February 24
March 17
I am reminded a tablecloth at the end of an epic feast.
Spring and all
Were it not for the high winds in February, the snow would be gone now. Instead, foot-deep drifts still rot in the sun.
Otherwise, it’s turning out to be an early spring. Thirty feet from the nearest snowdrift, the first wildflower — a coltsfoot — was out this afternoon, its rays seemingly taking their cues from the sun’s glittering reflection in the adjacent ditch.
Up on the ridgetop, the first butterflies had emerged from wherever they spent the winter — presumably under loose flaps of bark, or in hollow logs — and were sunbathing in the middle of the old woods road. I had the rare pleasure of witnessing a fight between a Compton’s tortoiseshell an eastern comma and a mourning cloak, though I wasn’t quick enough to capture it on film. I’m not sure what they were fighting about. There seemed to be plenty of dead leaves and bare twigs to go around.
I thought of the other insect life that must be stirring all around us, the buds swelling, the seeds beginning to sprout. Tomorrow will bring more arrivals and emergences, I’m sure, and by the end of the week — if the weather predictions are correct — the first spring orgies should be breaking out among the local garter snakes and wood frogs. It all happens so fast. Part of me is still wishing I’d gotten one more sled run in.
Emergence
Spring is definitely underway now, even as Old Man Winter is still shuffling slowly toward the exit. I heard tundra swans almost as soon as I went out on the porch this morning, and when the swans stopped flying over around mid-morning, it was time for the “V”s of migrant Canada geese. I even saw a lone seagull.
I walked around the field, checking out the networks of vole burrows emerging from the melting snowpack. Down by the barn, the bluebirds were inspecting a battered old nesting box, and a few hours later, the first song sparrow returned. This was actually the first year in a couple of decades that song sparrows didn’t over-winter, and the mornings have seemed unnaturally silent as a result.
When the temperature hit 60 degrees this afternoon, I felt a sudden compulsion to cut my hair. It had been a year and a half since my last self-administered haircut. It’s nice to be able to do it outside, without a shirt on, leaning over the porch rail.
I documented the results mainly with Facebook in mind, but since I don’t feel up to a real blog post tonight, I thought I might as well inflict it on y’all, too. (Yes, I wear deeply unfashionable glasses and clothes from Wal-Mart.) I was somewhat repulsed by the emergence of my bare scalp from underneath all that graying hair. There were some blood spots and other unsightly blotches of the sort that I tend to identify with — you know — old people. It looked raw, like a patch of ground just liberated from the snow.
Next Life
Every day it softens and settles; every night it sets. At a certain point in late morning, it no longer holds you up. In one week since this photo was taken, we have gone from late winter to early spring. Yesterday a bluebird began singing, and this morning at dawn the call of the Cooper’s hawk was echoing off the snowpack — as if such a skilled ventriloquist needs one more way to throw his voice.
I was out early enough to hear him only because a sea urchin woke me, spines poking my flesh as I wandered through a dream forest of kelp. For the past week I have been dithering over a poem about sea urchins, trying to capture that extreme otherness in words, and now this visit. I leaf through Rae Armantrout’s Next Life, which I am trying hard to like, and happen on a poem about those who believe they have been abducted by tentacled aliens, which she compares to Doubting Thomas and his probing of the wounds in the risen Christ. “It is from this wound/ that humans first emerged,” she says — the only lines in the poem that speak to me.
The blurb on the back from Publisher’s Weekly says, “this could be the year when more readers discover Armantrout.” Hmm. Well, readers who happen to be steeped in the self-reflexive thinking of American graduate-school programs in English, perhaps. For who else would relish poems about metaphor:
Metaphor
shifts a small weight
there and back.My self-relection shames God
into watching
(“Remote”), sentences about sentences:
A man and a woman
finish sentences
and laugh.Each sentence is both
an acquiescence
and a dismissal.
(“The Ether”), the use of quotation marks to signal irony:
It’s after us
and before us—alwaystrying to get “in.”
(“Continuity”) or a discourse on irony itself (“Empty”)? The book description informs us that “these poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the ‘next life’ and find it where we can.” No, they don’t. They merely bore me. The radical questioning of meaning is hardly new, and Armantrout’s poems show little evidence of familiarity with the significant philosophical works of the last hundred years.
I mean, there’s literally a poem here about — no, make that “about” — trying to write a poem, “Make It New.” Infinite recursion does not equal apophatic insight. “You’re left out,” concludes a poem called “Framing.” That’s fair to say.
I walk up into the woods to see if I can spot the Cooper’s hawk, but my eyes are drawn, as usual, to the ground. It’s still below freezing, and my boots barely crunch into the surface, but I stop to admire spiny oak leaves that have melted their way down into shallow graves. Again I think of sea urchins, painstakingly excavating nests in the seafloor’s solid rock: eyes in search of sockets. And that’s not just a metaphor. It turns out that the appendages between their spines are covered with light-sensitive molecules, and the spines help them focus on the same principle as squinting eyelids. They have no brains because they are all brain. They have no eyes because the entire surface of their body is wired for vision.
Listen, you can look forward to the next life if you want, or try to throw your voice beyond the event horizon of a black hole, but I’m telling you: there’s no way another life can be more marvellous than this one.
Beech grotesquerie
The smoothness of their bark makes beech trees, both American and European, among the sexiest and also the most grotesque of trees. Branch scars and other markings that would virtually disappear on trees with more bark-like bark are hard to miss on a beech.
Some beech trees look downright neurotic. But who can blame them? The great beech forests of North America are gone, clearcut two centuries ago to make way for farms, to such an extant that most people who spend anytime outdoors assume that beeches actually prefer the mountainsides and ravines in which they’ve made their last stand. The passenger pigeon, which once visited beech forests the way hurricanes visit Florida, has been extinct for a hundred years. And now a non-native scale insect is helping beech bark disease decimate the remnant stands, though thankfully it hasn’t appeared in Plummer’s Hollow just yet.
It was the trees’ abundant mast that accounted for their popularity with passenger pigeons, of course, and beechnuts still feed many species today. But the grotesqueness of beech trees has wildlife value, too: the frequent hollows in older trees can provide den sites for a wide variety of birds and mammals. Many trees rot out as they age, but beeches seem to get started on it early.
Nor does the grotesquerie end with weird, vaguely human scars and orifices. The self-grafting ability of beech limbs can produce some bizarre effects, as in the above specimen, which grows right next to the Plummer’s Hollow Road.
I am kind of at a loss to explain how this happened… or why it took me so many years to notice it. I don’t know how many more years we’ll have canopy-height beeches in the hollow — not too far north of here, all the big beeches are dead — so I figure I’d better start paying more attention to them now.
Beech bark disease won’t wipe them out completely, but it will probably kill almost all the mature beeches and keep new root sprouts from getting very big, just as the chestnut blight has done for American chestnuts. The grotesquerie will be all but lost, and the tree from which the word “book” is derived may become little more than an asterisk and a footnote.
Watch the full slideshow (13 photos in all) or browse the set (easier for people with slow connections).
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Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees. The deadline for the next edition, at The Voltage Gate, is Friday, February 26. See the call for submissions for details on how to participate.
Walking on water
Video link.
Walking on water, I forgot about the fish
in their white gardens of coral.
Walking on the snow, I forgot about spring,
though others knew to dig for it.
My snowshoes kept me from sinking
& I glided over the drifts
almost as lightly as the shadows of the trees.
And watching those shadows,
I even managed to forget about the trees themselves.
This is what’s wrong with that dreamy kind of faith
that depends on miracles. We don’t need
one more way to keep our distance.
Shady Side
The bottom of the hollow is a strange place: so steep that the trees grow tall and spindly, with few branches, and are spaced far apart. Two hundred years ago it would’ve been a much darker place, dense with hemlocks, but now it’s mostly deciduous and, in winter, as light-filled as a northeast-facing hollow can be. Plummer’s Hollow Run is of course as wide as it gets down here, and we have to be vigilant to keep it from undercutting our access road when it floods. Most of the winter, though, it’s dark and quiet.
The steep slopes provide some protection for vegetation that the deer would browse down to the ground anywhere else, such as wild hydrangea (above) and red elderberry. In May, they harbor our largest patches of purple trillium.
The wind is fierce along the railroad tracks at the bottom, and reaches up into this bottom portion of the hollow to make its mark on the snow, erasing and rearranging daily like a never-satisfied artist. Cold and wind have defined this landscape for the last two centuries. I think of the people who used to live in a small cluster of houses at the entrance to the hollow, on the shady side of the gap — a desolate and dirt-poor hamlet whose hey-day only lasted for a couple of decades before the railroad came through in 1850 and took out the heart of the settlement and its raison d’etre, an iron forge. (It was the forge that precipitated the original clearcutting of the hollow, since it ran on charcoal.)
People who grew up in the last of those houses are elderly now, and come to visit every now and then (though probably not in the winter). They walk up around the first bend, sign the guest register next to the Plummer’s Hollow welcome board, and return to gaze at the empty spaces where their homes once stood and listen to the thunder of the trains.
Glyphs
Snow forest
I set out this morning before the snow stopped, eager to take full advantage of the silence that settles over the land when a major winter storm falls on the weekend. This was the first I’d worn snowshoes in a couple of years, and I began with enthusiasm, despite the fact that I sank in nearly a foot with every step. Progress was slow. My own breath moved more quickly than I did, and I was soon almost out of it.
I’d almost forgotten what a deep, dry snow was like. From time to time my footsteps set off shockwaves, quiet little booms accompanied by a sudden settling of all the snow within a few yards’ radius. Sometimes this was enough to shake the snow loose from a nearby laurel bush, the waxy green leaves springing up and throwing off their white straitjackets. Before long my calves were aching, and my glasses kept steaming up and then freezing. I finally took them off and put them in my pocket, and did most of the rest of the hike half-blind: up to the top of the watershed, through the spruce grove and out to the Far Field, alone with the sound of my exertion.
Or nearly alone. The downy woodpeckers were out and about, and a pair of cardinals foraged in one thicket. On the ridgetop not far from its den tree I crossed a porcupine trail — an almost-tunnel through the snow — and wondered whether it had been going out or returning home. Twenty minutes later, on the lower trail back from the Far Field, I had my answer.
This was shot hurriedly in dim light through a zoom lens, and then magnified further through digital zooming. But I really only took the picture to make sure of what I was looking at, especially with my glasses so fogged up. Had it not been for the location on a thin branch, I might’ve dismissed it as an unusually messy squirrel’s nest. It sat motionless with its head tucked against its belly as the snow sifted in through its forest of quills.
Perigee
A book printed inside a book: halfway through, there’s the title page again, and the table of contents and the rest of it. You think, I’ve just read this, but you find yourself reading it again anyway, anxious to find out what will happen when you get to the middle. What happens is that suddenly you are back into unexplored territory, and you feel both lost and relieved. You get to the last page, and look: the outer book resumes where it left off, halfway through.
You set it aside. Does the cicada climb back into its shell? The book within the book has already crawled out and is waiting for its wings to dry.
In your spam folder, one of the messages purporting to originate at your own address reads: Hey, why do not you write? You forgot about me? Outside, the moon is at perigee — the closest it gets to earth all year. Perhaps that accounts for the numbing cold.
You fumble with the camera settings, shorten one of the tripod legs so the camera can stand on the slope, and peer through the LCD screen. The moon is the very same color as the lamp on your desk. Tonight it has a companion, too: Mars is just a hand’s-breadth away. You try to picture yourself as a red planet.