Molt. Rest. Molt.

Here's a poem from Amy Gerstler's terrific new book DEAREST CREATURE, a total pleasure for Christmas Eve. Not exactly in the holiday spirit, but, like this whole book, adventurous, funny, and completely unexpected. The long poem called "Mrs. Monster Pens Her Memoirs" is brilliant.





ADVICE FROM A CATERPILLAR


Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
Spin many nests. Cultivate stinging
bristles. Don't get sentimental
about your discarded skins. Grow
quickly. Develop a yen for nettles.
Alternate crumpling and climbing. Rely
on your antennae. Sequester poisons
in your body for use at a later date.
When threatened, emit foul odors
in self-defense. Behave cryptically
to confuse predators: change colors, spit,
or feign death. If all else fails, taste terrible.

Sleeping underwater with the maple leaves

See Paul's blog for photos of the fantastic snow here in the Springs today. It started yesterday, later than we'd expected it after the big drum-beats of the weather forecasters so excited to have a "major snow event" to talk about. First some stray swirling flakes, their density gradually increasing, and before I knew it the ice covering the fish pond was covered itself. I thought about the fish down there in the growing dark; just an hour before I'd seen one, sleepless, wandering slowly around under the skim of ice. I wonder if the darkness settling over them -- like a very early nightfall -- sent them all into their winter state of suspended animation at the bottom?

More snow as night fell for us, and we left the outdoor lights on so we could look, and kept poking our heads out to take the measure of it, but truly it didn't seem that much when we went to bed. By morning though -- extravaganza of ornament! Sheer white stretching on through the back garden, everything silent, nothing moving but bluejays, cardinals and woodpeckers. You couldn't tell just how deep it really was until you got outside in it -- which proved to be a daunting project, getting the doors open, stepping out, and immediately sinking in to our knees. Two feet, thirty inches? Now the fish are far down under the thick white that makes their kingdom dark, sleeping there among all those maples leaves I didn't have time to get out of the water.

Thus a snowbound day: reading, writing a little, messing around online. cooking, a nap, and -- just when it seemed that torpor would overcome us both -- bouts of snow shoveling. The body wants to slow down, like the goldfish settling themselves in -- and good thing the body then refuses, and wants to kick up its heels. Or is that the head?

Death and the Zebras

This remarkable poem by the Basque poet Bernardo Atxaga, translated by Amaia Gabantxo, appears in the current issue of the Canadian literary journal BRICK.


DEATH AND THE ZEBRAS


We were 157 zebras
galloping down the parched plain,
I ran behind zebra 24,
25, and 26,
ahead of 61 and 62
and suddenly we were overtaken with a jump
by 118 and 119,
both of them shouting river, river,
and 25, very happy, repeated river, river,
and suddenly 130 reached us
running, shouting, very happy, river, river,
and 25 took a left turn
ahead of 24 and 26
and suddenly I saw the sun on the river
sparkling full of sparkly splashes
and 8 and 9 passed me
running in the opposite direction
with their mouths full of water
and wet legs and white chests
very happy, shouting go,go,go
and I stumbled suddenly with 5 and 7
who were also running in the opposite directions
but shouting crocodiles, crocodiles,
and then 6 and 30 and 14 ran past us
very frightened, shouting crocodiles, crocodiles, go, go, go
and I drank water, I drank sparkling water
full of sparky splashes and sun;
crocodile, crocodile, shouted 25, very frightened,
crocodile, I repeated, rearing back
and running very frightened in the opposite direction
I suddenly collided with 149
and 150 and 151,
running, shouting very happy river,river,
crocodiles, crocodiles, I shouted back, very frightened
with my mouth full of water
and wet legs and wet chest
I kept galloping down the parched plain
behind 24 and 26
ahead of 61 and 62 and 63
and suddenly I saw, I saw a gap
between 24 and 26, a gap
and I kept galloping down the parched plain
and I saw the gap again, the gap again,
between 24 and 26
and I jumped and filled the gap.

We were 149 zebras
galloping down the parched plain,
and head of me were 12, 13
and 14, and behind me
43 and 44.

Serious moonlight

Last night the moonlight in the Springs was an astonishment. It seemed to transform the atmosphere into a kind of vague, milky solid. Warm late November night, and over the mostly gone garden, this almost tangible suspension. In honor, here's Dorianne Laux reading her wonderful poem, "Facts About the Moon," with a video accompaniment.

A poem I would have read had I been there

At tonight's Harvard reading to accompany the "ACT UP New York" exhibit, I'd planned to read this poem by Rynn Williams, from her book ADONIS GARAGE. Rynn died this year, too soon, but she left behind this superb collection, the evidence of a life deeply lived into.



The Forest at the Edge of the World


Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson
and tried to haul, up toward my block,
a cross section of maple grown too large,
chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso,
Super for All Buildings east of the projects,
stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom
against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe.
"Nothing to do but roll it," he said, hands
deep in his pockets. I nodded,
barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt,
transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs
as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it
against his shoulder like a man who bears
a handmade cross for miles on his penitent back.
I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood
the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark.
I stood on the side and righted the thing
and together we rolled this boulder of tree
past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair,
the Caribbean bakery. "You can smell the forest,"
he said, as we reached my stoop, wood
in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat.
And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping
only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour
it was filling the whole of my apartment--
the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence--
light brown rings so perfect my whole life
fell right down inside them, concentric circles,
tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself--
suddenly it was thirty-five years ago:
I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate,
and looked up into the branches of my first
true and majestic tree, in the first real forest--trees
instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs--
after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby,
to see the world through branches to the sun--I believed
the world was mine, there was sap in my veins,
the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree,
the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline,
which goes on to the edge of the known world.

I'm not at Harvard

I'd expected to be reading tonight with the wonderfully live-wire Eileen Myles in Cambridge, and I was looking forward to it. The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts has mounted a show called "ACT UP New York," centering on posters and other activist art from the crisis years of the epidemic. I'd planned to read poems by Tim Dlugos, James Merrill and the late Rynn Williams, as well as some work of my own.

But I don't know that anyone had quite considered the exigencies of travel on Thanksgiving week. Penn Station was packed, and when the track number was posted on the board for the Acela to Boston there was a mad race toward the escalator. In the Age of Terrorism, you have to get your ticket checked before you can go down to the platform, which means that the cone of travelers has to funnel down to a narrow line, like cars entering the Holland Tunnel. Lots of big wheeled bags, as much must be carried back to the family gathering. As we get closer, more and more of them wheel over my shoes. Once I'm down the escalator a conductor points to the quiet car, which turns out to be full save for a seat at the back, one of those where a narrow table separates two facings seats. There's a woman already sitting on one side; I ask if the other side is available and she says yes, so I stash my stuff above. But as soon as I try to sit another woman sits down beside the first, and I realize my long frame will not fit: my knees will be in the lap of one of the other passengers. So I scoop up my stuff (not noticing I'm leaving behind my sandwich and bottle of water), but it turns out the doors behind me are shut; there's no way out except back through the crowded car, and the aisle's completely choked by travelers and big rolling bags.

Eventually, I'm back through the crowd, duck out of the train, hurry down toward the other end, head in again -- not a seat in sight, unless I make a famiy with a crowd of kids move their pile of coats and toys and bags. The aisles are still full of the unseated, and suddenly I just can't deal. I turn and walk off the train.

There's another in half an hour, the cheaper "regional" train, running a little late. Once it's called I get back into the funnel again, only to be stopped at the head of the stairs by the Amtrak person who's protecting us from Al Qaeda because I have a ticket for the earlier train. He won't let me on unless I go change it, which would mean waiting through the huge line at the counter. So I'm sunk. I turn back, make my way through the wedge of bodies and luggage, over to the security counter where the handsome bomb-sniffing dogs hang out, and find myself beginning to weep. It's the big wave of all this fall's work and travel and responsibly showing up for all I needed to do breaking over my head. It's Thanksgiving, enough! In my head I am already apologizing: I would love to read for you, I'd like to be there, but I am going HOME, I am NOT going to Harvard.

Perhaps, given that many thousands of people travel via Amtrak at Penn Station every week, and that Thanksgiving week is a predictable crush, maybe they could do a little planning to get people onto the train in a humane fashion? Or add some cars?

Apologies to anyone who's come out to the museum this evening, but I hope the reading's wonderful.

By owl-light

Last night in the Springs I was just getting ready to leave the house, putting some things away, hanging a coat in the closet, when I heard a sound I'd never heard before outside the bedroom window. Over the summer a pair of screech owls woke us up a few nights with their unearthly call -- they sound like a very distressed raccoon, some careening warble of trouble -- but nothing like this. I went outside to listen, and there were the soft notes of the call again. I did a quick web search, listening to owl calls, and found this. If you click on "Typical Male" you'll hear exactly what I heard.

A short-eared owl in our maples! I left feeling sort of aglow with the experience. I drove to the train station, opened the car door, and there it was again, another owl calling over the parking lot. Then, on my fifteen minute walk to the jitney stop, beside the fire station, another owl; on the other side of it, another. Then, by the farmer's market, the next one: Amagansett was full of owls! And they were calling to each other from tree to tree in the warm November evening.

The web page says they glide low over open fields at night, looking for prey. Right behind the trees where I heard them calling there are big open fields -- corn in the summer, and the new organic farm behind the market. I love thinking of the dark shapes of the owls, silhouetted against the stars, flying there a few feet above the earth.