Mountain Retreat #11

Today marks my half-way point at Soul Mountain. The time has gone so fast. Once one enters a deeply meditative space with comfortable people and total control over one's time, it's like being in another zone all together. I've gone deeply in, loving the pond and the river as daily touchstones for writing. I want to stay as deeply available as I have been for writing during this next week. I was feeling a bit lonely for the family yesterday. Knowing I will go back to them makes the next week seem more poignant and the work more necessary.

Yesterday, while I was writing my woman in the woods essay, I was castigating myself for not being adventuresome enough when it came to exploring my environment. I've done a lot of walking here, but in "designated" zones, especially since this is the crucible of lyme disease. But yesterday I decided to venture beyond Baker Lane to perhaps find a public access entrance to the Nature Preserve behind the house. I walked along 156, the highway at one end of Baker Lane, towards a bridge over the Eight Mile River. Just before the bridge, I saw some dirt tracks off to the left. I followed them past a wooden bridge in a wooded clearing and continued towards what looked like a large open meadow. As I neared the meadow, I saw rows and rows of large black birds. At first I thought it must be someone's shooting range, with decoys. But then one of the large birds slowly turned its head towards me and lifted its large wing. I turned and fled. I felt outnumbered, as though the whole army of birds might advance on me.

"Turkey Medicine" Tonya called it. She says she has turkey medicine and that I must, too, if so many turkeys appeared to me. When animals appear to you, they have "medicine" or teachings for you. I am still pondering what I should learn from these turkeys. Tonya said that they can be aggressive, but mostly if they feel threatened, or if they are nesting. She told me that it was probably a good idea that I turned around and high-tailed it out of there, even if they did have a message for me.

In the afternoon Marilyn took Ching-In and me to the Florence Griswold Museum, where we viewed the house and the exhibit, including a display of poems written by Marilyn about Venture Smith, and accompanied by landscape paintings from the collection that inspired her. Afterwards she took us to Venture Smith's grave in Old Lyme.

Soul Mountain Retreat # 10

Our Eyes Are on Our Dreams

(for Marilyn, Tonya, and Ching-In, with thanks to Zora Neale Hurston)

In this garden there's a blossoming
pear tree for each of us--Janies all--
but these trees are are taller, older
than Janie's pear--there's no need
to lie down in the grass to see the wonder
of blossoms creaming to the hum of bees,
no need to risk the ticks of Lyme disease
in exchange for ecstasy. These trees are generous,
they lower their branch tips trained by years
of bearing heavy fruit to the height of our eyes
and hands, so we can stand beneath them,
grasp their branches, hold the flowers
to our faces. Though their fragrance is faint
the cascade of blooms is abundant
as a waterfall, bees ecstatic as ever.
To any Johnny Taylor who walks towards us
from the verigible woods
we'll languorously wave
and keep on writing,
keep on dreaming.

Soul Mountain
5 May 2007

Soul Mountain Retreat #9

Draped in a daffodil yellow shawl Tonya comes walking down the path from the woods towards the house, carefully carrying a goblet with both hands. "You're carrying a cup of sun!" I greet her.
"No, it's river water," she tells me, as though carrying a goblet of river water back to the house is the most normal thing in the world.
It's a perfectly clear and sunny morning, the sky blue and high above us. A day to bottle for posterity. I ask if I can take her picture carrying the river water. We talk about the birds, the pond, and gardening, her passion. It is she who has planted the bleeding hearts in front.
"I wanted to put one plant by the Buddha," she tells me, "because it is a symbol for Christ. I like the mixing of the two dogmas," she says. "They seem to resonate with each other." And indeed the bleeding heart she planted by the Buddha is four times as large as the other bleeding hearts she planted in the same garden.

Soul Mountain Retreat #8

A river runs through the Nature Preserve behind the house. Eight Mile River it's called, designated "Pristine" by the Wild and Scenic River River System of Connecticut. Shaded by large old hemlocks, it reminds me almost exactly of a stream in Central Ohio that I discovered on a walk with a friend, Buck Sanford. Thirty-three years ago that was, but the rushing water in the river and the scent of the Hemlocks bring it back so vividly it could have been last year. The flood of memories triggered has prompted me to write an essay about nature and discovery and longing. Back then Buck taught me to pay attention to plants and to look and listen for birds. He's a wildlife biology professor now at the University of Denver. And I'm still paying attention; I was an artist then, I'm a writer now. But the memories give me a hankering to pick up my pencil and draw. So far my visual impulse has been expressed through photographs--the river, the trees, the newly budded leaves, the blossoming pear.

Soul Mountain Retreat # 7

Marilyn invited Ching-In and me to accompany her to the Governor's Awards for Culture and Tourism. She was going to introduce William Meredith, a wonderful poet and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. So we all took a field trip into New Haven and attended a lush reception at Branford College, then the Awards Ceremony at the Schubert Theater across the street. Sadly, Meredith had just been rushed to the hospital with congestive heart failure, but at the ceremony his partner read several of his poems. It was so moving--Richard could barely make it through. Clearly he loves Meredith, around whom his life centers. Vincent Scully introduced Robert Stern, both legends of architecture. My favorite was Dr. Robert Ballard, who is an oceanographer with a lab at the Mystic Aquarium. His specialty is underwater archaeology, and he estimates that 50% of America is actually under water. He's the one who found the Titanic and discovered hydrothermal vents. And he's from Kansas (once an ocean bottom, I've been told). All three of us poets thought his profession was amazing. But then again, we realized, we do underwater excavation all the time in the metaphorical realm.

Soul Mountain Retreat #6

I have abandoned Thoreau this morning for the pond. The woodpecker trills from across the water and songbirds join in a symphony, celebrating the blush of green in the underbrush. Overhead three geese fly abreast, announcing their presence, and further away the drone of a plane and the revving of motors remind me of the inescapable human presence. What is it I want to know, capture in words, as I sit here in the adirondak chair, notebook in my lap? "Surely some revelation is at hand." Is it the human names for the birds and their rhythmic cheeping and twittering that could be charted in musical notation or poetic meter? Is it a term from physics that could name the ripple patterns on the pond's wind-stirred water, or describe the contrasting pattern set off by a duck's entrance into the pond? Perhaps it's the constant variation within a predictable range, or the sun's steady warmth--steady at least for now--that holds me here, each day, each moment, a variation in beauty, a shimmering, whose larger pattern I anticipate, whose minute particulars I can't predict. Or perhaps I am a voyeur of nature, longing for binoculars, to pry into privacies I have not been invited to witness. Yes, and there's that expectation from reading the Bible or centuries' old poetry that a blade of grass will hold a prophecy, that a stubborn dandelion sprouting in the crotch of an old tree will provide the text of a sermon, that the lazy surrender of thought will clear the mind of spot or blemish--that I will feel myself a member of the family of nature.

Soul Mountain Retreat #5

Jahrezeit

Morning mist rises.
Behind the trees clouds dark as mountains
edge their way elsewhere. Two yeas ago
today you left us, your heart winding down
as I sat at your feet. Where is
your spirit now?

I fall back into a deep sleep.
When I wake I have no idea
what time it is. The sky is still overcast
but leaves have come out on one--no two--
trees at the edge of the yard. I open
the window to birdsong.

Morning coffee on the glassed-in porch
where bees have wakened to Jasmine.
The porch is warm as a green house, but outside
April wind rattles the panes and stirs
the treetops, tosses the prayer flags
on their string tether.

In late afternoon I finally go out
to discover air warmed by golden sun,
much warmer than the shaded house.
Up the lane there is a woman who keeps
a menagerie--the Peaceable Kingdom she calls it:
horses, goats, llamas, an emu, guinea hens.

Her greyhounds are friendly and want
to follow me, but they are too polite. Perhaps
they sense your reluctance in me. "They're such kind dogs,"
Jane, their owner tells me. "You couldn't
race them if they weren't so kind. Otherwise
they wouldn't do what you ask."

On the way home I see
the first orange butterfly of the season
chasing a honey bee around a blossoming
shrub. Somewhere in flight, on the wind,
you are blessing me as I carry on, looking for signs
and wonders in the world you have left behind.