Fewer, Smaller

Montana greetings from the Vagabond Poet who is just now resurfacing from immersion in mountains and valleys and more mountains and valleys in Glacier National Park. It's a spectacular corner of the country where grizzlies rule and campers are wise to be cautious. We didn't see any of the ursine family in our four days there, but reports came into the campground of encounters -- all of them ending happily for bear and hiker alike. Word from the rangers is that Ursus horribilis is doing well; it's the glaciers that are really suffering. You look out from an overlook at a glacier then down at the roadside exhibit showing what the glacier looked like 10 years ago, 30 years ago. Today's glacier is an icy ghost of its former self. It's in-your-face global warming. It's in-your-eyes cold tears.

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Still, beauty remains, sometimes in the smallest things that often go overlooked. I found my solace in Glacier National Park thus:

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In the Valley of the Shadows of High Mountains

The active ingredient

in spruce trees

is lichen.

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From the Badlands Past the Bighorns

It's hard to believe that three weeks have passed since we left home on our pilgrimage to the western mountains via the Badlands of South Dakota where this photograph was taken along a trail through the rugged landscape where the Earth shows her bones. We've since left the Great Plains behind and have made it safely through the Black Hills of western South Dakota with a stopover in Deadwood to relive the wild-west late 1800s in that national historic town, and then over our first mountain range, the Bighorns of eastern Wyoming. Soon, into Yellowstone National Park where it's impossible to ignore that the Earth is alive--and gasping, gushing, bubbling and heaving beneath your feet or several safe feet away.

For now, I leave you with a short poem that I hope will give you a sense of what it felt like to cross over the Bighorn Mountains at 9,000 feet above sea level on a chilly June morning.



Amid the Bighorns


snow swale

fog drift

stream rush

raven glide

If I am not crushed
by cliff slide
I will become
the summit

East Meets West

At last spring has come to the south shore of Lake Ontario and our lilac bush is in bloom, two weeks behind those that graced nearby Rochester's annual Lilac Festival. I picked two bouquets to enjoy on my desk, in the kitchen--which will travel with us across the U.S. towards Montana. A gathering of blooms and aroma to remind us of home, at least for the few days they last.

We depart tomorrow, May 24, for a nine-week expedition-by-trailer to the Badlands of South Dakota, Black Hills, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park in Montana and then our return trip via the Badlands of North Dakota and along the Great Lakes shores from Minnesota to Ohio and home again on August 1. I promise updates from the blue highways of the plains and Rockies. Meanwhile, a tiny poem to celebrate Spring-at-Last:





May Star Date #4:
Lines Aligned in a Parallel Universe

Overhead after midnight,
a shining through—
new life.





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Peace and health to all.

Kindly,

Karla

Not-Spring

Where did the winter go since my last posting? In Western New York, the answer is: “Not away.” It’s been unseasonably cold since I returned north from Florida two weeks ago. A late-February expedition into the Baja of Mexico to see whales seems eons ago and my Artist-in-Residency program in the Everglades even deeper in time. While winter continues to have its grip on the shores of Lake Ontario, I try to hold on to the warmth of the south and of Mexico.

Photographs and poems of the Baja trip help me hold onto the magic of being among the great cetaceans – five whale species, including mating humpbacks with the randy males ramming each other to win breeding rights to the evasive female. This photograph of a humpback’s flukes is a clear reminder of the majesty of these mammals, our cousins who also remind me of how insignificant is humankind. And how fleeting is our time here on Earth.

That must have been on my mind when I wrote this poem.

The Price of Souvenirs


We leave something of our souls
in our footprints in foreign lands
and take only these photographs:

The one where I left a flicker of myself
reflected in a gray whale’s eye
in Magdalena Bay in the Baja of Mexico.

One where I left a scrap of being
in Los Islotes on those rocks
of seals and pelicans in the Sea of Cortez.

You saw me amid cardon cactus and elephant trees
leaving one last innocence aside
on Espiritu Santo like skin drying in desert air.

You have seen how I leave a dream behind
among Pacific turtle bones and sand dollars
on a bleached beach by an ocean of death.


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Meanwhile, I’ve home and settling into a spring brightened by poetry readings and gatherings with friends. Snow may be yet on the ground, but the promise of spring’s renewal is kept by birds at the feeders and buds thick on the trees in the neighborhood. I feel the warmth within. I hope you do, too.

Morning in the Everglades

Greetings, readers!

I have surfaced for a few days from my artist-in-residency in Everglades National Park...and will be heading soon to the Baja for a Lindblad expedition to see the gray whales in their nursing lagoons.

The Everglades residency experience was eye-opening in so many ways...through writing and editing poetry, a poetry reading, photography, botanizing, hiking, biking -- being. It will stay with me forever. That is the nature of the Everglades.

Among my accomplishments was a collection of 19 "cameos" -- miniature portraits of people in Everglades history dating from the 1500s to the present. Each one is 100 syllables long (or 200 if a double cameo) and is based on historical fact presented with mythic embellishments. The research for the poems was almost as fun doing as the poems themselves. So I will leave you with one in the series...about Guy Bradley, the future park's first game warden, one who was murdered by plume hunters at the beginning of the 20th century.

See you next time with tales and whales' tails from the Baja.

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1905, Guy Bradley Cameo: Dead or Alive?


To St. Bradley,
patron of subtropical birds,
our latter-day Assisi,
our Everglades martyr
to its causes, I pray.

How unceremoniously they took aim
and shot you, those greedy hunters,
those ravaging devils, that plague
of egrets great and snowy,
of hierophantic great blue herons, too.
Those killers in the rookeries
are dead. But you live on
among the glossy ibis,
a feather spirit, listening.

Ever the Everglades

Everglades Horizon #1


Limestone
sawgrass
panther
dew
If I do not evaporate
in winter’s drought,
I will become
the summer slough.

Everglades Horizon #2


Mangrove
osprey
hurricane
mosquito
If I am not lost
in the ten-thousand watery labyrinths,
I will become an island.

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Greetings from Chokoloskee Island in the western Everglades where I've made a base for exploring both Big Cypress National Preserve to the northeast and the 10,000 Islands of the Gulf just beyond the small wharf at the campground. Some hiking, some kayaking, some lazing on the verandah watching the pelicans, spotted sandpipers (a bird-first) and terns while they watch for anglers to return with their catch and the detritus that will fall their way when cobia, snook, snapper and sheephead become filets.

On Sunday, February 1, I return to the eastern Everglades to commence my two-week artist-in-residency program where much inspiration awaits, including the splendor of purple gallinules like the handsome fellow in the above photo. In addition to giving a couple poetry readings, my goal is "to contemplate the Universe from the Holy Land of the Everglades." More specifically, I wish to complete a cycle of short poems -- "Cameos" -- that pay tribute to key figures in Everglades history. I'm sure other poems will arrive on the wings of birds to celebrate the flora and fauna of this unique place on Earth. The thought of unfettered hours to write (I'll be "off the grid!" and not much concerned about cooking and other quotidian tasks) is thrilling. Update to follow upon my return from the wild, the wonderful River of Grass.

A Beckoning Beacon

Greetings from the Atlantic coast in Florida near Ponce Inlet where this 1887 lighthouse -- Florida's tallest -- guards the entrance from ocean to the Halifax River. The imposing tower, second highest brick lighthouse in the U.S. (only the Cape Hatteras lighthouse is taller), stands stately guard over the tricky inlet. While no longer operated by the U.S. Coast Guard, it still functions as a "private" lighthouse, lovingly restored and maintained by a non-profit foundation that has even restored the 1933 first-order Fresnel-lens light. On such a beautiful day as yesterday when I visited the handsome structure, it stood out for its rich brick-red color against a flawless blue sky. No, I did not climb to the top for a lighthouse keeper's view of the surrounding waters, but stood humbled beneath it with respect for its architect, masons and the generous people who restored it and the mryiad lenses and prisms in its lamp. Sometimes mankind gets things right. The Ponce Inlet Lighthouse is one of our more admirable achievements.