HOWDY 2011!

Tags

2011, a momentary creed, Gwendolyn Brooks, happy new year, Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, Naomi Shihab Nye, Shadow of Sirius, Ted Kooser, thank you, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams

 

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Our 2010 is not about The Desperate Housescribes.  It’s about All of You.  You keep us energized, inspired and motivated to write.  We thank you.  Fiercely.  Vastly. Utterly.

We also take our nourishment from a passel of poets ~ Ted Kooser, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Naomi Shihab Nye, William Carlos Williams, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Nikki Giovani, Donald Hall, Lucille Clifton, e e cummings, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Gwendolyn Brooks…. just to name a few.

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W.S. Merwin, the 17th Poet Laureate 2010-2011, is one of them.  Yes, he’s wise. But he’s on my Fave list because he’s tossed out punctuation. He says it ‘staples the poem to the page’. He wants the hearing of the poem to be like spoken language. Here’s a recent punctuation-free poem from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book,  The Shadow of Sirius. Read it aloud.

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///////////////// A Momentary Creed I believe in the ordinary day that is here at this moment and is me I do not see it going its own way but I never saw how it came to me it extends beyond whatever I may think I know and all that is real to me it is the present that it bears away where has it gone when it has gone from me there is no place I know outside today except for the unknown all around me the only presence that appears to stay everything that I call mine it lent me even the way that I believe the day for as long as it is here and is me

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May 2011 bring you the gift of ordinary days.

Toni 12/31/10

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For the curious, here's a list of the 24 poets and 1 astronaut (?) portrayed in the linocut: First row Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Robert Browning - Walt Whitman - William Butler Yeats  - Gertrude Stein Second row Robert Frost - Carl Sandburg - Wallace Stevens  - J.D. - T. S. Eliot Third row Edna St. Vincent Millay - Neil Armstrong - e e cummings - Langston Hughes - W. H. Auden Fourth row Randall Jarrell - John Berryman - Dylan Thomas -  Gwendolyn Brooks - Philip Larkin Fifth row Gregory Corso - Allen Ginsberg - Anne Sexton - Sylvia Plath - Frank O'Hara

IT’S GETTING ROBERT FROSTY OUTSIDE

Tags

Bali, Bob Dylan, Elizabeth Gilbert, India, Indonesia, Italy, poem, poet, retirement, Robert Frost, singer, Tibet, time

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.   Robert Frost

It’s well before light, and I’m listening to the wind, watching the occasional flicker of headlights on my street.

The rhythms of the day ahead are different now that I’m retired. There’s more time for everything. And never enough time for everything.  When I worked, it was all about ‘saving’ time – take the shorter route, multitask, freeze dinners ahead, work through lunch.

Lucky me, now I can spend all that time I saved.

HAH! (as Mary says) ~  if only it worked that way.

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I have a ‘new’ kitchen- what the carpenter calls refreshed – it’s just days old. Before it was somewhat inefficient and tired, but good enough. Now it’s like the midway at the fair, appliances churr like a bluegrass band. It’s an amusement wonderland.  A pay-one-price ride, all day, every day.

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Elizabeth Gilbert went searching for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. She siphoned her savings to downward dog in Bali.  I found my enlightenment closer to home. Like the Buddhists in Tibet, I plan to carve my personal mantra into a rock next summer.

Cook. Eat. Swoon.

 

 

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This is one of those Robert-Frosty mornings when I think I have this kitchen just to surround me while I cultivate wonder. Squirrels dart in and out of the woods, snow falls, and birds stand around on feeders looking as though they’ve got a game of five-card stud going. It’s a brilliant jewel of a moment. All this dithering of mine is not a waste of time.  Far from it.  I’m a life-long noticer, like my fellow writers. So pull up a chair and sip a Cup of Time. Listen to the words of another guiding spirit, Bob Dylan~

“It’s not dark yet / But iiiit’s gettin’ there.”.

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<oThe best is not yet to come.  It’s Here and Now.

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Now That I’m Retired

I keep the woods in view,

brown leaves on early winter trees;

notice a rabbit crouch under the pine,

watch grape leaves darken and

birch trunks lean against the snow.

I sort the hawks into categories:

Cooper’s, red-tailed, sparrow and sharp-shinned;

hear geese call, woodpeckers jeer,

cold lean birds light out from the spreading oak.

Icy needles hit the window,

wind slips in through cracks in quilted silence.

I get the moon up,

turn the stars on,

listen to Dylan while life hurtles by,

keep it all going right.

Toni  12/29/10

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Here’s my Toast  for tomorrow night ~  Happy New Year Everyone!

 

Sempre cosi

e qualche volte piu meglio.

 

May it always be like this,

and maybe sometimes even better.

Birds Smuggled in Hair Curlers, Hope, and Irruptions: More Observations from Backyard in Winter

Tags

backyard in winter, bird clocks, bird smuggling, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Guyanese Towa Towa, Hope is Thing with Feathers, Irruptions of birds, Macaulay Library Archives, pine siskins

When the story hit the papers about the smuggler who was caught with 13 slumbering Towa Towas inside plastic hair curlers I sat up and marveled.

Well, I marveled and squirmed at the same time, if this is possible.

I squirmed that I was marveling at what sounds mighty cruel. While this Guyanese bird can be trained to live in a cage and does so in many households in Guyana, importing them is illegal and frequently leads to lots of bird deaths enroute.

I marveled because birdsong slices right to my very core. I love the birdsong of my backyard and really miss the symphony of it during all that wooing and mating in the Spring. Therefore I understand the lonely Guyanese immigrant yearning for the beloved sounds of her favorite homeland bird. To help me through the quieter winter months, my kids gave me a songbird clock. It calls a different bird song for each hour: Hmmm…I’m hearing the Great Horned Owl, must be 12:00. Sandhill Crane croaking? Is it 3:00 already? But, like the Guyanese immigrant hungry for the sounds of beloved birds, for me the bird clock is not enough.

I found a recording of the Towa Towa. It does have a lovely song.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECygBAilSzM)

Guyanese immigrants pay a lot of money–up to a couple of thousand dollars–to buy this bird. And once they’ve got the bird in hand they often meet in the bushes of Central Park or some such urban oasis and have contests to judge which of their Towa Towas has the sweetest sound. Cash prizes for placing first, second, and third.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start smuggling, but to sustain myself during this relatively quiet winter, I do hope for  something called an irruption. Not interruptions or eruptions.  Irruptions.

A little background:

Birds irrupt when they run out of food in their usual wintering place. On one of our birding trips, Ronnie and I learned from our bird guru, Ray, about the Great Simultaneous Irruption of the Winter of 97-98. It seems that Red and White-winged crossbills, Common Redpolls, Evening Grosbeaks, and Pine Grosbeaks did a gigantic fly-in throughout the Northeast.  I’m not sure what the other birds were looking for, but the Common Redpolls came because their normal birch and alder catkins were scarce. (I’m picturing some Travelocity-type system that gives food alert and new source information; I mean, how DO they know where to go?)

As an Emily Dickinson lover, I also know that hope is a thing with feathers and recently, as I looked into my winter garden with all its messy seed heads, piles of brush, and feeders, I think I see and hear birds that I don’t normally see and hear!  High drama. Could it be an irruption?

What alerts me is a sort of raspy, chittering zreeeeeet! zreeeeeeeet! in sycopation with my scoop, lift, swing, and toss as I shoveled. (I’m clearing a path to the feeders; we’ve got at least 15 inches of snow out here.

Audio #44845 http://macaulaylibrary.org/search.do

I look up and see about a dozen Pine Siskins–Pine Siskins!–fluttering around the feeders and the pines. They’re scattered throughout a flock of Goldfinches. I lean on my shovel and, as I said, marvel. Birdsong! Ah. The wonder of it all.

And I didn’t have to pay two thousand dollars and use nary a haircurler.

© Gary Tyson

(And just incase you wanted the whole hope and feathers poem, here it is:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Patty 12-30-10