• Category Archives Poetry
  • Still Alive

    Spring and the Corona Lunacy

    Sunday gratefuls: 25 days of physical distancing. Flattening the curve. Beau Jo’s pizza. Rigel’s smile after I took her with me to Evergreen. Kep wanting to get up at 5. Little Gertie, a sweet girl. Snow showers yesterday. The wet whooshing sound of the occasional car on Black Mountain Drive. Braiding Sweetgrass, the grammar of animacy. Capitalizing the names of plants and animals to show their life force.

    Buddy Tom Crane found this oh so pagan poem. I loved it and want to share it.

    Time for Serenity, Anyone?
    by William Stafford

    I like to live in the sound of water,
    in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
    reminder hits me: this world still is alive;
    it stretches out there shivering toward its own
    creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
    enters into the elaborate give-and-take,
    this bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
    winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil
    chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
    This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
    This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.


  • Through our life together

    Winter and the Full Future Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: the full future moon lighting up Black Mountain Drive when I went for the Denver Post at 6 am. The crunch of the snow. The starry sky. The groomers at Petsmart for spiffing up Gertie, Rigel, and Murdoch. Kep’s on Monday. Kate’s weight at 101. Her increased energy and good spirits. Stefan and Lonnie in Vail. Stefan’s new hip.

    Buddy Tom Crane, a cognoscenti of contemporary poets, found a book, A Dog Runs Through It, by Linda Pastan, former poet laureate of Maryland. Thanks for the gift, Tom.

    Here’s a stanza from her poem, Envoi:

    “We’re signing up for heartbreak

    We know one day we’ll rue it.

    But oh the way our life lights up

    The years a dog runs through it.”

    Those years have been, for Kate and me, thirty plus. And not just a dog running through them, but an ever renewing pack, sometimes as large as seven, now down to three plus a guest.

    My first dog, Diamond, a puppy with brown and white fur, a misshapen diamond mark on his forehead, I barely got to know before someone fed him hamburger with ground glass. It still makes me sad, 64 years later.

    The second dog, whose name I can’t recall right now, a black and white bouncy one, went after a five year old girl who leaned into the stroller to pet my infant brother, Mark. Dad told me he went to a “farm in Tennessee.” Uh huh. One of the reasons I lost trust in my father.

    Steppenwolf, a German Shepherd. Dundee, a Sheltie. Both went to better homes than I could provide. Steppenwolf due to divorce and Dundee to my ignorance about how to care for dogs.

    Kate was a long time dog owner when I met her. She had Buck and Iris, Whippets, and Bemish, who was old and died before I could get to know him. I learned from her how to be with dogs, how to love them, how to accept their love, how to care for them.

    Since then, we’ve had Irish Wolfhounds, many, more Whippets, two IW/Coyote Hound mixes (Vega and Rigel), and two family rescue dogs, Gertie, a German Shorthair pointer, and Kepler, an Akita. Murdoch, also an Akita, is here for eleven months, then he’ll return to his mom and dad.

    My heart is full with dog. Licks, kisses, wiggles, jump ups, digging, running, hunting, killing, barking, growling, fighting. Joy over their happiness and grief over their pain and their deaths. So many memories, so many deaths. So much joy. So much sorrow. Life. Life. Life.

    When we consider our life situation, it’s not only about us, but also about the dogs. Part of our reason for staying on the mountain is our fenced in yard. Easy for the dogs. Good for them. No heart worm. No fleas. No ticks as long as they stay in the yard.

    Hilo who would crawl up into my armpit for a nap. Gertie who lies with her head on my pillow at night. Celt stepping on my snowshoes. Sorsha with a squirrel in her mouth and another in sight, frozen in place. Emma standing on the big downed cottonwood surveying her realm. Vega and Rigel digging holes in Andover. And so many, so many more.

    Dogs run through our lives, Kate’s and mine. Sharp teeth, four legs, wagging tails, floppy ears and alert ears, noses, always noses, taking in a world we humans cannot access. Asleep in our lap or near our chair. Eating. Getting treats, heads turned up, expectant.


  • Work Without Hope

    Samain and the Gratitude Moon

    So. Whaddya think?

    December 7, 2019   Work Without Hope   Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
    The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
    And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
    Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
    And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
    Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.  

    Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
    Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
    Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
    For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
    With lips unbrighten’d, wreathless brow, I stroll:
    And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
    W

  • Hózhó

    Samain and the Fallow Moon

    A fellow MIA docent posted a Navajo rug and it had this explanation of hózhó:

    Hózhǫ́ is a foundational concept in the Navajo world, encompassing ideas of beauty, harmony, balance, order, grace, health, and happiness. It is a state of being, thinking, and acting. Navajo artists embody hózhǫ́ as they weave, and textiles are imbued with and become works of hózhǫ́.

    Not a human being. No. A human becoming. Becoming with hózhó, with knowing ichi-go ichi-ge as the rich moment, with an ikigai of life as it is, not as we might want or wish it, but as it is, hózhó always. No matter what.

    With wabi-sabi as a preferred way of seeing the world. Tarnished often, broken, yes. But even so a Velveteen Rabbit place. Repaired with gold where the cracks are. Walking this ancientrail of becoming which never ends. Walk along with me, friend.

    Reading Zornberg on Genesis (see below), The Beginning of Desire. She found this title in a poem fragment from Wallace Stevens, his Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction:

    “And not to have is the beginning of desire.
    To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
    It is desire at the end of winter…

    It knows that what it has is what is not
    And throws it away like a thing of another time…”

    Sat down this morning to read Zornberg, but I printed out this poem, 23 pages long, yesterday. Thought I’d check where her fragment fit in the whole. Wallace Stevens is a giant to me though I know only a few of his poems. He hits me in a place I do not recall exists until I read him.

    Anyhow an hour later I looked up. Read the whole thing. Yowzer. Let me repeat that. Yowzer.

    A few lines:

    The death of one god is the death of all.

    Phoebus was a name for something that never could be named.

    …the future casts and throws his stars around the floor

    There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete

    The bear, the ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain At summer thunder…

    Stevens kept throwing in beautiful lines filled with the horror of nothingness and whether the Supreme Fiction can counter it. I’ve got to read it several more times. But, wow. This poem is something. It’s apparently considered his master work and I can see why.

    Reading it reminded me that reading poetry, ancient texts, philosophy has a sustenance all its own. A castle of temporary meanings lodged in stony rooms, waiting for a visitor. Part of life now. Not what’s next. But, now.

    Hózhó in this once in a lifetime moment and the next one, a wabi-sabi vision sufficient for ikigai.


  • Samain 2019

    The Wheel has turned full round again. Back now at Summer’s End, Samain. In very ancient times the Celts only had two seasons: Samain and Beltane. The fallow season and the growing season. Beltane on May 1st marked the start of the agricultural year and Samain its end. Later they added Imbolc and Lughnasa when celebration of equinoxes and solstices became more common. Imbolc, February 1st lies between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox while Lughnasa, August 1, is between the Summer Solstice and the Fall Equinox.

    The Celts did not begin their year at Beltane, but at Samain, the start of the fallow season. Today. Happy New Year to all of you. Especially to those of you whose heart, like mine, beats to the rhythm of Mother Earth’s changes. And, I would add, to Father Sun’s constancy during her changes.

    Rosh Hashanah begins the human new year for Jews as the growing season comes to an end. Michaelmas, September 29th, the feast day of the Archangel Michael, is Rudolf Steiner’s springtime of the soul. It’s not as strange as it may at first sound to begin the New Year in the fall after gathering in the crops.

    This was the season in pre-modern times when the flurry of growing, gathering, fishing, hunting that marked the warmer months slowed down or ended. Families would have more time together in their homes. Visiting each other was easier. Time would stretch out as the night’s lengthened, making outdoor work difficult, if not impossible.

    This is the season of the bard, the storyteller, the folk musician and it begins with the thinning of the veil between this world and the other world. Harvest and slaughter have the paradoxical affect of sustaining life by taking life, necessary, but often sad. Our need for the lives of plants and other animals reveals the fragile interdependence of our compact with life.

    The veil thins. Those of the faery realm and the realm of the dead are close as the growing season ends. The Mexican and Latin American day of the dead and the Christian all souls day point to the same intuition, that somehow life and its afterwards are closest to each other now.

    I’m recalling Gertrude and Curtis Ellis. Grandpa Charlie Keaton and Grandma Mabel. Uncle Riley, Aunt Barbara, Aunt Marjorie, Aunt Roberta. Lisa. Ikey. Aunt Ruth. Uncle Rheford and his wife. Uncle Charles. Grandma Jennie. Grandpa Elmo. And so many, many others extending back in time to England, Wales, Ireland. Before that as wanderers up out of Africa, those without whose lives I would not have had my own. Nor you yours.

    There are, too, friends and their loved ones. The members of my high school class who have died. Regina, wife of Bill.

    The Romantics say it best for me. Here’s the first few lines of Thantopsis by William Cullen Bryant:

         To him who in the love of Nature holds   
    Communion with her visible forms, she speaks   
    A various language; for his gayer hours   
    She has a voice of gladness, and a smile   
    And eloquence of beauty, and she glides   
    Into his darker musings, with a mild   
    And healing sympathy, that steals away   
    Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts   
    Of the last bitter hour come like a blight   
    Over thy spirit, and sad images   
    Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,   
    And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,   
    Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—   
    Go forth, under the open sky, and list   
    To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
    Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
    Comes a still voice—
                                           Yet a few days, and thee   
    The all-beholding sun shall see no more   
    In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,   
    Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,   
    Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist   
    Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim   
    Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again…


  • The Equilux

    Fall and the Harvest Moon

    I’m changing seasons on the equinox, which is today. Learned a new word reading some material for this post: equilux. An equilux happens after each equinox and occurs this fall on September 26th. If you look at a table of sunrise/sunset, on September 26th, at roughly our latitude, the sun rises at 6:59 am and sets at 6:59 pm. After the equilux, for 172 days, until the next equilux on March 17th, the sun will shine for less than 12 hours.

    Yeah! Though born in Oklahoma near the Red River, almost to Texas, I’ve always been a child of the cold and snow, influenced by too many Jack London novels. And, Renfrew of the Royal Canadian Mounted. Moved to Appleton, Wisconsin in September of 1969 and lived up north until the Winter Solstice of 2014. In our particular location on Black Mountain Drive, just east of 14er Mt. Evans, we get lots of snow, some cold, but easier winters. Better for septuagenarian bones.

    from “What is Michaelmas?”

    Six days from now is the 29th of September, the Feast Day of St. Michael the Archangel. It is, as regular readers of ancientrails already know, the springtime of the soul. At least according to Rudolf Steiner.

    Rosh Hashanah, September 30th this year, the Jewish new year (one of four), begins the month of Tishrei in Judaism’s lunar calendar. Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, follows ten days later on October 9th. 5 days later on October 14 and 15 is Sukkot, a harvest festival. A week after the second day of Sukkot is Simchat Torah, joy of the Torah.

    On October 31st, 6 weeks from last Friday, the next Celtic holiday is Samain, or Summer’s End. The Celtic New Year comes at the beginning of the fallow season.

    I am the hallow-tide of all souls passing,
    I am the bright releaser of all pain,
    I am the quickener of the fallen seed-case,
    I am the glance of snow, the strike of rain.
    I am the hollow of the winter twilight,
    I am the hearth-fire and the welcome bread,
    I am the curtained awning of the pillow,
    I am unending wisdom’s golden thread.
    ~ Song of Samhain, Celtic Devotional:
    Daily Prayers and Blessings, by Caitlín Matthews

    The transition from the growing season when farmers and gardeners harvest its fruits to the fallow season when plants in mid and northern latitudes rest has ultimate significance for non-tropical humanity. Not so long ago a failed growing season would lead to a limited harvest. Unless adequate stores from years past were kept, starvation over the winter was a real possibility.

    7 Oaks garden, 2014

    Oh, you might say, well, that doesn’t apply to us in the modern age. Think not? Perhaps one really bad harvest could be accommodated by trade and stored foods. Maybe even two bad harvests. But if the world saw several bad harvests in a row, say because of a dramatically changed climate, starvation over the winter could become a real possibility even in the developed world.

    Mabon, Sukkot, Samain. With Lughnasa on August 1st, the first harvest festival, the months August through October have evoked human expressions of gratitude, of thanksgiving for soil, seed, and sacrifice. Certain animals and plants become offerings to feed others, including the now unwieldy population of humans.

    The heart of the harvest season, right now, is a deeply spiritual moment. The complex web of life bares itself to our witness. Any Midwesterner is familiar with trucks of yellow corn, soy beans, golden wheat, rye, rolling down highways to grain elevators. Hay gets mowed perhaps a third time and baled either in rectangular bales or huge round ones.

    This is also a traditional time for the slaughtering of animals. Now slaughterhouses and intensive livestock farming have allowed slaughter throughout the year.

    I’m grateful that farmers and ranchers are able to feed us still. I’m grateful that the soil, that top six inches especially, feeds and stabilizes the foodstuff that we grow. I’m grateful that photosynthesis allows us to harvest the sun’s energy by transforming it into vegetables, fruits, grasses, grains, nuts. I’m grateful for each and every animal that dies for our table. I’m grateful for the grocers who buy and display the food for us to purchase.

    It is a time of thanksgiving followed by an increasing darkness. That darkness is fecund, for me at least. Steiner’s idea of Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul, the placement of so many Jewish holidays, in particular sukkot, during this harvest time, and the major Celtic holidays of Lughnasa, Mabon, and Samain offer us many chances to open our hearts to the wonder of this world and its blessings.

    Slightly outside of these three months is the Day of the Dead celebrated throughout Latin America and the Feast of All Souls.

    WINTER SOLSTICE by Willow, Celtic Lady

    As the harvest wanes and summer ends (Samain), we have time to take stock of our lives, of our hopes and dreams. We can lean into the darkness after the equilux, celebrate its fullness on the Winter Solstice. It is in the fallow season that we learn the why of death. In this coming season we can make our peace with mortality.


  • Hokusai Says

    Lughnasa and the full Harvest Moon

    “Hokusai says Look carefully.
    He says pay attention, notice.
    He says keep looking, stay curious.
    He says there is no end to seeing.
    He says Look forward to getting old.
    He says keep changing,
    you just get more of who you really are.
    He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
    yourself as long as it’s interesting.
    He says keep doing what you love.
    He says keep praying.
    He says every one of us is a child,
    every one of us is ancient,
    every one of us has a body.
    He says every one of us is frightened.
    He says every one of us has to find
    a way to live with fear.
    He says everything is alive –
    shells, buildings, people, fish,
    mountains, trees. Wood is alive.
    Water is alive.
    Everything has its own life.
    Everything lives inside us.
    He says live with the world inside you.
    He says it doesn’t matter if you draw,
    or write books. It doesn’t matter
    if you saw wood, or catch fish.
    It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
    and stare at the ants on your verandah
    or the shadows or the trees
    and grasses in our garden.
    It matters that you care.
    It matters that you notice.
    It matters that life lives
    through you.
    Contentment is Life living through you.
    Joy is life living through you.
    Satisfaction and strength
    is life living through you.
    Peace is life living through you.
    He says don’t be afraid.
    Don’t be afraid.
    Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
    Let life live through you.”

    ~ “Hokusai Says” by Roger Keys


  • Nightmare Number Three

    Imbolc                                                                              Recovery Moon

    Friend Tom Crane found this very, very strange Steven Vincent Benet poem, Nightmare Number Three. You can find the whole poem here.

    Made me think of the Charlie Chaplin movie, Modern Times.

    Modern Times“We had expected everything but revolt
    And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking–
    But there’s no dice in that now.
    I’ve heard fellow say
    They must have planned it for years and maybe they did.
    Looking back, you can find little incidents here and there,
    Like the concrete-mixer in Jersey eating the wop
    Or the roto press that printed “Fiddle-dee-dee!”
    In a three-color process all over Senator Sloop,
    Just as he was making a speech.  The thing about that
    Was, how could it walk upstairs?  But it was upstairs,
    Clicking and mumbling in the Senate Chamber.
    They had to knock out the wall to take it away
    And the wrecking-crew said it grinned.
    It was only the best
    Machines, of course, the superhuman machines,
    The ones we’d built to be better than flesh and bone,
    But the cars were in it, of course . . .”


  • On Working at Your Best

    Winter                                                                         Waxing Moon

    20181214_081606Painting. A long, long ancientrail. Walked by so many. A few well, more journeypersons, and the rest of us.

    Mediocre. An interesting idea, mediocre. If you’re working to your best capacity, your work is wonderful. Mediocre arrives on your doorstep when you begin comparing your work to others. I’m a writer of wonderful novels and short stories. I create wonderful paintings. Am I going to be hung in the National Gallery? No. Any gallery? Probably not. Am I going to make the NYT times best seller list? Unlikely. Have I done less than my best? No.

    Success, I’m gradually beginning to learn, is not about the other. It is about yourself. If Michelangelo painted like me, he’d be mediocre because he had the skill to paint well. If Tolstoy wrote like me, same. Where do I fit? Hell if I know. I’ve had the chance to work at my best level in two fields where criticism is a given. I’ve learned to quiet my inner critic, to stay away from sweeping generalizations about my books, my paintings. Now you may read them, look at them, and say, “He’s no Song Dynasty landscape artist.” Or, “He’s no Marquez.” And you would be right. I’m just and only me.

    breathe thich-nhat-hanh-calligraphyThis does not mean I’m uninterested in the quality of my work. Hardly. I want it to be the best I can do. Do I always work at my best level? Of course not. But I do as often as I can. Which is most of the time. I’ll leave the judging to others. I did write that novel. Several, in fact. I did create that painting. Several, in fact. Enough for me. Could I have done this without Kate? No. But Kate is in my life and I in hers. Both of us have sought the best for each other, have sought to create a home environment that encouraged our best work.

    Quilting, making clothing, writing novels, and painting are not the only things we’ve done. Kate healed children. I worked hard at social justice, at following a small r religious path. Both of us have raised kids, learned how to be grandparents. Grew much of our own food, our own flowers, our own fruit, our own honey. There is no accounting, no form of critique that can measure these things. They are past. And we don’t live then. We live forward, on the ancientrail that leads into the time beyond this moment. What we have done is not what matters anymore. What matters now is what we do today, right now. As my buddy Bill Schmidt says, “Show up.”

    crane2Life allows no do overs. We can reconsider, reframe, reevaluate, remember, but we cannot change yesterday, or any yesterday. We can make choices right now.

    Today I chose to use turpentine to wipe out, literally, work I did yesterday. And, I’ll do new work on that painting today. I’m not doing over what I did yesterday. I’m going in a new direction today.

    It feels to me like I’m beginning to get this, to accept the truth of the past, of my intentions, and to find a path with no attention to results. Not sure why but this excites me. A form of liberation, I guess. Not giving up, just going forward. Working at my best. Nothing else is possible, except apathy. And that’s not me.


  • Face the Fear

    Summer                                                                            Woolly Mammoth Moon

    300px-Gutenberg_pressAt the Mussar Vaad Practice group we all come up with a practice for the coming month, a practice based on that month’s middah or character trait. Each month the congregation has a middah of the month. Emunah, or faith was the middah last month. My practice focused on sharpening doubt, a practice that made me feel more alive, more grounded in faith as a necessary human act.

    This month I’m getting even closer to the bone of my inner skeleton, as we focus on bitachon, or trust. This radical confidence is a natural sequelae of emunah. Like doubt is on the same continuum as faith, but at one end of it, trust is on a continuum, too, with fear. In the Jewish approach to these matters it’s not doubt bad, faith good, fear bad, trust good; it’s about knowing how to deploy them at the appropriate times, or if not deploy them, be able to feel them, to know them without hiding.

    Following on the rich experiment with sharpening doubt, I decided to go with the same approach, the far end of the continuum, and focus on fear. I said as much at the MVP, but the fear I wanted to confront embarrassed me (probably making it an excellent candidate), so I didn’t name it there. I will now.

    Albert Camus 1955
    Albert Camus 1955

    My fear, the core fear, is exposing my writing to publishers and critics. Ancientrails doesn’t ignite that fear for some reason, maybe because it’s seen by only a few, but sending off my novels and short stories and poems to publishers causes my fear to burst into a wildfire.

    It’s quiet, though. How it works is I think about submitting work, I make a move or two toward that end, then abandon it. Often not intentionally, at least not overtly, but I allow this or that to get in the way. Query letter? I can’t do a good one. Mail the manuscript? Too much hassle. Find an agent? The old writing ouroboros rises from north sea. Nothing published? An agent won’t want my work. Yet, I need an agent to get my work published. A problem that constantly eats its own tail.

    artistsThat same fear is the one I faced after the Durango trip, writing here about setting a rejection’s goal. I have made two submissions so far, one of Missing, a novel, and one of School Spirit, a short story. By focusing on my fear of rejection, the vulnerability it exposes, the possibility that I’ve been wasting my time for over 20 years now, I hope at least to get my work out in the world. Whether any one wants it is, well, up to them.

    MAKING ART copyI’m embarrassed to write this, ashamed I’ve been so fearful, yet I have been both embarrassed and ashamed for most of the most of the time I’ve been writing. Now is not different. The only way I can make it different is by finding publishers and agents and getting my work to them.

    I’ll let you know how it goes. I just got a new shot of magazines and book publishers open to submission today. That means tomorrow I’m going to be reading submission guidelines, looking at finished work and getting stuff out there. Staying at it is the key, I know that. Persistence. Something I’m usually pretty good at.