Fox in our midst

gray fox sketch

A gray fox appeared in the misty evening, near Wellfleet on Cape Cod.  As we drove slowly around --because the mist near the ocean was so beautiful-- we saw two other gray foxes!  Magical, these sights.

A gray fox has a bit of red on its head.  It is said to be less timid than red foxes, that it can climb trees, gosh, because it has strong, hooked claws.  It likes transition areas between habitats.  "Our" foxes were between the ocean, below, and the cliff upon which we were driving, upon which a few houses were situated.

This was a month ago, and the magic stays with me.

Tonight on the news and in the newspapers this week, there is commentary on a new study of the place or diminishing place of the humanities in university life.  No one even comments on the place of magic anymore.  Humanities is a bit more measurable than magic, but not much more.  Measurable studies are gaining in measurability and in demand.  Magic roams between.

the eagle that James saw

James told us last week about this eagle.  He appeared on the golf course; James was about 15 feet away from him.  The golf course is in Indiana.  In the northern Midwest we have eagles, but we rarely see them close up, very rarely perched on a lawn.  You can see more images of this eagle at  http://www.purgatorygolf.com/blog/an-american-bald-eagle-at-purgatory-golf-club/tennamerchent_041113_0342-as-smart-object-1/  .The photos are by Tenna Merchent.

sparrow, sparrow again

Sparrow

Sparrow again!

This sparrow is the most common bird in our yards; they are everywhere. Still, I think his nut-like colors are handsome.  A common bird can be handsome, yes?

The female house sparrow is below.

Sparrow

Easter 2013

daffodil, forsythia, irises

oil/linen

Easter today, and all around us life is stirring out of the cold dark winter's earth.  Soon Spring will fill us, all around.

M told me about the title of the journal that he edits, Spring.  Norman Friedman, David Forrest, and Richard Kennedy met to discuss the idea of starting a literary journal about the poetry and work of E.E. Cummings on a day in New York City that was very cold.  They met at Sweetwaters Cafe, they decided they would do the journal, they could not find a title, and on the way out of the cafe, back into the sleet-filled streets of New York, Norman cried, "SPRING."

The journal continues today, so many years later.  You can take a look at:    SPRING  .

spring!

Daffodils, oil/canvas

This painting, which is quite large, has become apart from me; I cannot remember my imprints upon it.  Still, exuberant, with joy it is; "It takes my place" here!  

Here is a wonderful poem, a paean of spring, by Tomas Transtromer, Morning Birds .

The translation is by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will.  Such ordinary-seeming views: this poem takes my breath away.

I wake my car.

Its windshield is covered with pollen.

I put on my sunglasses

and the song of the birds darkens.

While another man buys a newspaper

in the railroad station

near a large freight car

which is entirely red with rust

and stands flickering in the sun.

No emptiness anywhere here.

Straight across the spring warmth a cold corridor

where someone comes hurrying

to say that they are slandering him

all the way up to the Director.

Through a back door in the landscape comes the magpie

black and white, Hel's bird.

And the blackbird moving crisscross

until everything becomes a charcoal drawing,

except for the white sheets on the clothesline:

a Palestrina choir.

No emptiness anywhere here.

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows

while I myself shrink.

It is growing, it takes my place.

It pushes me out of its way.

It throws me out of the nest.

crest-less cardinal

We have seen a male cardinal in our yard that has no crest feathers, no bright red triangle on top of his head. Sometimes this baldness is due to an unusual molt.  For two reasons, I think our friend has some kind of mite:  because I saw him this way in the autumn, and also because I see some squirrels in the yard with bald fur patches.  This bird could probably preen and catch the mites on his other feathers, but getting them off his head must be difficult.  Or the scratching to get them has caused some feather loss.

Imagine this cardinal with his new crest feathers!

He seemed undiminished in his flight and song, and since he is around again this spring, let us think of him as a resplendent red cardinal going through a minor patch of misfortune.

This photo is by Greg Dodge, from a fine blogsite which you can reach here:

http://blogs.lifeandscience.org/greg-dodge/2011/03/18/bald-headed-cardinal/

the white roof

Our friend Gillian sent us this photo of the mountains near her home in Virginia.  And she sent this wonderful poem:

After Snow

to put the world in the same color

the white roof

the blue sky

the still earth

and the trees stand

nodded

to a benevolent all

as one. 

--gillian huang-tiller

1-17-2013

Who's that bird?

mourning dove

pastel, charcoal, graphite, glue/ paper

Lenn asked today if this bird was up on my site.  I call him Valentine Dove, and he seems to me still, but also somewhat between coming forward and turning backward, and a bit supercool, a bit gentle.  I wondered who this kind of "bird" is, who his valentine could be. (Remember your Valentine next week, the 14th!)  I never really know what kind of bird will come on to the page when I start.

"Valentine" likes it at Lenn's, that is, at Lenn and Michael's shop called Wealthy at Charles..  He is also seen at  Toughdoves.com , but like several birds before him, he prefers flying out into the world from the shop.  Word is that Michael is a terrific cook. 

winter all around

pastel/paper

Winter is all around us today.  Everywhere we look, and immediately upon us when we step outside.  We are winter today!

The Outermost House by Henry Beston is a wonderful book.  From Autumn 1927 to Autumn 1928 Beston lived in his two-room cottage on Cape Cod and wrote about Nature around him.  The dunes, beach, the sun and moon and stars, the birds, the movements of the sea:  all are characters, the formers of the drama in his book.  There is very little about humans or about himself.  Here is some of his writing.  Look how carefully he pauses at the end of this passage, in memory and gratitude, and then resumes.  Isn't it Nature here that he has become even as much as he is a man writing about Nature?

Nb."the Hunter" is Orion, in the sky

    My year upon the beach had come full circle; it was time to close my door.  Seeing the great suns, I thought of the last time I marked them in the spring, in the April west above the moors, dying into the light and sinking.  I saw them of old above the iron waves of black December, sparkling afar.  Now, once again, the Hunter rose to drive summer south before him, once again autumn followed on his steps.  I had seen the ritual of the sun; I had shared the elemental world.  Wraiths of memories began to take shape.  I saw the sleet of the great storm slanting down again into the grass under the thin seepage of moon, the blue-white spill of an immense billow on the outer bar, the swans in the high October sky, the sunset madness and splendour of the year's terns over the dunes, the clouds of beach birds arriving, the eagle solitary in the blue.  And because I had known this outer and secret world, and been able to live as I had lived, reverence and gratitude greater and deeper than ever possessed me, sweeping every emotion else aside, and space and silence an instant closed together over life.  Then time gathered again like a cloud, and presently the stars began to pale over an ocean still dark with remembered night.

for Fran

mare and foal

pastel, charcoal, gouache/ paper

New wobbly legs, this foal has, next to its mother's gracefully curved confirmation.  A new year ahead for both of them.  Of course, a new year for us today, 2013.

I'm thinking of Fran:  that she go into the year as both, the mare and the foal.  Fran, who carries distanced perspectives--from her learning of history and her love of the best of history--and delicious detail with her into every room she goes.  Her details we all enjoy when she cooks, when she weaves, when she (wryly) comments and converses.  I think of her especially because of her health.  We have hope for her foal, her health, in the new year.  If Fran outlives us all and looks back at this  (wobbly) encomium with graceful forbearance,  may this image of a foal and mare, still, have some charm for her!

chimpanzee relief

at Chimp Haven

Today we got news that the NIH (National Institute of Health) will allow more than 100 chimpanzees to retire to a chimpanzee sanctuary: Hurrah.  We are slowly putting an end to using chimpanzees for our research.  You can read a news story and see a video about this move at  Chimpanzee Relief  .

In this season of glad tidings and great joy for a humble child who became a man-and-God, we can be humbled and can be glad that finally we are no longer harming animal-beings that are made by God in our own close image.

sun movement

The first lines of a Tomas Transtromer poem:

The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down

The sun soaking through the smog!  (The rest of the poem is below.)
Yesterday I came across another sun-sky-movement passage, this time in a very early page of Wallace Stegner's novel, Crossing to Safety.  The narrator has just left his wife to sleep longer and stepped out for a walk in the woods surrounding a cottage they have traveled to the night before.  It is early morning, "keen air, gray light, gray lake below, gray sky through the hemlocks whose tops reach well above the porch."  He walks a bit down a dirt road alongside of a hill:

     Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars.

Wonderful, that "drowned."
Each of these two passage is contained in a fine bit of writing wherein the sun exchanges further with the writer (and us).  Here below is Transtromer's poem,  Looking Through the Ground and the rest of Stegner's paragraph, on page six of the Modern Library paperback edition of his book.  Enjoy!

Looking Through the Ground

The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down

to my deep-down eyes that are resting
deep under the city looking up

seeing the city from below: streets, foundations--
like aerial photos of a city in war

the wrong way around--a mole photo:
silent squares in somber colors.

The decisions are taken there.  No telling
bones of the dead from bones of the living.

The sunlight's volume is turned up,
it floods into flight cabins and peapods.

translated by Robin Fulton
_________________

     Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars.  Its edges are piled with hills.  Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.