Crossing over

I have tried for some time to write poetry. I have looked carefully at the world around me and have considered my words. I have tried to reach some unknown reader.

Then the other day, I was walking back from the river. The air was cool. The sky was a late afternoon blue. There was a thin scattering of clouds like fish scales and I thought ...

... and then I stopped thinking that thought.

All this time think that I had failed to understand. Being a poet has almost nothing to do with the unknown reader. To be a poet, I should write words, nothing more and nothing less. My subject might be banal, my metaphors lacking, my words ill-crafted – my poems might not make any sense to anyone else in the whole world whatsoever – and be clunky.

Or maybe, just maybe, my poems might be good. Who’s to say? To be a poet, I think that I should just forget about all that.

And so I finally crossed over.

Here’s one of my poems. I didn’t write it for you, but you can read it or not.

I was walking back from the river.

The air was cool.

The sky was a late afternoon blue.

I saw clouds like fish scales –

and then I knew I would never find the words

to say what I wanted to say.

I miss you.

A beautiful thunderstorm

A somewhat soggy tale of about a fifteen minute walk in the rain from downtown to home - told in about four minutes.

Link to YouTube video

Poppy petals - A sentimental reverie

Long ago when the world was younger,

before smart phones and MP3s,

people sang songs and read books.

On one of those days a young woman was wandering in her garden reading a book of poetry.

She paused to pick a few bright red-orange petals from a bed of Flanders poppies and she placed them on the page she had just been reading.

When she looked up, she saw a man approaching.

She closed her book and went to meet her love.

Years later when the children were tucked into their beds,

the woman pulled a book from the shelves in the sitting room to read a few poems.

When she opened the book a few dusky lavender poppy petals fell out onto the floor.

They crumbled in her fingers as she tried to pick them up.

When she looked up, she saw a man standing in the doorway.

She closed her book and went to meet her love.

Just another summer's day

What could be more pointless

than watching summer clouds

drifting across a summer sky?

Or cottonwood fluff?

A Great Blue Heron

flew in from somewhere,

only to land at the edge of a sandbar

that wasn’t there last month.

Clouds had rained rivers

and flood waters had dropped

countless grains of sand.

And cottonwood trees scatter

cottonwood fluff with

careless abandon.

And how is it that

you coming to mind

makes all of this more dear

than I could possibly say?

Swallows over the river

Yesterday I was leaning against the railing of the Kaw River Bridge, just looking at the changing patterns on the surface of the water and watching the ever circling swallows swooping in under the bridge beneath my feet - and then steaking back out again. From the buff colored patch above their tails, I identified them as cliff swallows. I have often seen them dipping and darting around long rows of mud nests one next to the other against the steel girders on the underside of the bridge.

From my sky view, I stood there mesmerized. The winds were light and the muddy current slowing after heavy spring rains. The gray skies and dark trees reflected off of the endlessly undulating ripples, the colors changing with the breeze. The surface of the water dimpled and danced, foreground becoming background, background becoming foreground. Wavy lines dividing dark and light.

Everywhere I looked, the same and not the same.

And right there, from just below my feet, uncountable swallows were looping out, looping back, darting in and up and down and around again. A flicker of wings then long glides, banking and diving, skimming the surface of the water. Swallows flying with abandon, hurtling through thin air at breakneck speed, missing each other without a thought. I would try following a single swallow as it flew closer to the bridge, and then in a blink, it would dodge out of my eyesight.

I quickly realized that I couldn't catch any of this with a camera. I didn't have the equipment either to freeze the motion or to contain the randomness of the scene below me. And even if I could stop the action or video the movement, I knew that I couldn’t capture my sensations. I couldn’t even come close. And I knew just as well, from long experience, that I wouldn't even remember much more than a blur of my afternoon on the bridge after I walked away. So I just watched for awhile. Swallows flying over the river.

But then, after fifteen minutes or so of just being there, I pulled my device camera out of my pocket anyway. With nothing but electrons to lose, I held my camera with careful fingers over the railing and simply clicked the button. Click, click, click, click....

I was aware of the absurdity of my actions, but I wasn't even sure which absurdity was which. I was trying to somehow hold onto something that was simply there for the seeing and trying to catch something more than a camera could ever catch. And the river and the swallows would be there again tomorrow. And next year. And the next.  Water reflects sky. Wind ripples rivers. Swallows fly. The living world is always there, but it never holds itself still for a picture. I knew that I was at best taking a small souvenir of a moment in time.

Later, back at my computer, I deleted one image of muddy water after the next. I had been mostly shooting air. Then I began discarding photos of small dark blotches nearly indistinguishable from small chunks of wood drifting downstream. I deleted and deleted. I framed and cropped. And finally, the photos you see are what remains. Not very much, but something. At least the edge of the bridge was in sharp focus. And the horizon always seems to sort of blur into the distance – in pictures or in reality.

I see things in photographic images that I don’t see in the living world. And so I step back from that world now and then to take some pictures for myself. It’s another way to look. And I am often astonished by what nature photographers can capture with an experienced eye and good equipment. Images I could never see with my naked eyes. Hummingbirds frozen in mid-hover. Every gray frayed feather of a Great Blue Heron, revealed as sharp as glass on my computer screen in an instant as yesterday’s bird flies low over stilled rippling water. A complement to what I know from life.

But these here are my photos. I couldn’t capture the living world. I didn’t expect to. I did manage to retain a kind of afterimage of ripples and swallows.  And out of the corner of my eye, I might have caught a wing and a prayer. But nothing I could prove with a photograph.

**

Grass Clippings

How I think about climate change.

No steadicams were used in the making of this three minute video. And yes, I know I should oil my squeaky lawnmower. But give a listen - to my voice and to the sweet sounds of me cutting my grass.

Life is good. Let's not waste it.

grass clippings: the video

Another look from a drift log - three herons

And then, I found another drift log by the Kaw River to sit on. It was the one the three turtles had been resting on just the other day. I could see about forty feet of smooth, sun-whitened wood, resting on the rocks, but I couldn’t tell how much of the log extended down beneath the  muddy river. I straddled the log as if I might ride it on down into the water.

A heron stood on a rocky point catching the spill that comes through the north unit of the Bowersock hydropower plant. The heron was perhaps seventy-five yards away from me, standing motionless on the other side of a small cove of the river. It gave no sign that it noticed me.

I think of herons standing stoically, just watching the world as it turns – quite imperceptibly from I was sitting. From my log, I watched the heron watching. And then, suddenly, it stabbed its bill into the water and came up with a flash of wriggling silver. So much for stoicism.

For me to imagine what herons think is mostly about what I think. And what I want to think is that things make sense. That there’s a reason among the rhymes. I can perceive patterns all around me, but what do they mean?

For instance, over some time I’ve noticed that herons seem to like to play a kind of game – I might call it ‘King of the river.’ The game tends to be played in a triangular pattern.  It’s probably is just a territorial thing, but from my perspective the game seems nearly pointless – a game played out of idleness.

As I watched, a heron flew in from somewhere across the way and landed near the one that had caught the fish some minutes ago. That one flew up and over to where another heron was standing near the low island in the middle of the river, bumping that one off. Then that heron flew off somewhere. To some other edge of the river.

The herons settle for a while, but, if I sit long enough, eventually a heron will be flying in to take the spot just across from where I am sitting.

Now I can’t tell which heron is which and one edge of the river doesn’t seem significantly different from another to me. But then I don’t think like a heron. And then, maybe this flying around is indeed all just some kind of a game. Something to do while waiting for something to happen.

And then I felt something. It was almost imperceptible. It felt as if the log I was sitting on had moved. A shudder. I wondered if I was imagining it. Maybe it was I that had moved. Shifted. The river was flowing with only a moderate current and the log seemed well anchored on the large limestone rocks of the levee. But something must have moved. I felt something. Or maybe I just imagined it.

I picked up a light stick lying among the rocks nearby and balanced it across the log. Perhaps with this sensitive instrument, my eyes might see the movement that I thought I felt. If it happened again. The light breeze moved the light stick. So much for that idea. I wasn’t  doing much more than playing my own game.

I looked up to see if the herons were still standing where I had seen them last. Time is not quite measurable when you’re just sitting on a log by a moving river. The river flows. Always changing and yet still the same. Heraclitus said that. I’m just repeating it in my own way.

The heron across the small cove waded slowly along the near edge of the point. It was close enough that I could see a dark band across its gray head. And then the heron waded back. It seemed pointless to ask if there was a point to all of this.

And then the log underneath me moved again. Well, maybe it moved. How could I tell? I watched the log. I looked down its length to where the log extended down into the moving water. It would have to take something pretty big bumping into the end of the log for me to feel it. And then I felt the log shudder again.

Do herons expect two plus two to equal four? Do they think that there a cause for every effect? And then, why should I care if the log moved or didn’t move under me?  Not that I cared very much. As I have said, the movement was nearly imperceptible. But still, I sort of wanted an answer.  A reason among the randomness.

Wondering about things is a very human game to play.

I looked up to see if the herons were about to trade places again.

As if it mattered.

**

 Photos of the Kaw River for comparison:

May 9 - The Kaw River flowing at about 46,000 cubic feet/second.

In the photo at the top, taken a few weeks earlier, about 7,000 cfs.

The Kaw - same river - running 10 feet higher.

This drift log and the one nearby that I was sitting on in this story are long gone.
 
The herons stood watching on that point just across the way.