Category Archives: writing

Closure

In the course of working on revisions, I’ve been pondering the closing lines of poems. Examining the close of a poem is common revision practice; and over the years, I have gathered much advice concerning when and how to end a poem, some of which is conflicting (of course). Perhaps most famous is Yeats’ idea that the poem should click closed like a box. But poets themselves may disagree. Mentor & Muse (no longer extant) devoted its last issue to just this topic, and clicking on the link will get you to the opening page–on which you will find numerous poetry worthies quoted regarding the way poems ought to end. The essays in the issue are also worth reading, though you may end up feeling more confused than ever about what poems need to do. https://mentorandmuse.net/issue-11-on-poetic-closure/

Photo by Nancy Zjaba on Pexels.com

And just consider the word “closure.” It derives from the word for a fence, wall, or enclosure, also meaning to lock and from the Latin verb for to close. Gestalt psychology employed it to refer to the sense of satisfaction that comes from making things (or feelings) whole even when parts are missing or when a visual image is fragmented. It’s something the human brain seems geared to do: make a whole from bits and pieces. For example, in Impressionist paintings, we see the images’ gestalt despite interrupted and fragmentary brush work. Which strikes me as not unlike many poems I can think of. So when a poem closes with a measure of uncertainty or ambivalence, is the poem flawed? Or can attentive readers make a whole or sense of the piece through the marvels of the brain’s networking activity, connections, resonance?

~

I’ve read that the turn in a poem is a key to the closing, and ending lines will be stronger depending on how near they are to (or distant from, and evocative of) the turn. This seemed helpful revision advice. Yet does every poem require a turn? The idea of the volta is ancient indeed, but it need not be a prescription for all the poems in the world. Poetry from other than Western cultures often proceeds quite beautifully without a turn, and does that mean that such a poem is static? That’s often seen as a negative in art: when nothing moves, or moves the viewer. I’d like to refer my readers to L.A. Johnson on Jericho Brown’s duplex form, “Radical Stasis” in Poetry. What could be more static than repetition? And yet in Brown’s work, the lack of a turn implies circularity, not necessarily ambivalence and certainly not a lack of movement. Johnson calls it a transformation.

I want to experiment with how altering a poem’s closing might lead to changing the poem’s form or structure for a stronger impact. Another option I’ve used is moving the last lines to the start or near the start of the poem. Maybe those lines weren’t really the image or idea that particular poem was aiming for. And then there is docking the tail of a poem. It may be a cruel practice for dogs and horses, but a poem can benefit from a careful removal of the unnecessary closing line(s). Closing lines that summarize a point can wreck my delight in a poem, and alas, I tend that way sometimes…I spent my childhood Sundays in church, listening to my dad declaim from the pulpit. The oral and rhetorical structure of sermons is routed into my brain, and that can be a real problem when I draft. Poetry can be many things, but I don’t care for poetry that sermonizes.

At any rate, I have a LOT of unfinished drafts that might benefit from change-ups. Instead of writing a blog post, I ought to be working on those! But in closing, here’s a poem by Kay Ryan that uses stasis and the tedious routines of housework as operation and image, and that ends with the non-ending of making things “unhappen.”

Linens
by Kay Ryan

There are charms
that forestall harm.
The house bristles
with opportunities
for stasis: refolding
the linens along
their creases, keeping
the spoons and chairs
in their right places.
Nobody needs to
witness one’s exquisite
care with the napkins
for the napkins
to have been the act
that made the fact
unhappen.

~

Process & metaphor

redbud
photo: Ann E. Michael

Springtime! Bees, ants, gnats, and a few butterflies have appeared. In the veg garden, the greens are thriving. I’ve sown the ornamental corn, noted the appearance of volunteer sunflowers, amaranth, and chamomile, and moved or weeded out those seedlings coming up where I don’t wish them to be–like in the middle of my soon-to-be tomato patch. The zinnia seeds have germinated in their little square, along with lettuce and spinach in their designated rows. The swallows returned today, right on schedule. Late April, and the garden looks pristine and tidy, even relatively weed-free for now: sectioned into rows, with a couple of raised beds and some stakes ready for climbers like cucumbers and pole beans. All prepped for the mid-spring explosion. The very small part of myself that likes things neatly in place promises to keep the garden less messy this year while knowing that won’t happen. The wiser self cautions that too many rigorous expectations take some of the joy out of the work.

~

Frankly, it’s all too easy to find metaphors for life in the garden. Nurturing seeds with a sense of hope, even expectation, sure. Endeavoring to control outcomes though one cannot control the weather? Yep, that too. Culling, thinning, weeding in an effort to produce abundance, clarity, or beauty? Yes; and waiting and working under hot sun or in the pouring rain and being surprised by hail or hurricane or drought. (You can pop any of those words into the “search” bar on this blog page and find times I have written about said weather events.) In the thousands of poems I’ve drafted during the past 45 years, garden topics and metaphors abound. Lately, though, I’ve been dwelling on how change–inevitable in the garden–presents problems to solve but also lovely surprises. And yeah, there’s metaphor in that as well. Though people tend to avoid change, change brings a wealth of education in its wake.

It’s true that education is often humbling. We work our butts off only to discover we’ve been doing things wrong, or ineffectively, all along. That’s one of the things I learned when I began trying to grow things in earnest, and it is also true of my experience writing poems. You have to be willing to make mistakes and accept that you made them if you are going to improve; it doesn’t mean you have to solve each difficulty in a prescribed way. You can invent! As long as you know that invention sometimes fails, you can learn from it. Create a nonce form for a poem, for example. Or an improvised trellis for a squash vine that got a lot larger than you’d planned.

Every year in late winter, I devise a garden plan and order seeds. Every year in early spring, I revise the plan in some way. Every year in mid- to late-spring, the garden looks very different from those designs…it helps to have a flexible nature, since nature hates rigidity and thrives in its own way. Often unexpected. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes quite a charming surprise to which I’m more than happy to adapt–I welcome the variation! It’s a process that reminds me of writing. No wonder my gardening and my poems are so connected: the processes are so similar.

Learning & yearning

photo from ebay, asking $199.00…

During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts.

Though I can’t clearly remember the “how,” I can say my topics and perhaps instincts and inspirations have definitely changed as the decades accrue. I wrote fewer poems during the years I was raising very young children, for obvious reasons, and my main topic at the time was mothering. The poems tended to be short. Mothering did affect my approach to poetry: brevity and swift sketches of imagery were all I had time for. It was necessary to be more concise compared to my earlier narrative lyricism fused with imagism and surrealism. As the children got older, I started reading a bit more widely into less-contemporary poetry and attempted a few formal approaches, such as sonnets, blank verse quatrains, and haiku. I wasn’t terribly good at it and needed some instruction, so I started attending short workshops when I could arrange childcare. The West Chester Poetry programs were helpful to me in the mid-90s and piqued my interest in going back to college for my MFA.

My advisors at Goddard observed that no matter my topic or method, environmental/natural images populated my work. I’d known this was the case but wasn’t aware of how prevalent the garden, fields, animals, and woods were…basically, always present. Even in some pieces I wrote when I was 19 and living in a city, there are sparrows and pigeons, dogwoods blossoming, spring rain. Some things don’t change.

~

Other aspects of the writing life morph, however, as circumstances alter and we get older and more experienced in dealing with said circumstances. Mothering continues even though the children have grown up–I still love and miss my kids, think of them often, and worry now and then, not that they need anyone to worry about them. I’m much smarter about how to grow things in the garden as well as more knowledgeable about the flora, fauna, and weather in my region. I’ve read reams of poems by excellent writers, studied what they do and how they do it, and felt excited by new work. I don’t miss being young, though I miss the stronger physical self I once took for granted. These experiences change the topics and the emotive aspects of what I write, I suppose.

It’s hard to explain what that means, though, so here’s an example. I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.

I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me.

Later, when I actually loved a person who lived further from me that either of us liked, I’d listen to Mary Black, who was then with Planxty, as she sang the plaintive and beautiful tune “I Live Not Where I Love.” The ballad seemed accurate. Ah, young love.

The point of all this (and no, I haven’t been concise, sorry), is that while I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.

[[]] ~ [[]] Here’s a poem of mine that appeared 44 years ago in Painted Bride Quarterly #20. (Autumn 1983). I can see some structural things I would revise if I were writing this now. But let it stand as is:

House with a Red Roof

The house with the red roof makes a beacon
in the hills. We watch it constantly; it 
tricks our eyes.

The storm is bold behind it, an unsettled
feud of red and blue; heaven has its slate-
colored roof, its Chinese fire. It mounts 
hills, and before it, the house stands out,
a ruby in a charm.

The roof gems back summer sun, red hot, ablaze
and searing white siding: when we look away,
a yellow house with purple about it blurs our vision.

Autumn, red roof flanked by trees which hold
their color against it, slanting westward,
northward, ever lower.

A shadow bends the hill. The red roof hangs
on winter sky, the only bright for miles.
~
Photo by Nikita Parev on Pexels.com

NoPoMonth, but…

April is National Poetry Month; but this year, I am in hibernation mode.

I’m not going to readings or writing a poem a day for 30 days, not posting much of my or other people’s poems or poetry books on social media, and not doing much poetry writing or any submitting. What’s gotten into me? Some kind of malaise? Or just a sense of being overwhelmed by, you know, life and aging and perhaps too much reflection. Plus there’s garden catch-up to tend to, since I was away for the early part of the season opener. And we’ve had a heat wave with a dry spell and lots of wind, so I’ve had to pace myself with the heavy stuff. Thankfully, Best Beloved can pitch in with much of that. Yet I am reading poetry, and if that ever stops I’ll know I’m in trouble.

So–back from traveling westward-ho. While in Fort Collins, Colorado, some dear friends introduced me to Wolverine Publick House, Cafe, and Bookshop, where there’s a lovely poetry book room in which I found my colleague Ian Haight’s book, Spring Mountain: The Complete Poems of Nansŏrhŏn. Also lots of other fabulous poetry that I had to restrain myself from purchasing, lest I overload my carry-on luggage weight. I read many of the Nansŏrhŏn translations in earlier versions that Ian emailed to me, and it is wonderful to find the book in print (from White Pine).

While in Boulder, CO, another friend suggested Devon Price’s book Unmasking Autism, which has given me much room for reflection. For many years, I helped students write college-level papers and realized that a number of these young people had varying aspects of “autism spectrum disorder”…that I, as a writing tutor/teacher, was wholly untrained to deal with. To help them, I made it up as I went along, student by student. It turns out that most of what we know about supporting autistic people to navigate contemporary social structures has been pieced together by people making it up as they went along. It helped me that one of my dearest friends has a now-adult child with autism–I’ve known him since before his birth, and I think of him as an intriguing person who has much to offer to a society that essentially ignores or shuns people like him. He needs more support services than the students I saw at the university, but he is quite his own person, and always has been. It saddens me that people like him are not more celebrated (not merely tolerated) in our society. We would all be much richer for the experience. Devon Price makes an excellent case for how acceptance of neurodiverse people can enrich the world; however, that would mean dismantling much of the capitalist, work-ethic, individualistic social systems we have, not to mention changing how the US health insurance and health care industries operate. So–not too likely any time soon. If ever. But I believe we need more social space for people whose “peculiarities” are not harming others, even if they seem a bit “weird.”

That would be good for me, for one. Speaking as a perpetual outlier and occasionally rogue thinker, it’d be nice to feel my ideas and modes of thinking aren’t weird, just different; they can be acceptable in their own way. I do not fall under the category of adult autistic but, like most of us, I have some traits that I share with the people Price writes about. Recognizing that we share traits is a way to get to know people who seem “unlike us.” And to feel less afraid of, or uncomfortable with, having them in our lives.

~

Finally, I want to shout out to Bob Mee, whose blog I read (thanks to Dave Bonta’s Poetry Blog Digest.) Mee’s recent post questioning whether the brain, as we age, changes the way we write poetry really got me thinking. I’m getting longer in the tooth myself and, as I’ve been writing poems since I was 20, his post got me curious about my own changes in style, approach, form, content, topic, influence over the years. I will probably be mulling over this idea for some time, and it may even get me to dredge up some really old poems to see whether how I write poetry has changed. Mee says: “when I sit to write the process is different. My brain is still capable of energetic concentration but I look at some of the ‘old’ poems from twenty years ago and know I cannot write like that any more.” Hmm. I’m not sure this is as true for me as it is for him, but I think it is worth examining.

Sowing and reaping

Last week of March, and I suppose it is time for my customary “prepping the garden and sowing greens post.” One thing I like about gardening is that there’s constant change; each year differs somewhat from previous ones, in terms of weather/climate and in terms of my situation/plans. This year, not much seed-starting indoors. Instead, I’ll sow direct and purchase seedlings locally. So what I grow in the vegetable patch will depend on what looks good at the farmer’s market or the nurseries. It will be a surprise.

The garden does need some prep work, however, and greens need to be sown early. Today I planted spinach, lettuces, purple kale, carrots, coriander. And I set up a raised bed, which I finally moved from its previous spot, for herbs. I listened for returning migrant birds, noticed little flying insects, and found grubs, worms, and numerous arthropods (millipedes, garden centipedes, sowbugs). The usual suspects! Mild days in early spring are salubrious to body and soul.

~

The reaping to which I refer in the title of this post is metaphorical, as spring isn’t a big time for bringing in the sheaves, though in a few weeks the winter wheat will be ripe. I feel I have reaped some joy from a recent poetry reading I gave at the library of my former employer, DeSales University, and how often do we feel that way? It’s a gift! Dr. Steve Myers invited me to read with three of the alums of the MFA program DSU now offers, and last night I found myself back in the library where my office used to be (once I finally escaped from the basement where I’d been located for 17 years). The audience was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students and friends who were kind enough to show up on a Wednesday night. It’s wonderful to feel appreciated now and then. 🙂

I haven’t been giving many readings lately or even attending open mics. Evenings and nights are not my best time, but the college is very nearby and I really was pleased to be able to participate…Best Beloved drove me there and back, so everything was manageable. I read some quite old poems and some quite new ones, and a few in-between from my books. And I sold a few books! Always a thrill. I am dwelling in gratitude today.

One of the best things at the event was seeing a former student who was one of my writing tutors and who now works at DeSales. She’s also lately enrolled in the MFA program. What a joy to catch up with a person I met as a bright 18-year-old with a natural talent for writing, who’s pursuing creative writing now–as a mother of two, and nearing 40–not so different from my own circuitous path in poetry. Such are the rewards of teaching…occasionally, I do miss it.

Lots of rain in the forecast for next week. Things will green up, and maybe those seeds will sprout.

Snowdrops

My trip to Baltimore for the AWP Conference Book Fair didn’t happen; my immune system decided otherwise, with a resurgence of a nasty respiratory virus and a flare of fibromyalgia. I guess I can look on the positive side and say I saved a lot of money, right? Plus I can purchase most of those poetry collections online, I suppose. Still, there really is nothing like browsing through thousands of luscious books for something that grabs me, that takes the top of my head off, to paraphrase Ms. Dickinson. Through social media platforms, I can see colleagues-in-literature making connections and meeting one another face-to-face, which is what conferences are for. Another year, maybe.

And after days of necessary spring rain, drizzle, and fog, the long-awaited thaw eradicated most of our snow. Crocuses bloomed, and bees came out to visit the snowdrops.

I felt much better today and was able to take a walk in the mild sun, listening to robins, mourning doves, song sparrows, woodpeckers, redwing blackbirds, bluebirds, house finches, Carolina chickadees, American crows, Canada geese, mockingbirds, cardinals, bluejays, masses of starlings…I watched the high-flown antics of redtail hawks and turkey vultures.

In other regions of the world today, people listen and watch for fighter jets, torpedoes, drones. There but for fortune may go you or I (Phil Ochs). Meanwhile I remain grateful for feeling slightly better as the days lengthen into spring. It’s March–we could still get snow! But the spring peepers sense the warmer temperature and trilled a bit last evening while the great horned owl was hooting. Here’s a poem I wrote in 2012 about DST.

~

Daylight Savings Time

In the 21st century it seems
a bootless custom, a cultural exercise,
useless gill of the railroad era.
Yet as I sit on my porch
long past the 6 o’clock hour,
dinner already consumed, dishes cleaned,
feeling the breeze of mild late winter
raise the hairs on my bare arms,
I am glad for the extra hour
among long shadows as my dog
chases a woodchuck, as the wood-
pecker pounds in metrical progressions:
trochee, trochee, spondee.
The path the dog follows 
is greener than it was yesterday,
coltsfoot blooming and the scent
of winter-blooming hazel in the air, 
available to my senses because
the day’s now one hour further skewed
toward spring, a brief and welcome turn 
in the nature of things, 
however imposed and arbitrary.
~
~~~

A week before National Poetry Month, I’ll be reading at this event in Center Valley PA.

Midwinter mojo

Midwinter thaw. Hints that underneath all the snow, spring awakening could eventually occur; also, a distinct likelihood that once the snow melts, the air will again get frigid because winter’s not over.

Lately, I’m trying to find enough mojo to send out some poems. My thinking is that given current circumstances, having poems in (mostly) online journals offers more possibility that someone, anyone, will read them. Poetry like most arts is communicative, so poets need readers; I treasure my readers, but they are few. I love books, but my books do not sell well. That means the poems don’t reach an audience. This blog doesn’t have a host of regular readers, either, though there are some stalwart followers for whom I am immensely grateful. Then what are a poet’s options? Small-press publication (let’s hear it for those wonderful folks!) and self-publishing can get you the physical book, but for readers you have to do a ton of self-promotion. This is a skill I have never developed and that I do not, at my age, wish to learn. Besides, I am out of the job market now and have no need for a CV full of publication credits.

But I read literary journals. My colleagues in creative writing read literary journals. Some lit journals continue to produce paper issues, bless them, but more of them post poems on various social media platforms, where casual viewers might run across a poem and–who knows?–read it! Therefore, it seems to me that’s what I ought to be doing: getting my work in magazines, large and small, local and international, professional and amateur, one poem at a time as a kind and careful editor decides my poem suits the journal. I think that in 2026, more poems reach people online than in books. Am I wrong about that? I guess I could research that question if I really want to know.

Of course I love books and will never stop reading them, poetry books and other kinds. Of course I would be thrilled to have another book in print if the manuscripts I send out ever were to find homes. However, probably my focus this year will be on the more ephemeral but wider-reaching media forms. I want to remind myself that I write because what I want to say may be valuable to someone other than myself; might strike someone as beautiful, sad, or wise; might make someone think in a different way or learn something new. Poetry has always done that for me, after all.

Now if only I can generate the mojo…

P. S. ~ If you’re interested in purchasing one of my books, Abundance/Diminishment can be found here and The Red Queen Hypothesis is here, and my chapbooks are listed on the My Books page of this blog. See? I did some self-promotion. 🙂

Unlovely drafts

Well, I have been writing. But less about the current wintry days than I expected, because of the online poetry seminar I’m taking.

One recent prompt in Anita Skeen‘s workshop involves employing phrases from a text and using those words, or images, as a start to a poem that would not encompass or even relate to the original topic. I’ve written work that does that; but more commonly I continue the topic in some way, most notably with my long-poem/chapbook manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong. And what I notice is that I tend to choose “unlovely” texts, articles or essays that are historical, scientific, or academic, rather than to use the words of poets or novelists. Why that is, I can’t say for sure; it may simply be due to my deep-rooted nerdiness. But I think of poets like Martha Silano, Rebecca Elson, Muriel Ruykeyser, and others who have created amazing work, beautiful poems, from newspaper articles, scientific papers, academic texts, encyclopedias–so I feel encouraged. The result, for me, however, is often an unlovely draft.

Etching by or after J. Gamelin, 1778/1779. Created 1779. Contributors: Jacques Gamelin. Work ID: h3ybfzwe.

I have recently spent some time proofreading one of my brother’s papers that addresses the origins of some of the crania in Samuel George Morton’s collection, which resides at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia and is among the controversial holdings there of sacred/religious objects and human remains. The University has committed to “repatriating” such items in its collections that belong to indigenous peoples, for example, and to returning human bones to places of origin or to “respectful interment.” The challenge with Morton’s large collection is to ascertain where, in fact, these human beings came from. [Informational page is here.] My brother has been trying to track down the people, likely young Africans, who made up one set of about 55 skulls collected in Cuba around 1839-1840.

It’s a terrible history, of course. The Middle Passage, slavery, illness, misery, abandonment even in death. And it’s an academic paper, so the language–not to dismiss the author’s writing ability, since he’s keeping to the conventional style–does not lend itself to poetry.

Basically, I’ve given myself a difficult task. Yet we learn through difficulty, do we not? Often, too, the unlovely poems are those that deal with how rotten human beings can be, or illuminate the worst of times and offer us insight and information that we had not been taught, hidden horrors, trauma, all of the above. I have written many lovely poems about lovely things. The world, however, manages to be far more complicated than beautiful, a mixed bag of joys and miseries, and it seems to me that literature and art ought to reflect that fact sometimes.

What I’m posting below is not even a draft, just some notes I may decide to use as quotes or images. It’s one way to demonstrate how I begin a difficult poem, a poem based upon historical facts that I’m learning myself. It’s a completely different process from when I write from an image or observation of my own. For example, the “Librarian” poem, which is about 15 pages long, took me a couple of years and a visit to the United States Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) at Carlisle Barracks, PA! First I pull some quotes, make a lot of notes, highlight images or place names that seem most resonant. Then I develop these into what I call “jottings” and fragments, and start setting them into an initial sequence–which I often change later.

Stanzas? Line breaks? Metaphors? Meter? All of that can wait; I like to work on structuring the narrative first when I try something in this vein, and I want to find images that might speak to a reader. So it is clear to me that this poem is not one I’ll have finished before the end of the 5-meetings-long workshop. Assuming I ever do finish it. Yes, poetry is hard work.

~

José Rodríguez y Cisneros, Havana Physician, Ships 55 Human Crania
to Samuel George Morton, Anatomist (1840)


A Cuban journalist writes that by 1915
“The Vedado of my childhood was a sea rock
over which the seagulls flew”

sandy, overgrown with Caleta sea grapes
the nesting-place of rats, iguanas

but once a cemetery for paupers and bozales,
the unbaptized, slaves, the suicides (define bozales?)

abandoned on this coast as carrion

where turkey vultures and wild dogs
fed on corpses hastily interred

“el Pudridero” they called it—
the rotting place—
local people thought it cursed

for a more scientific-minded man, opportunity
to harvest skulls for anatomic pursuits.
Nameless, blameless nobodies

who were otherwise less than worthless:

the definition from a 19th century
Spanish dictionary:

“bozales. A Negro recently removed
from his [native] country—
metaphorical and vernacular,
one who is foolish or idiotic…

can be applied to wild horses.”

~~

*note~

“the Vedado Interment Site…originated as a sinkhole that came to be utilized as a mass grave…[the majority] of the Vedado Group likely consisted of enslaved people born in Africa during the early 19th century, most of whom died of infectious diseases soon after arriving in Cuba.” —John S. Michael

Tracks

This was no fox.

The other day, we noticed a coyote limping down the meadow. We hear them now and then, at night, but we seldom see them; and this one was out at noontime. A bit unusual. I felt concerned about it as it moved off into the undergrowth at the field’s edge.

Out of curiosity, I guess, the next day I traced its tracks from the treeline between our property and the next one, down through our meadow, into the woods beyond our lot. Mind you, I am not an animal tracker. Furthermore, our snow is absolutely criss-crossed by tracks: deer, rabbits, humans, birds, squirrels, cats, and the occasional owl-hit. It took a little looking to determine which tracks had been left by the coyote, but I had seen it taking the deer path through the dead weeds, so I started there. It wasn’t really too difficult to determine, despite paw prints from all those other critters. The prints resemble dogs’ tracks; and there aren’t spots, like those you see with a fox, where the animal suddenly prinks, leaps, or lunges its nose and forepaws into the snow while chasing field voles. Also? The prints were too big to be a red fox.

An aside–I recently read Catherine Raven’s memoir-ish book Fox and I, which I liked very much and from which I learned a more than a few fox-related pieces of information. And some descriptions of winter in Montana, which is too much winter for me, especially after this latest snowfall in Pennsylvania. But anyway—

The average cat weighs 10-12 pounds, the average red fox 30-ish pounds, and eastern coyotes in our region can be 45-55 pounds. This one was, I think, a male because it left quite heavy tracks, though possibly it was putting more weight on three legs because the front right paw was injured badly enough it never set that paw down. I recall once when our family dog got caught in a neighbor’s “soft-paw” fox trap. As soon as I got her loose, she ran for the house, and I noticed her prints in the snow–three heavy prints and a lighter one since she was favoring one foot. This coyote wasn’t using its leg at all. In a few places I could see a swash on the snow surface where the snow was deep enough that the coyote’s foot had skimmed it. The circuit led into the woods and I pressed no further.

That’s about the extent of my animal-tracking knowledge. It was, however, an interesting departure from my usual winter walk, and a nice day for walking. Everyone else in the county was out buying gasoline and groceries because a big storm was in the forecast for the weekend. Which did arrive (the storm, I mean. Well, also the weekend.).

I’ve been working on new poem drafts lately, after weeks of barely any new writing, focusing on revision instead. What do you bet that coyote, or its tracks, or at very least, the snow, will show up in at least one new draft?

~

FYI: Here’s another set of tracks commonly seen at my house in winter:

Tracks of a John Deere Model M (c. 1947)

Unsettling

We got some rain on Saturday, which we’ve needed, and dismal cold rainy January days are perfect for settling down with a book. I’m reading The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (1977) by poet, writer, farmer, educator, activist Wendell Berry, still working at 91–his book Sabbath Poems was published in 2024. I’m much more familiar with Berry’s poetry than his prose, though he’s written at least half a dozen novels and many books of nonfiction. This text, I’ve since learned, is one of his more famous–it’s been revised and re-issued six times. The copy I got from the library is the original version and features cover blurbs by Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Stewart Brand, among others; Publishers Weekly summed up the book as “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to the American fabric.”

Which is a fairly good one-sentence précis, though Berry’s wording often strikes me as more passionate than “cool,” and agribusiness is only one aspect of his critique. I was in high school in the 1970s, and at the time it seemed average Americans were beginning to recognize that pollution and overpopulation could be problematic, that maybe we needed to eat more natural and wholesome foods, and that establishing an Earth Day might help people turn focus toward the planet. Simultaneously, we had Earl Butz as Agriculture Secretary, a man who ended many New Deal programs to help “small” farmers and who encouraged large (eventually, corporate) farms. Butz appears several times in this book, and no wonder; he and Berry debated the topic in public and in print, and their thinking was almost diametrically opposed concerning the philosophy behind agriculture. Berry’s book is a social and philosophical argument that is only somewhat dated and really quite prescient, though he might come off as mildly curmudgeonly to today’s readers. Or maybe not so prescient. He was simply paying attention.

The sections of the book that most resonate with me are those in which he writes of nurturing and relationships, and points out that good relationships involve responsible actions and collaborative, mutual care whether they are marital, family, or social relationships or relationships with the soil, the flora and fauna, the whole planet. He predicts a future in which people live in their houses and not with the land, or even within their communities, and where wilderness is “conserved” so that it can be exploited for entertainment and scenic views. People in the US, he says, don’t feel responsible for the land on which they live; they don’t understand its cycles, its weather patterns, its waterways; their property is merely property–a commodity for convenience and investment. I’d say that future is already upon us.

Thus, Berry has made me think more deeply about my relationship with “my” property. If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you may notice how often I consider weather, dirt, local animals, insects (especially invasive or non-native ones), plants, tree diseases, water–I’m no farmer, but I am a gardener and do feed myself at least partly from my own backyard. I take almost daily walks around the perimeter of our 6+ acres, poking around in the hedgerows, scanning the sky, looking down at walnuts and animal scat, watching for new buds or coloring leaves or bird nests or wildflowers. I worry over droughts and hailstorms and flooding. Climate change concerns me in very local and specific ways, not just in general.

One could say I’m at least trying to nurture the earth. I’ve made many mistakes along the way and done some damage that I’m learning how to rectify; I have also realized that I have to accept some changes, such as incursions by invasive species, because they are beyond my control. Through the almost 30 years we’ve lived on this land, I’ve tried to understand it better. After all, we built a house on it. The soil was hard-packed, acidic, overused from previous decades of corn-growing, full of stones, sumac, and asiatic rose bushes, a fallow field that hadn’t been planted or farmed in decades but didn’t necessarily need me to tend it. It wasn’t my family’s land, and I didn’t intend to end my days here; however, I figured if I was going to live on this spot, I had better do whatever tending and nurturing it might require.

Which is about the best I can do as far as a relationship with the land in which I dwell, and about the best any of us can do in any long-term relationship: try to understand it, get acquainted, do some research, make plenty of observations (maybe take notes), and nurture what seems to need special attention and care. The land has given me much more than I’ve ever given it. It’s offered shelter, beauty, an education, food, the companionship of animal life, cricket sounds, tree frog songs, firefly lights on long summer nights, open spaces for my children to play in, owl calls and fox kenning, the grace of leaping whitetails, dead-fall wood we can burn in winter, forest-bathing, hammock-swaying, inspiration for writing. The wonderful porch here, where I often sit to write in my journal, opens a view to the meadow out back. So many poems started on that porch, with that view…

That’s how the earth nurtures me. May I be somehow worthy of it.

photo by David Sloan 2020