Where we tread

Fog. We are immersed in an unending fog that drifts in and out with the tides. Sometimes the air is warm and still and the water like glass, beaming back reflections of trees and stone with greater clarity and definition than the atmosphere. But then the wind blows, rifling and darkening the surface of the water.  

Dried grasses and lichens loom up out of the mist as if aglow; fiddleheads unfurl, swallows swoop in graceful arcs over the yard, Sometimes, when we're out walking, they bomb by so near and so quick, I feel the air around my face stir. 

The loon calls from an invisible space, and all around songbirds trill. A yellow finch gleams from the upper branches of an apple tree, then flutters away into the mist. Now you see it; now you don't, but the dip of its looping flight resounds in the air.

Water beads tender greens unfurling on every tree, drips from the pines, puddles in the centers of lupin leaves, illuminates spidery filaments webbing the grass. Everywhere the long view is obscured, but whatever is close, tiny, near to the ground, is magnified.

Here the sweet scent of spruce bud, flowering maple, smashed violets smeared where we tread.

What the dog's nose knows, or the art of noticing with the dog (art walk challenge #1)

A ripening apple

Just as birds need to fly and deer need to run, we need to walk....to be happy.
Enrique Peñalosa, Mayor of Bogotá

Every place structures our perceptions; so too, does every sort of being. We all know this, and yet we rarely attend fully enough, in our daily lives, to the implications of such insights.  While we might be quick to agree that what one notices while walking on a city street is dramatically different than what one hears or smells while out in the woods--the roar of traffic drowns out the subtle scrape of drying leaf against leaf in the breeze, or the lilt of birdsong--we're noticeably less willing to entertain other entities' or creatures' perceptual modes as a part of our own, unless we're trained observers of one sort or another. 

And yet everyone who lives with a dog walks such a path daily: the dog regularly notices things we do not, and bit by bit, our association with a dog tunes our apperceptions to theirs. We see, by dint of daily walking together, that here, by this tree, is a particularly exciting scent, while that patch of grass there is somewhat frightening. The dog's responses begin to frame our own, even when we don't quite understand what is going on. For example, a friend who lives in urban Vancouver recently reported taking her dog, a young Great Dane, for a walk in the predawn morning. All of a sudden the dog began growling.  My friend neither sensed nor saw the trouble, thought her dog had been somehow startled by a blowing leaf. And then the lights from a passing car illuminated a row of coyote eyes. Smart dog! writes my friend, relieved to have arrived back home safely. 

Enya sniffs for field mice

Often enough, what the dog senses is invisible to us, and thus appears somehow nonsensical, irrational, idiosyncratic. What might we see or understand, however, if we attempted to walk through the world guided not by our own imperatives, but by the dog's? And why stop there? Why not follow a deer path and learn to notice what a deer might?  What about following a line of current, or the trajectory of a falling leaf? How would we walk through or map the world differently? What would we hear or smell or see otherwise? What novelties would strike us? How would our inner sensory and kinesthetic maps alter? Would our experience of walking, itself change, and how?  

Leaving aside for now the great epistemological debates about what we might ever know of another being's ways of knowing (culture and learning suggest we can share something on this front,) and the challenge of tempering or overcoming our tendencies towards anthropocentrism, would or could a simple set of exercises--"art walks" say--begin to help us to attune ourselves to alternately lived (and thus possible) interactions in the worlds where we live?

Such questions led to what I am calling my "art walk challenge #1: while out for a walk, maybe with a dog, notice and document zones where two or more life forms enter into conflict, avoidance and/or collaboration."

we follow a deer path down to the water (pond)

I made and annotated my own walk on and around the grounds where I live, in rural coastal Nova Scotia, and then invited others living elsewhere to do likewise. I offer a selection of notes from my walk, and others' responses below.  As I read over the responses I've collected, I'm struck by how like poetry they are--perhaps because poetry too is an art of aerial or subterranean attunement, a mode in or by which one hears or notices things that pass above and below the threshold of ordinary experience. Does this mean that poetry, too, is an art of listening with the dog? (Or sometimes, perhaps, with the deer?)

orchard where the deer (dog and crows) graze

My notes from Art Walk Challenge #1 (24 October 2015) are as follows: "Here, the deer avail themselves of apples from our trees and walk on paths that we've made. But we also follow deer trails to the pond (human made) and through the woods.  The dog follows other deer paths, munches on crab legs dropped by gulls, digs in mouse holes, chases grouse. We come across a rat's nest a neighbour has tossed from a barn. Dog drinks from ditches and at the edge of the bog."

Enya crunches up the remains of a crab where a gull dropped the carcass on the rocks in order to break it open

 

pond edge where one deer path ends

found on a neighbour's land: tossed out rat's nest

 

Video clip: Enya chases a spruce grouse

Friends responded as follows: 

Devon Query (Eastern Shore, Nova Scotia) writes, "Out with the dogs down to our shoreline. A feather, no two(!) are consumed immediately.....small ones, gull feathers.....then a crab part by the other dog. Finally the piece de resistance! A large gray gull feather.....NOT to be consumed here....but ferried back to the house for the morning's amusement!
Thanks gulls!"

Carol Bruneau (Halifax, Nova Scotia) sends along a picture, which she captions,
'Here's my deerstalker scenting prey in the urban wilderness:"

 

Faizal Deen (Ottawa, but remembering South Korea) is prompted by the video of Enya chasing a spruce grouse to write "Beautiful and free. Sabrina would go after the quails on Namsan when we lived in Seoul. It always made me nervous because had she caught one, we would've been fined and she could've even been taken away from me and euthanized. So, we always went to the mountain under the deep cover of night and she would run her heart out and chase all manner of beasts."

I note that Faizal's remembered walk documents not simply encounters or collaborations (don't the quail sometimes draw the dog on, and work to decoy it from a nest or another sensitive area?) but potential conflicts between his dog and quail (finding, flushing out and possibly killing birds in the dark), and potential conflicts between doggish pleasures and the law, which is to say, between the law and the dog's human companion (punishable by removal and death of the dog.)

Who knew that a simple walk could uncover so much? And doesn't it always, if we've attuned ourselves to notice? 

Of course, the sort of "tuning" I'm describing here, and asking my friends and readers to consider practicing, is not always so romantic.  It is also a deep part of our social and historical experience, now muted by urban habits, the comforts of modern shelters and our typical patterns of consumption. A good hunter or a nomad for example, (whether human or non human) regularly must perceive as another does in order to survive. But then, so do children, any creature that is lost, or any person or creature who lives without adequate shelter or food. Nervy and alarmed, we learn to read others' patterns and pathways, and to map out escape routes and diversions, as well as others' garbage dumps.  

From where I sit, in rural Nova Scotia, I cannot truly walk the routes taken by Syrian refugees as they flee the shifting and hostile landscapes of war and asylum. But I can begin to imagine these routes, in all of their heart-thumping horror and impossible hope--and indeed I must, and by so imagining be driven to act, if I am going to maintain that social awareness does any good good at all.

Looking towards the back of the pond where sea ducks nest

What's the news?

What's the news? I don't know
I haven't been listening to the radio,
but the daffodils are blaring. Meanwhile
morning and evening the peepers are
chanting.  Deer clatter along the breakwater and
into the garden--not a tulip to be found. We've caged the
anemone pulsatilla: still the bees gather.
Hummingbirds buzz our heads; swallows
nest again above the door.
I saw whitecaps in Dufferin Harbour today
on my way to get my hair cut, but here
it's almost still. Fog overtakes the islands,
draws up its noose.

Anemone pulsatilla

All the night flights to Europe

An array of contrails
overhead, like a child's
drawing of the sun. Here
where land and sea conmingle:
all the night flights to Europe.


Lately, because I have been reading them, I too have been trying to write some tankas, a 31-syllable form of Japanese "diary" or daily verse. Harryette Mullen, for example, in Urban Tumbleweed (2013), collects and reworks the contents of her "tanka diary," daily short poems, many built from observations made during walks in and around Los Angeles. Mullen invents her own three-line form of tanka, and here writes within the frame of what I would call "urban naturalism," an emerging genre, a space of metropolitan commonplaces readers tend to fall upon with rapture, recognizing just that sort of incident, or this view in Los Angeles, or a particular news item. Urban Tumbleweed seems an apt title, for the poems snag all sorts of detritus, and then pile up against odd walls, spaces you never thought to find them--and then also, at all of the usual fencerows and barriers--for example this one, all to familiar to so many African Americans:

"Visiting with us in Los Angeles, our friend
went out for a sunny walk, returned
with wrists bound, misapprehended by cops" (94).

Perhaps my favourite of Mullen's tankas is another visitor poem, but sweetly surprising, unbinding:

"My visitor from Nebraska buys
a sack of assorted seashells at a souvenir shop,
then scatters them along the beach" (22).

My own experiments with the genre have seemed far more leaden and fraught; like shot scattering, or an old bit of cotton cloth tearing suddenly in every direction, the words pull apart, leaving nothing. After weeks of trying I have just two or three poems, the one above, another half assembled, and this one, from early April:

Blue sea, bitter wind
snow foundering. New dog stands
in ditchwater, watches
chickadees pluck seeds
from our outstretched hands.

Who knew brevity could be so hard?

Hurt birds (on the politics of blame)

I wake from a dream in which small birds are fluttering into my hands.  They are the size of finches, but coloured in blues and rusts and creams, as if they were swallows. I place each bird on a scarred round wooden table beneath a tall window and they gather in a huddle. It is cold. We seem to be at one end of a large library: musty volumes line the walls and the space is hushed and dark. Outside, it is winter, and bare branches scratch at the window. One detail stays with me as I wake--just before setting down each bird, I pluck a few feathers from its wings.  This seems to frighten them, and hurt them; I do not know why I do it. Waking more fully, I realize that the cat is asleep on my chest. This has happened to me before--am I having her dreams again? She lifts her head and blinks at me.

No, let me own my own cruelty. I should not blame it on the cat.

Talking Turkey

We saw them for the first time yesterday afternoon, large dark forms bobbing uphill beneath the trees, their tails dragging through the snow.  Birds of some sort.  We got out Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern and Central North American Birds and tried to match the trailing forms to the pictures in the book: quail? grouse? They looked like turkeys, but were they big enough? We argued back and forth--they did't have red heads or obvious wattles; were they bald or not? Did they have stripes? They kept their distance from us and disappeared over the hill behind the house. Spruce grouse, we thought, but then last night I kept thinking, that body form, it looks like an African guineafowl, without the spots.

This morning they were back, clustered under the birdfeeder, chickadees fluttering over their heads. Marike called me out of my bath, and Elisabeth and I crowded at the window with our cameras.

Turkeys, for sure. Those tiny bald blue heads we'd seen on the guajolotes in Mexico, the pink legs and three-toed feet, the enormous breasts and fantails.  We checked Peterson's Field Guide again just to be sure. Yes, there they were, Mealeagris gallopavo, "bronzy iridescent body; barred wings." They seemed to be females, eleven in all.

At first the turkeys watched us carefully and ran away each time we shadowed the window with our cameras. But then they got braver and approached the house again, clustering around a near bush at the back, scratching away the snow. One or two even looked up and peered back at us, eye to curious eye.  Where had they come from? I started looking up stories on turkeys.

Turns out they sleep in the trees, although it's rare ever to see them there.  They were named by Europeans who saw them in North America and thought they resembled the guineafowl seen sometimes in Turkey (my association with African Guineafowl wasn't so daft after all, or, perhaps more precisely, no more daft than many other Eurocentric associations and geographical mistakes starting with the discovery of indians in the Carribean), domesticated in Mexico (the Mexican name, guajolote comes from the Nahuatl word, huexólotl, or "big monster"), and imported to Spain and thence to England and the rest of Europe in the 16th century. Wild turkeys, however, range throughout the Americas, and are once again roaming the forests in North America, after near extermination in the early 20th Century.

There you have it, my turkey talk. Now to go find one for Christmas supper.

Which we did, immediately after lunch--we drove to Aliments d'antan ("food the way it used to be") in Knowlton, Quebec and got a lovely 18 pound turkey, cleaned and plucked and ready for stuffing (not exactly d'antan, but that's okay).  And then on the way home, as we were slipping up the hill in 4-wheel drive in deep wet snow, we saw a wild turkey perched in the branches of fir tree. Proof positive they can fly.

On the etymology of "talking turkey"

"Talking turkey" is an expression that seems to have originated in the United States in the colonial period.  Michael Quinion, cider maker and etymologist extraordinaire explains that

"the meaning of the phrase seems to have shifted down the years. To start with it meant to speak agreeably, or to say pleasant things; nowadays it usually refers to speaking frankly, discussing hard facts, or getting down to serious business. The change seems to have happened because to “talk turkey” was augmented at some point in the nineteenth century to “talk cold turkey”, with the modern meaning. In the course of time it was abbreviated again, with the shorter form keeping the newer meaning. (The other meaning of “cold turkey” is unrelated.)

The most prosaic answer is that the “to talk pleasantly” sense came about through the nature of family conversation around the Thanksgiving dinner table. It is also suggested that it arose because the first contacts between Native Americans and settlers often centred on the supply of wild turkeys, to the extent that Indians were said to have enquired whenever they met a colonist, “you come to talk turkey?”.

Quinion then goes on to tell a version of story about the origin of the phrase that apparently first appeared in Niles Weekly Register (NY) on June 3, 1837. He doesn't find that story very convincing or satisfactory (not getting satisfaction is in part what the story is about), but for what it is worth, here it is, apparently as printed in 1837:

"Talking turkey," "as we understand it," means to talk to a man as he wants to be talked to, and the phrase is thus derived. An Indian and a white man went a shooting in partnership and a wild turkey and a crow were all the results of the day's toil. The white man, in the usual style of making a bargain with the Indian proposed a division of the spoils in this way: "Now Wampum, you may have your choice: you take the crow, and I'll take the turkey; or, if you'd rather, I'll take the turkey and you take the crow." Wampum reflected a moment on the generous alternative thus offered, and replied - "Ugh! you no talk turkey to me a bit." 

This story makes me want to propose a new definition: "talking turkey" is a rhetorical ploy and is always political; it's what the lying party (settler) says they're going to do when they're about to try to trick another (first inhabitant, citizen) into giving up the goods, as in "The World Trade Organization is all about talking turkey" or "Banks have a new policy of talking turkey with citizens when they say 'give us your money and we'll keep it safely.'" In other words, no matter what they say, "talking turkey" is all about lying.

If you had wings

If you had wings, what would you do with them?

I would fly out to the ice edge and see who passes there, what the hooded mergansers fish.
I would watch snow melt in the sea.
I would fly to the hilltop and watch the sun rise over all 72 islands in the Baie des Isles.
The eagle and I would meet in an updraft and I would stare him down:
         my current, my space; I'm here: don't bother me now.
         Go find your own air.
That settled, I would carry on.

Notes
This poem, if it is a poem (perhaps it is a draft for a poem), emerged out of an exercise that I gave a writing class a couple of years ago; it is based on a poem entitled "Wings" by Susan Stewart. One of my favourite poems--up there with Neruda's Estravagario and his Book of Questions, Stewart's poem is an interview based upon the question, "if you could have wings would you want them?"  I changed the question slightly, and then, of course, had to try to answer it myself.

(For some English translations of some of Neruda's poems see http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/Neruda.htm)

Genoa Bay

The tide 
bursts in like
a river. With it, clouds.
Gulls rise, crying. Wings flash on the
mountain.

White blooms
of arbutus,
like seaspray, cloying. Red
bark peels, leaves drop, reveal green heart
wood. Scarred.

Floathouse
artist pounds old
nails, bends steel, polka dots his
boat. Turns jetsam to mandalas,
cursing.

Notes
Cinquains, again.  Pictures were taken in Genoa Bay, where we have been anchored this week, a wonderful harbour full of colourful characters, live-aboards and float homes.  Genoa Bay is at the end of a dead end road, and surrounded by steep mountainous land.  The photos are of the marina from the shore, of an arbutus tree in bloom, an arbutus trunk, and two large sculptures made by Genoa Bay artist, Tom Faue. As far as I know, Tom doesn't curse as he makes his mandalas, although he might. The line was poetic license, not depiction.

Blue odour of iodine

Strange and complicated morning. A skim of ice
calms the sea; sudden colour scours your eyes.
Bright light white heat flood the house. 
Throw open the windows! Fling wide the door!
Flash of kingfisher wing and peaked blue crest
(you're back! we're so glad to see you!). Sparrows sing.

Scent of---    open water. Salt, of course. Blue
odour of iodine, knotted rotting bladderwrack,
sunwarmed grey stone steeped in cold mud:
each element bound to its proximate. Life
on the strand, lived at an edge, wind-tumbled,
cloud-driven. Unstable. Chance-riven.
What peculiar mercy makes us forget that
with heat, comes fog?

Notes
I am thinking of Boston this morning, and the two explosions at the marathon finish line yesterday. (Who in North America isn't riveted and horrified by such wreckage of runners and their families and friends?) But to write a poem about that seems impossible.  I judged a poetry competition once not long after 9/11, and the poems that commemorated that event were, without exception, awful. Mawkish versions of catastrophe miniaturized in dancing rhyme. An occasion for falling flat on your face, poetically speaking.  Still, as I finished this poem I realized something about yesterday's news was working me--that what one finds at the edge of a sudden change is not a clash of civilisations (that appalling phrase and idea authored by Samuel Huntington), but one thing slowly shifting into another, "each element bound to its proximate." And this too, of course: what draws us--heat, say, or celebratory events full of oblivious affluence, also draws other things we think we love far less, like fog--or anger and targeted destruction. We forget at our own peril our own angers, our own targets, how closely interleaved rage and righteousness are.

Pictures, more land-weaves and tumbling structures, natural and not, taken on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore.

April Sunday Morning / moods in falling snow

Risen from the blindness of sleeping to dull light of morning.
Shadows flare and blur. When I find my glasses: sudden sharp edges.
Fat snowflakes gathering in clusters bomb by the windows--
Oh why get up; just let me close my eyes.
But the dog wants breakfast and the fire must be lit, so I stand up.
Waves swarm the harbour and rush into land--
this battle will be lost. Gritty foam scatters on the beach, 
clings to stone, tumbles end over end.
Lately I'm hearing voices as if
the radio's half un-plugged.
There's this song that someone is singing
in a language I can't understand.
In the newspaper, rows of North Korean children holding red scarves.
No one mentions hunger, just missiles, thermonuclear threat, diplomatic talks.
Crows cackle in the snow, but the sparrows do not sing.

Notes
Nearly every day for a period of years, Robert Lowell wrote at least one blank verse sonnet--fourteen lines of dense thought and rhythm, without any rhyme. I break more rules here--hardly following the sonnet form at all (I am a much less able poet than he)-- but do begin with a variation on one of his opening lines, from "Blizzard in Cambridge" (first published in Notebook 1967-8). My title, of course, echoes Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning," a long poem built of eight 15-line stanzas. The second part of the title, "moods in falling snow," is a line from that poem.  And for any line that begins, "Lately I....," I am indebted, of course, to Amira Baraka, whose "Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note" resonates forever.

Pictures were shot through a plastic bag in damp weather, in Marie Joseph and the Liscombe River, on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia.

Why is poetry an emergency?

10 April 2013

prose is a house
poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it
Anne Carson, Red Doc>

Why is poetry an emergency?
Why are some poems impossibly slow?

Imagine you are looking out to sea.
Every day for a year.

Some days the water rages. Other days
it chatters. Scatters. Freezes. Whispers.

Rarely is it silent. One vast silver mirror
dumping back a blanked-out sky.

Try a morning when the dog barks you up:
hungry geese are on the lawn.

  
Unmoored ice shards and founders, 
every grassblade dead and yellow.

How long must we
wait for the season to shift?

Slow spring, the kid 
at the filling station says. While gas guzzles 

snow gathers on the windscreen. 
You speed off, late for dinner.

Why is poetry an emergency?
Our hearts knock 
 

against a stubborn world. Inside,  
forever, the house is on fire.  
        

Notes
Pictures were taken on the West Quoddy dock. 
Nets and buoys are for fishing herring.  Commercial vessels and pleasure craft in Canada longer than 12 meters are required to carry two or more fire buckets.