Autumn Greetings from Home

Corn Fantasy


Acres of August corn crowd
to the shoulders on four corners.
I creep through the intersection—
cautious, aware: I am in over my head
in fields to every horizon.
The corn hovers above like an army of green

seraphim protecting me as far as I can see.

I slow down driving between their handsome ranks.
But the stalks are restless, like me,
as if wrestling with competing personalities.
On the outside, the plant admits to chaos—
its tassle-do tossed by stiff mid-day breezes,
and, like my own gray hair, its silk tangles
But beneath the husk all is tidiness.
Each sweet ear I bite into this autumn
yields six hundred kernels, arranged in even bands.

So orderly, the kernels of corn I swallow.

I come to a full stop
thinking of Mayans, Huicholes, the Anasazi,
and other peoples of the corn.
I pull off to the side, park, get out, push into
the rows of corn near Peter-Smith and Lakeshore;
I join the spirits in the maize.

***

The Autumn Equinox occurs tomorrow at 11:44 EST...and the fields are full of the season's bouty--corn, pumpkins, cabbabes, beans, carrots, apples, pears... After a delicious summer (som much fresh seafood!) in the Canadian Maritimes (alas, without email most of the time and few opportunities to update my blog!), I've settled back into the routine of teaching freshman writing, visiting with friends and enjoying the beauty of Lake Ontario in my front yard. It is indeed a blessing to be home.

In the Poetic Forest

The Bashō Trees of Acadia




Northern forests in the east
are littered with brief poems
written in white bark code
on curled scrolls peeled
from paper birches.
Each is a secret haiku
scripted in dashes to read
like Braille with your fingertips.
I retrieve one scrap hidden
in the duff by Jordan Pond,
ponder its lines embossed
on papyrus, deciphering:

Mist lifts. Loon surfaces.
Bold tremolos echo through
cold light of wildness.

***

While the above poem was written in Maine's Acadia National Park, I remain in Acadia -- up in the Canadian portion of that land once widely settled by the French who were later ousted from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia when the British took control. Many of the deported French ended up in Louisiana and became known as Cajuns and were immortalized in Longfellow's poem "Evangeline."

Acadia is a land of birches, firs and granite...a magical land. And today, a special treat: the ferry across the Bay of Fundy from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia. Fundy! Site of the world's greatest tides -- a shift from low to high (or high to low!) up to 48 feet. Such a tremendous tide that you can stand at water's edge and watch the water rise to your feet or ebb away minute by minute. But today, a different view: from atop the bay's great waters on the ferry boat Princess of Acadia.

Another Vagabond Summer

On Sterling Pond


Who first called it fair?
Who first named it haven?
How long ago were the thoughts
first twinned in the minds of mapmakers?

I have it on good authority
from season’s first dragonfly
along Ontario: It was a pair of them.
The gander saw her fair;
the hen had found in him a haven
for seven goslings to be raised
on a sterling—his idea—pond,
her word for their home of reeds.
Since the end of the last Ice Age,
its great glacial retreat,
Canada geese have claimed
these south shore marshes.
Despite red-tailed hawk visions,
shadows of turkey vultures,
the arrival of man, me,
this species thrives.

Tonight I sleep in Fair Haven
on the bluff above Sterling Pond,
in the company of Branta canadensis.
Tonight I dream the voice of the goose
is yet heard in the wetlands
eight thousand generations later.
I dream the birds’ long aquatic history
and lore of this place on the charts. Again,
I make their fair, sterling acquaintance.
Tonight I swim in protected waters.

***

Summer season's greetings, friends and visitors.

With Fair Haven State Park in New York already a memory,

I head across Lake Champlain into Vermont today,

a green northern kingdom of rugged mountains.

Home, Sweet Home

Spring hasn't quite arrived in Western New York, so I sure wish I could walk back into this beach scene in a photo taken on St. Joseph's Peninsula State Park a couple weeks ago.

Chilly and rainy and gray in Kent, N.Y. It's definitely not shorts and sunglasses weather. But it's good to be home...visiting friends...entertaining...sleeping in my own bed...and listening to the thousands of geese in the fields behind the house as they commute to and from Lake Ontario.

Reflections in the Longleaf Forest

Ochlockonee River State Park on Florida's "Forgotten Coast" region of the panhandle is my favorite state park. There's a serenity there engendered by the tall soughing pines and the almost imperceptible hiss of the river as it slips across the sandy banks on its daily unhurried rise and fall with the tides. The longleaf pine, my favorite evergreen, is endangered; only remnants of the great forests that stretched from Virginia south and west into east Texas remain. One such pocket of sylvan glory is at Ochlockonee, where you can also, if you take a lesson from the river and move quietly, slowly, see a red-cockaded woodpecker, endemic to the longleafs and also endangered.

I saw the bird; I breathed the tangy trees; I reflected. There's still time to save them both.

More Florida Sunshine

Sunset at Chokoloskee, a small, sleepy "old Florida" island on the edge of the Western Everglades, 10,000 Islands area.

Sunshine on My Shoulders

Warm Florida greetings to all. It has been a busy time for this vagabond poet. Writing, of course, but also meandering bay and estuary by kayak and beach and forest on foot trails along the Atlantic coast, into the Keys, and now on the Gulf coast, where I'm making my way slowly northward as the days grow perceptibly longer.

One of the best days so far I spent alone on Cayo Costa, a small barrier isle on the Gulf coast accessible only by boat. I spent the day on the beach writing and bird watching, cloud watching with no one in sight despite the perfectly sunny, warm day. The solitude was refreshing...and inspirational. Hence:

In Order


It is not any memory
of the sea, but the eye—
the eye goes first.
So a sailor’s sailor,
one who has gone round the Horn,
will tell you: the eye goes first.
Where have gone my guiding stars?
Where my albatrosses?
In the footsteps of Darwin
go studious scholars of benthic depths,
of the great pelagic heave,
who report in scientific journals
the news on every shore:
how the eye goes first.
Where have gone my pristine waters?
Where my blue-footed booby?
And the ocean’s poets
from Antarctica to the Gulf of Alaska
as they stroll coast lines in their lines
espy the moon by ebb and neap,
and the next day, night’s dead on the beach.
We write that the eye goes first.
Where have gone my Neptune, my Poseidon?
Where my penguins and puffins?
Death surfs on crushing waves in our poetry;
first the going blind, then the fade of memory.

***