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The Kildeer
Took me three days of looking
To find the kildeer’s nest
When I walked near
She would stand
Skitter away left or right
Fake a broken wing, cry
“Kildee, kildee, deeee Dee Dee Dee”
Limp and dip:
“Take my body,
not my young”
Bent on my search, I looked
beyond a row of bare leaved blueberry bushes
Looked at the ground, at each wood chip
Came to a leafless plant, and crouched down
Set my hands on the ground
And felt something warm and hard
Under my left palm
She came close then, an arms length away
And I could see her big round eye
Lined with bright pink
Her tail feathers splayed, peach colored turning to white
So beautiful and small
She flopped pitifully on the ground
Drug her body around, saying
“take my body, not my young”
Kildee, kildee
I love you
I love you
I love you
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Three Mantras
Three mantras
I say to myself
One. To feel ok
Two. To be a person
Three. Suffering through a life
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Making Tea
From Frosts Old Woods
I found a chunk of chaga
in Robert Frosts old woods.
Touched the stream
that flowed through
and took water
to make chaga tea with.
Robert: your meadows have filled in
with bitterbrush, meadowsweet, and young birch.
I burned, and left, a sagebrush strand from the west,
where you’d also come from.
Where your scythe worked
to make a clean line
along a wall
rocks have fallen down
to the earth
that you pulled them from.
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Late Summer, Beekeeping
There was a woman
whose monk-chanting story said
that monks sound like bees in a hive:
Sense of self long gone. Sharing food. Speaking softly.
Keeping clean. Dancing. Letting others know where
to place their shoes
when they come in.
Oryoki. Po-Cha. Simple things.
Letting weeds grow well. Not controlling.
Riding broken bicycles, needing nothing else.
A slung bag.
Looking for flowers, or searching for the self. Green plants.
Still not enough. Smokey tea, a few new faces.
Keeper (abbot) checks in, takes away.
Flowers bending down in fall.
Dew in the morning.
Sun at noon.
Nightfall.
Dreaming for nothing.
Autumn empty ground.
Many leaving.
No one coming back.
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Metamorphosis
Bombus— russet-back
grasping with black arms
climbs inside a red flower
which is dying in a plastic tray.
Midsummer, low water
Soil dry
Sun hot
Dead leaves, yellow stalk
But the red flower is blooming
Frayed edges of its curling petals
Last sugar from the rootbound base blooms
at the top—
Bee dives down, struggling deep
All covered in golden pollen
No matter is a flowers death
to this bee
Only
what's deep within matters.
Being given, taken,
transformed.
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Eight Ravens
Glisten black
Flying high
In pairs
Flip, spiral down
Talons out
Expressing
Happiness
—Go low over Eagle
who, crouched on a spruce,
looks timidly
at the compost.
Eight ravens
Picking through rotted squash
Eating roadkilled deer
Flying it up
Where it could never go
How many stories you must keep
our broken and full
mandala of lives.
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Mourning
Looking back
at the way I have come
Who I have met with
Tree or rock, beings
stick or stone, bone.
E’yah, as Axel once said:
I can take a stove alone
on my back
up a mountain.
And Bjartur, who needed nothing
least of all “a milk cow,”
only his sheep, independent man!
Both of them
Self standing folk!
Independence?
What a lie! A place
to lay stones, and old stories on.
Last night I was here
I slept in the woods
at the coming together of two roads
avoiding walking home.
My wool hat
on spruce roots beside me
to cover my face.
I watched cars pass, moonrise.
The roots held me, kept me still,
laying on moss and duff
soft, and warm.
Morning
turf hut, stone cairn
deep forest
and leaving this place,
like Chihiro
crossing a dry stream
which was – is a river, and
not looking back.
The next mountains rise
float above fog
“What can you challenge me with?”
I have no dream of independence.
though I will try and climb.
Bjartur & Axel are two men striving for independence who appear, respectively, in Sjálfstætt fólk (Self Standing Folk, Laxness) & Markens Grøde (Growth of the Soil, Hamsun).
Chihiro is a young girl becoming an adult, striving to help others, the main character in Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, Miyazaki)
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Wild Apples
The road began at the end of the ferry line
and onto the coastal shores of rough edged Maine—
The old boat building culture
early fall
mushroom growing time
when we left.
First day, to the highland trail, along the branch of a stream, dry
and no mosquitos.
Slept in the leaf duff!
Abandoned apple orchard!
Forest road when the land was clear
rock walls
in every direction.
Thinking about all the things people did here
And we in the woods listen to a few owls
who live up and along with everything
who hunt the silent voles who live in the woods.
And we fell asleep, as we had months and months before
but then on the snow
and under lower branches
where we made a fire for tea.
In the morning, atop the hill,
where we had been before
and there was snow before
but now the grass had already browned
and the view was full of voluminous things,
bursting forth with their last summer life
yellowing edges on some of them out there.
Back down the trail
with all our things
and then onto the place we parked.
Everything we owned
in the back of the car
still enough room
to see out the windows.
And across the border of states, to the next
New Hampshire, New York
all the buildings receding from view
and all the things to leave behind.
What do we really need?
A flat place to sleep
wild apples, and trees
and the clean fall breeze.
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Clarity
“Depending on how long you stay at the lake
the water you drink
will by and by
work itself
into you,
you get used to, you know
to the taste
and the water other places just don’t taste
as good
as that high mountain lake water..”
– 4 September
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3-4 September
Black oak, white pine camp
mosquito-coil and incense-smoke
like Japanese tatami-mat scent.
The inlet and the dogs there, sailboats moored, three hundred feet away dark woods.
Kids kicking up rocks and dust in their beat trucks.
Navigating through woodland
Graveyard other side 1863 1835 1875
Brave heroes. People no one living met.
Mosquito swarms again, leaving quickly
Driving through the night to
Portland