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.