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.

Sea Smoke

 

Just before dawn every autumn, or early in the winter, as the temperature of the air drops well below the temperature of the sea,  the rising sun pulls moisture from the water into the sky. The fog billows up like smoke and runs eastward, towards the sun.  If there is a bit of a breeze, it can look as if the water is boiling, though of course, it is not; it is cooling down.

Early in the morning last Friday, when the thermometer dropped to around -20C, the sea smoke began to form giant clouds over the off-lying islands. Here's how it looked from our house--or, more precisely, from the porch:

 

And looking back into the house:

 

Sea smoke is also called "artic steam fog." Brr! Nothing steamy about it. For us it means that soon the sea will freeze.

Afterthoughts for the last day of November

It's the last day of November and at the edge of the bay, the water is beginning to freeze. Where the tide has receded, brittle salt ice clings to the grasses and intertidal weeds; overnight the sea has tossed up opaque sheets a foot wide and thin as a snowflake. They shatter when we walk by, crumble into shimmering bits of dampness. The world is set to tumble into winter, but are we?

Of course we've pulled out coats and hats and mittens, and I keep trying to remember to bring my boots to the cobbler, because the sole is pulling away from the leather. I've got to repair them long enough to get to Montreal, where I'll buy a new pair. But rearranging the closets isn't really what I have in mind.   I wonder instead where all of this writing is going....what I am doing with this thing I call Visible Poetry?

I signed on to the challenge to post an entry a day this month in order to defend myself against the increasing encroachment of bureaucratic duties, the way an endless run of small tasks can slip into and fill every available hour. I wanted to recover some ground in which I was not simply responding to demands coming at me from the outside, but making something of my own, no matter how modest, each day, poetry or not. It seemed necessary, a way of finding my footing in spaces where I was feeling increasingly lost.

I am not sure that I am any less lost than I was at the beginning of the month; perhaps I have simply discovered, as Robert Lowell writes in the “Afterthought” to the third edition of his Notebook, a collection of sonnets built from letters and daily observations, that “For the poet without direction, poetry is a way of not saying what he has to say.” I fear this might be true; that although I've managed to carve a bit of space from each day for a few words and images of my own, these smaller undertakings are exercises in misdirection and work to sap larger projects. Still, perhaps I ought not be so hard on myself: as a long journey is built of shorter segments, so too are larger undertakings. How can I hope to find new routes through those more elaborate efforts if I do not also practice, when the stakes are lower, getting lost and pushing onward?

-->"Poetry is not a luxury" writes Audre Lorde in 1977; "it is the skeleton architecture of our lives." She is claiming here, as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva will in 1936, that poetry is "necessary as bread," an essential part of daily life, like water, like air, like hope, like dreams. Without it, something in us dies. "It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change...." Lorde writes.  "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought." 

I am not always reaching so far, perhaps, and yet, this writing is, if nothing else, a space of musing, of stretching of daring, of dreaming.  I should cling fast to Lorde's words then when I am feeling useless, or as if these little efforts are beside the point: "If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core--the fountain--of our power...; we give up the future of our worlds." If I can believe this is true for others, why can't I believe it for myself?

On feeling blue (reflections on insomnia and melancholy)

Every year around this time, I lose my steam. It's not just that the days are shorter and colder and the wind more cutting, although these things are surely factors in any sense of diminished purpose; it's not just that so many of the plans packed into the early days of the autumn semester, with freshly sharpened pencils, and as-yet unread books--yes, we will get through it all!-- have somehow been undone by circumstance and scaled-back ambitions--let's just make it to the end of term in one piece, without too many tears; it's not just the stacks of papers mounting, the endless marking, the fatigue of one-too-many committee meetings, or the necessity of getting the snow tires on, although these things do take their toll. It's not even the lists of things undone from the end of the summer, the unprocessed photos and sound and video files (some not even yet downloaded!) from our latest summer sailing, the fact that the floor of my home office is covered in stacks of papers I don't have time to file, and that there are still gaping holes in the wall where two years ago the carpenter banged out chunks so that we could observe whether the window frames were leaking water inside the walls; it's not the cupboard full of partially completed manuscripts, or the printer I need to fix so that we can print photos at home again; it's not even the six cords of wood recently dumped by the wood racks that we must get up off of the ground this week, despite the fact that I wrenched my back last Friday while stacking wood, and for much of this week, could hardly bend down to tie my shoes, or the fact that our beloved boat blew down this autumn and is wrecked beyond repair. These are in the end, just things, annoyances, labours to be completed (albeit sometimes Herculean), rendered more difficult by the fact that all I seem to want to do is to huddle by the fire or hibernate, and that for half the week at least, while I am in town at work, I do not live at home.

In the end, what gnaws at me and wakes me in the night is something other than all of these things.

At first, of course, the source of my insomnia masquerades as one or another item on my infernal lists--all with a sticky sort of power, so that one item gets enchained to another in an endless midnight series. I lie in bed and unfold the list, accordion pleat by accordion pleat, not forgetting to add old sins or invent new ones--it is as if I am, now and forever, reciting the terms of the Lutheran confession that framed my childhood days:
Most holy and merciful God,
we confess to you and to one another,
and before the whole company of heaven,
that we have sinned by our fault,
by our own fault,
by our own most grievous fault,
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done and by what we have left undone.

As I child, I had thought it terribly unjust that "things undone" (something of which I am forever guilty) somehow weighed as much as things wrongly done. My wakeful night time adult self however understands utterly the scale of my own worthlessness as measured in things "left undone." We never can come to account; life is lived in arrears these days--financial, temporal, social, familial: the holes are everywhere. Darkness comes and you tumble into it, with all of the lists of your dead.

For this is the crisis, in the end, not the wrestling with earthly tasks, but letting go of the dead, (autumn seems to bring so many). Finding joy and purpose without them. Lists of chores aren't enough to bring on a full-blown existential crisis (although throwing your back out and then adding to the lists of things to do might assist); what creeps around the edges of the duvet on these cold nights are the winds of mortality.

There are so many I miss, gone, like the winking out of starlight; and the longer I live, the more people and creatures there are to miss. Why are we built thus, "so that," as Rilke writes in his Eighth Duino Elegy,
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the furthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers---,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

In these middle of the night agonies, I am, perhaps, despite my own feelings of worthlessness, doing the poet's bidding, even perhaps, hearing my own calling...

In the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke writes, 
Be ahead of all parting as though it already were
behind you...
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Impossible task. And yet, which other one could I choose?

After all, most of those things that I do and don't do on my to do lists don't add up to much: they are but preoccupations--not exactly what one must do for life to have had meaning, for it to have been enough.

Here's the odd thing: we wake and churn and turn about inside, but what feels like enough is never much and never within. It is the white flash of gulls' wings in the sun, or the far flung spangle of the milky way. It is a ray of sun on my cheek or the cat's purr; it is a friend's laughter, a lover's breath, the aching arc of a melodic line, the first frost etching patterns on the pond. It is the boom of a wave and the smell of sea spray, the burst of red juice from a ripe pomegranate or the flicker--now you see them, now you don't--of surviving deer slipping into the woods.

Tomorrow there will be ice

 

After an autumn of flat seas, the storm arrives at night. 

Rain stutters against the windows, billows in blowsy curtains 

past the light at the dock. At first the wind sings, a long slow whistle from

afar; it fingers through the cracks in the sash and

moans at the door. A light wind. By midnight 

it's roaring up like a train, slamming not again!

into the south wall. The house beams crack and 

whinge; we put out towels to sop up the water streaming

in: oh please move the pears; it does them no good

to be so damp.

Who sleeps in the midst of so much noise, and yet we do,

waking to ceaseless seas big as houses, water

roiling and tossing, beaches cluttered with 

spindrift and seaspray, the path puddled and filled

by twisted strands of seaweed and splintered 

lobster traps. Scrappy ancient spruces crouch 

close to the earth, turn 

away from the water: stones 

gather at their roots.

The cold hunkers in. We light the furnace;

tomorrow there will be ice.

Fragments for a windowpane (Second Act of a virtual love story)

-->

III.  Like a moth in love and months

We flicker

at the edge of light, separate

and not.

Onscreen you write,

            I write,             we

are

somnolent, alight.

We are

swept up, swept under,

here and there and

nowhere, which is to say,

spark gapping,

everywhere:

propiniquitous in our

distance.

Again and again,

(my beloved, my one, all of my heart)

we say

we miss

us.

IV. Change it should stop with not.

 Every story has more than one version.

Do not believe what I tell you do not

Once there were three. No

more—if me and thee and he,

then she.  And she. And

deception. And

daring. (And there would be

exhilaration, if not

expiation, or simple

filiation, or....)

(Please here do not state such mistakes.)

I cannot

settle

these odds: 

How can you be

beside me, when you are

so far away?

How can she be

so far away, when she

is beside me?

Proximity--it's

not always what

it’s cracked up to be--

(that's when the dog barks).

Fragments for a windowpane (First Act)

I. Did we who did and were and not

In the beginning,                          

no thing.

A slip of light divides the darkness.

I emerge                                           

you do.

There would be a dog,

a third,

a fourth,                        

death                                     and water. 

Everything  invented.

Everything                                                                        

                                                                                                            lost.

II.  (One is not one for one but two)

Of course it was a love story.  They always are.