a series of walkz
a chapblog gleaned from the pages of grapez
choose a path from the table of contents on the right

The Talkin' Non-Poetry-Writing Walking Month

Wednesday, April 06, 2005
The Talkin' Non-Poetry-Writing Walking Month

So I’ve decided, for National Poetry Month, I’m not going to write a poem all month long. That can be considered either my protest of such a government-inspired travesty or a gift of mine to the same.

Instead, I’m walking. No, not from the blog, but outside. Spring has finally come, and I’d like to dedicate myself to walking at least a little each day. And with a companion such as Thoreau the past 9 months (for those few who may not know, I’ve been blogging Thoreau’s Journals) I’d like to see what, if anything, I’ve learned.

To this effect I took a little walk by the Newburyport waterfront this morning. Besides the sun shining brightly and a stiff wind from the west, though, I found no flashes of inspiration. I was alone, all but for a man taking a smoke break by the river. Same as me, I guessed. I’m talking a horizon break, sucking in the endless Atlantic through the mouth of the Merrimack and exhaling Powow Hill, upriver, in the west. But then too soon, we both must return to our workaday worlds.

But tonight, after work and dinner, I walked along the road besides the Merrimack. The red-wings brought the river marsh alive, although I couldn’t see them at all. Down by the river I cramped my brain trying to think great thoughts. But I only felt like a boy in front of his great grandfather, and wondered, like that boy would, how old is this river anyways. Back home, I heard the peepers in the wetlands. From a solitary peeper on Thursday, they’ve become a symphony orchestra. (Or as Van Morrison sang, from a whisper to a scream.) And they haven’t hit their crescendo yet.

And I certainly hope I’ve only just begun too.


Thursday, April 07, 2005
Getting My Moorings

Wed AM: Newburyport Waterfront

It’s a noisy morning in Newburyport. The street cleaner is sweeping away the road sands of winter. For some reason the cars crossing the Route One Bridge seem louder today and there’s a metal clang when each one passes over the drawbridge section. Most loud though are the trucks in the parking lot delivering the wharves, soon to be placed in the river and readied for boats.

Today, though, there are no boats moored in the river. It’s a wide expanse of empty water shimmering in the morning sun. Looking downstream toward the mouth and that small strand of empty horizon, I can feel the wide open possibilities of spring.

But the longer one looks downriver, the more one becomes aware of moorings and navigation markers of all sorts. At this time of year, there appears to be no purpose to such things. What are they mooring? Who are they guiding? The ghosts of last summer? The spirits of this coming one?

Well, there goes a lobster boat brimmed with traps heading out to sea ready to build this year’s workplace. So much for the markers. I sometimes forget this is still a working fishing port. As for the moorings, I suppose they’re just pinning down the current from the past. Keeping the river there and available. For the real new year is coming.


Friday, April 08, 2005
Looking at Silence

Thurs AM Deer Island

Easily perambulated the park on this island. It can’t be more than 25000 square yards in area. But since the river has been high as of late, it’s difficult to walk to the very eastern shore, yet I maneuvered my way through the mud to stand on a log and watch the Merrimack flowing past Eagle Island towards the hush of morning sun.

In the winter eagles are often spotted here, and in numbers. But not usually at this time of year. Instead I see a duck, some seagulls, and hear the trill of a red-wing. Unfortunately the sound that dominates is that of cars traveling over the metal grating of the Essex-Merrimack Bridge.

It’s difficult to find silence around here. If it’s not bridge traffic, then there’s the constant roar of I95 or I495, or a combination of the both. This land is at the crossroads of Interstates, but nowhere near the center of peace and quiet. And so I look at a lot and listen only for the little.

Time is short; it’s time for work. The duck quacks and flies away as I splash heavy off the log.


Saturday, April 09, 2005
Looking at Things in a Different Light

Fri Noon An Undisclosed Industrial Park on Boston’s North Shore

I walk past the new construction site and all the explosive trucks parked in a line. It looks like a bomb site. Or a murder scene. They’ve killed the hillside and the mangled bedrock is bleeding everywhere. Not a pretty sight.

So I turn my head and look at the parcel of wetlands across the street that remains undeveloped, surrounded by all those unsightly glass-walled or supposedly stylish brick buildings. It’s the only natural stuff in town. Usually it’s a downer though, that poor leftover swamp-infested woods unconnected to the rest of the world.

But today I see it in a different light, that grace-filled illumination of early spring. There are some prerequisites to such a radiance though. First, the snows must be gone. Next, the day must be bright. And last it has to be early spring without any significant sign of foliage in the woodland.

Then the woods stand wonderfully clear, without leaves or shadow. It is, upon reflection, a quite surreal sight, naked December-like woods beneath a late summer sun. For this light today is equivalent to that last day of August, before the leaves start falling with abandon.

There’s something about that incongruity that brings acceptance of an otherwise unforgivable condition. Call it grace. Or call it April. I walk on with a spring in my step knowing there’s always some kind of resurrection after death, whether we live to see it or not.


Monday, April 11, 2005
A Weekend of Walks

Fri PM Plum Island Marsh and Dunes Trail

Now this is silence. From the marsh, all I can hear are the red-wings, the wind through golden reeds, a stray voice from somewhere, the muffled steady roar of the ocean in the distance, and maybe an occasional airplane not necessarily objectionable. It has an aura of loneliness to it when heard in the midst of all this marsh. And now there’s a train whistle, certainly a lonesome sound. And a jet in its rumble going faster than sound itself, less a sound than an anti-sound, emphasizing the silence.

Sat Afternoon Boston

Beverly and I walked through the Common and met my daughter for lunch at the Beacon St. entrance. Walked to Quincy Market. After lunch, my daughter parted our company and Beverly and I walked to Rowes Wharf, and then Fan Pier, where we looked at the buildings around the Harbor. The Custom House, once the tallest building is now dwarfed by the buildings around it. The landscape of the city is its architecture, and this mountainside is growing taller, like a volcano. Its magma is money. When will the Financial District finally explode?

Sun AM Maudslay State Park

I see my first bluebird ever in my life! What a vision: this small shockingly blue bird flying past me into the pale blue sky. I see other spring firsts as well. As I walk I hear something in the leaves, look behind me and see a snake gliding by. A beetle lands on my shirt. Then, a butterfly circles around my head. And on the way back, I see the first hiker talking on a cell phone. Such is the local company I keep as I commune, without phone, with spring.


Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Confessions on the Waterfront

Mon AM Newburyport Waterfront

What a difference a day makes. After yesterday’s sunshine and temperatures in the seventies, a north wind is driving steady. And here that means right over the river, unimpeded and Atlantic tidal water cold, which by the way is now rushing out to sea, as if it was draining the land not only of its tidal surge but any earthly warmth as well. Still, the sun is bright and welcoming, our benefactor, The Lord of the Spring. It’s deserving of our worship. It won’t be long until that seasonal Sabbath is upon us and the congregation gathers at the beaches. For now though we’re just content to offer our confession. There were times O Lord when you were so low in the sky and the snows were falling almost every day and arctic cold was turning this neighborhood intemperate that we doubted your return and entertained wicked thoughts of moving south somewhere and worshipping the idle. April always makes me glad I didn’t. I sit for a spell on a bench, drink my Gatorade, and say my penance to the sky.


Wednesday, April 13, 2005
An Alien Education

Tues Am Pleasant Valley

Temperatures are just above freezing, but one of the benefits of walking the west side of the river is a double sun. The first sun has risen over Maudslay Park and shines with April morning strength. The other sun is concentrated in the river, reflecting heat with full tide height. The effect is quite warming and natural despite the extraterrestrial number.

I notice that the alder trees by the riverside have hung out their catkins like spring clothing, little sheer cotton things that offer only an embarrassment of riches yet to come. Across the street, the maples are bursting into red ballroom buds instead. Further down the road, by a clump of snow drops, some renegade daffodils have flowered into their tough yellow stuff.

On the way back, I see some children have gathered at a corner waiting for the school bus to bring them away from all this and on to their education in reading, writing, arithmetic, and the sciences. Most will get their twenty years of schooling and then go work the day shift. Like me. They’ll learn the face of humankind quite well, but this face of god with the little gee, well, not so much.

I can play with everything I see this morning because that’s the face I see in spring. Even the river has broken out in a gap-toothed smile. Beyond the necessities for life and family, there’s only this. It’s why we live and why we bring our children up to live. It can’t be taught though. We can only hope for an acclimation of sorts. Walk your children well.


Thursday, April 14, 2005
The Republic of Walking

Wed Am Maudslay State Park

The sun is out in the pasture as I walk towards the lower field. But the path around that meadow is covered in cold shade so I walk on the sunny side where there isn’t a track but only rough grassland. Although it’s only uneven clumps of territory it’s still off-trail and it dawns on me that such walking is akin to the philosophical. Only here can you begin to comprehend the natural world.

Walking on a paved street, even amid trees and near marshes of reeds and cat-tails and besides a wide tidal river, is like pacing in Plato’s Cave while looking only at the shadows on the wall. And walking on a trail means you’ve turned your head around and now can see the puppets and puppeteers. The stage is rough and the all the actors look like trees.

But really walking off-trail, and especially in the middle of woods like I will later on as I try to connect two perpendicular paths with an isosceles-like slash, approaches the entrance of that cave and sees some light. For a fleeting moment you recognize the possibility that somewhere wilderness exists. And there live the Philosopher Kings.


Friday, April 15, 2005
The Ordinary Ocean

Thurs Am Plum Island

The beach is deserted. The wind is strong and steady. The waves, though small, are noisily insistent. The sun is glaring off the ocean while it shines brightly in a clear blue sky. All of these things are so ordinary yet every time I witness them I become undone.

I can’t help staring out to sea at nothing in particular, across an empty ocean to that point where it meets the sky, some fourteen miles later but really an infinity away. I’m dumbstruck.

I could walk this beach all day, but I really have to go. The waves keep coming. Their never-ending wash is most hypnotic. But work is calling. The surf is one long line that slowly breaks along the beach before me then begins again and breaks along the beach before me then… I tear myself away.

Possibly walking along the beach before work isn’t the wisest thing to do. This time, knowing I was taking a long weekend, being Acadia-bound, I was able to break the spell. But just barely. Next time I may not be so lucky. And, like the waves, there will be, life willing, a next time.

Even though all of this is just so ordinary.


Saturday, April 16, 2005
A Pilgrim’s Progression

Fri Afternoon Shore Path, Bar Harbor

The Shore Path skirts the southern shore of Frenchman Bay. And there’s something about this place that conjures up the New World. Maybe it’s the long expansive breadth of it all. This ain’t no Smuggler’s Cove. Graced with pine-fringed, round-topped, rock-bound, completely unpopulated islands called the Porcupines (Sheep, Burnt, Long, and Bald), it doesn’t flow inland as much as cut a mighty swath into the continent itself.

From here, I can also see the opening to the open sea, protected by Egg Rock Island and its squat lighthouse. While looking to the northern side, past the Porcupines, I see nothing but shore and pines. Oh maybe one or two buildings that from this distance could pass for small trading posts. In other words I think I see the last frontier.

I know I’ve thought and written that before, but every year this discovery is so startlingly revealing. What I see right now is not that different from what Samuel de Champlain must have seen when he dropped by like a European Adam to name this place Isle de Mont Dessert.

Deserted indeed. And so, like a desert to its pilgrim, the new world waits. And every spring for the past eleven years I’ve come to find it.


Monday, April 18, 2005
Intermission in Acadia

I had hoped to blog daily from Acadia, but the best laid plans are lost to time, and Thoreau. I've seen ducks that walk trails, and eagles with head and tail feathers whiter than time itself, and a bat that patrols a thirty-foot section of trail with militaristic detail. I've seen visions of endless ocean from granite mountains, brooks come alive with talking spring freshets, and lakes sparkling with a single kayak and the lonesome sound of loons. Otherwise, this place is just the usual. Paradise. (Walks to be assembled at a later date.)


Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Three Singular Experiences

Sat and Sun afternoons; Acadia National Park

Walking in Acadia National Park in April is usually a bracing experience. But the weather this weekend was spectacular. I would even say that Sunday was warm. This time of year I like to take it easy. carriage roads (gravel roads limited to walkers, bicyclists, and horses) my choice of fare, and a detour up Connor’s Nubble is the closest to mountain hiking I’ll make. So Saturday, Beverly and I walked the Jordan Stream loop, and Sunday, I walked the loop around Eagle Lake with a visit up Connor’s Nubble to look at the lake and surrounding mountains from an open height. As usual, breathtaking.

But things aren’t always at their usual. Take the start to Saturday’s stroll. While we were walking the carriage road, we noticed, across the brook, a wood duck walking the parallel path that also follows the stream. Now I’m not accustomed to seeing a duck hiking a woods trail. And neither am I accustomed to seeing a duck swim in a rushing brook, but this one, after fifty feet of following the trail, descended the bank and entered a shallow pool amid the rocks and rushing water. That was refreshing.

Later on, from one of the many marvelous stone bridges built in this network of carriage roads, we spotted a hawk overhead, and watched it in the sky, between branches of birch and fronds of pine. As we continued walking, I kept my eyes open for another one. In the corner of my eye, I saw a large bird, and thought ‘hawk!’ but then almost at the same time noticed that it was white, and said to Beverly, “there goes a sea gull.”

But as we looked, I exclaimed, “no!, it’s an eagle!,” and we watched it approach, its wing span growing in our eyes as it neared. Its head and tail feathers were bleached as white as snow. I am accustomed to seeing immature eagles, with brown, or at most, dark gray, head and tail feathers. The eagle has only recently returned to southern New England, so I think we only see the immature ones. But this one was a granddaddy of an eagle, the kind you see in all those wildlife pictures. Now, that was exhilarating.

Lastly, on Sunday, near the beginning of my walk, I noticed up ahead, over a stretch of road mottled with sun and shade, a large butterfly flitting back and forth, up and down, and left to right, always in that stretch of road. But as I approached I realized it was too large for a butterfly yet flew too zig-zaggingly for a bird. Nearer, I noticed an almost transparency in the wings, and then, the unmistakable head of a bat! I stopped and watched it fly back and forth in that same stretch of road for at least five minutes. Now that was extraordinary.

Maybe not. But for me, all three of these experiences were singular. And therefore remarkable. I suppose too often I take the world around me for granted, even a world as stunning as Acadia. I take its beauty for granted and know I’ll be astounded by the combination of woods and mountains, and lakes, and ocean and all the colors ranging from pink granite mountains to deep blue sea.

Every time I visit I’m amazed. But still, I’ve learned to expect it. So when the experiences of things I don’t expect, like a duck walking a woods trail, or a seagull morphing into a bald eagle, or a butterfly becoming a bat, I feel a thrill ride up my spine shocking me again into the miracle of existence. At home, when such incidents occur I am upended, sometimes overcome, maybe reborn in a way. But in such a paradise as Acadia, when such moments occur, I am simply created. Like Adam I look at the world around me and don’t even know the names for things. It’s inconceivable, but it is.


Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Seasons of Civilization

Tues PM Pleasant Valley to Hatter’s Point

The river here narrows, but the view upstream is extensive, although the crossword puzzles of docks at the marina are beginning to fill the water with their thirteen downs and five across.

It’s a blooming of sorts. During the winter, there’s an empty wildness to this stream. But every spring civilization hits the river all over again. Docks bud, boats blossom. And the pollen of traffic fills the river come summer. Then in the late autumn, everything falls out again.

I have a question formed by the shape of this puzzle. Could we build our developments on land like we do in the river? Pull them all out six months later. Let the wildness return for half the year. Go with the flow.


Thursday, April 21, 2005
The Day After

Thurs AM Newburyport Waterfront

This morning is much cooler than yesterday. And lucid. There was actually a summer like haze in the air yesterday. But today things are crystal clear.

I can see every ripple on the water downstream. I see each navigation marker and mooring. The branches on the trees across the river are detailed silhouettes of that particular natural chaos. The houses downriver miles away on Plum Island have obvious windows and rooflines today. The rock jetty in Salisbury doesn’t fade away into perspective but stands with crenellated strength. Even the clouds above the horizon have singular features and facets.

After the thunderstorm comes such clarity. One goes to school and graduates, gets a job, falls in love, gets married, has kids, buys this and that, reads these, writes those, lives here and there, and in the meantime wishes for something else, questions everything and nothing, longs for anything but that.

But that, you see on days like this, was everything there is.


Saturday, April 23, 2005
Honeysuckle Green

Fri PM Hellcat Trail Plum Island

The honeysuckle bushes are leafing all over the place. It’s like green popcorn throughout the woodland section of this trail. Looking closely, you can see the little leaves busting out of buds and beginning their photosynthetic lives of light and carbon dioxide. Each one is like a child. Everything is there. And green! Already nature’s gold is gone here, and Frost would talk of the inevitable decline in store for each one of these little darlings. He can be so unzenlike.


Sunday, April 24, 2005
The Word and Me

Rain and no walk today

As April continues and my poetry vacation goes on, I now realize it’s not about some feeble protest to NPM, but instead a time of reevaluation. I need to step back and assess my relationship with poetry. Or as religious fundamentalists would have it, my personal relationship with the word. Not as some link in a continuum. Or some voice within a community. Or even some student of its craft. Be it past, present, or future. And not persona, just me.

to be continued


Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Light Rain / White Light

Mon AM Newburyport Waterfront

There's very light showers, almost individual drops with personalities of their own. This one for example loves to surf the furrows of my forehead as I approach another Monday. If only I could be so free.

No boats are moored in the river yet. The wilderness of water still remains untouched by mast or rigging. Only small ripples from the intermittent rain dot the surface with any movement. Everything else is silent in the shadow of clouds.

All except downriver where a glimmer of sunshine lights the water over Joppa Flats. I think it may be the summer making its approach. Or else the white light of next weekend is greeting the start of this lifeless work week.


Wednesday, April 27, 2005
The Poet Formerly Known As Greg Perry

I’ve been working out this poetry funk this month while walking and writing the spring. There’s a number of streams flowing into this depression. I’ll just name them here as if they were crooked lines on a map. Publication fever. Cronyism. Intolerance. Pretentiousness and self-importance. Professionals and phonies. Cliques and prima dons and donnas. And more.

Sounds like the real world, doesn’t it? Well, maybe, but it’s not the world I chose when I first started writing poetry. Look, I believe in craft and hard work. Good poetry doesn’t come easy. Workshops at least taught me that. But there’s more important things than what journal should I send this little darling to and when will my manuscript be accepted by those bastards. Or the endless practice of exclusion. Avant Garde or Quietude: Silliman and Snider shame on youse guys.

Capitalism ultimately bends everything to its sway. Poetry isn’t any different. But I forswore marketing and corporate whoredom in my work life and damned if I’ll let it creep in here. So starting today, I no longer write poetry as Greg Perry. I’ve taken a nom de plume and plan to write again for fun and rediscovery.

Let me digress. I purchased an iPod last December and I’ve been rediscovering pop music, Will Oldham for one. And I love the way he makes his music under names such as Palace Brothers and Bonnie Prince Billy. Mark Oliver Everett is another one: The Eels. As for band names themselves, I’ve always liked Son Volt, Jay Farrar’s offshoot of Uncle Tupelo (another good name). But Son Volt has, for me, always contained references to the great bluesman Son House as well as its solar connections.

And so I’ve chosen Son Rivers, for similar and differing reasons. I’ve always lived in the Merrimack Valley. I’ve studied its history and even written a thesis on its industrial heyday. As for Son, I like the musical references as well as its childlike connotations. I’ll always be one. So here’s the first short poem written by this fresh new poet:
Son Rivers

I’m a son of rivers,
born of water, earth and
sky, a slant reflection
of ancestral outcry.

-Son Rivers 2005


Thursday, April 28, 2005
Son Rivers' New Spring Single

Son Rivers has just released a new single just in time, before April ends. In an interview with Spun, Son said he “was hesitant to release anything during National Poetry Month, that self-congratulating Hallmark-masturbating month-long saint's day, but what the hell. I need to make a living too.”

He rounded up some old Old Man River band mates for this one, including Slow Hand on rhyme and Rhythm King on meter. “It was great to play together again. We started out on burgundy but soon just hit the harder stuff. Mushrooms and metaphysics.”

So eff the RIAA: here’s the file. Download and share amongst your friends.

Another Effing Forsythia Poem

Cynthia Forsythia,
the goddess of fertility,
flirtatious bleached blonde bombshell wow!—

there’s no divinity but spring.
Paternalistic deities
are fall’s cheap comeback to her fling.

With flowing tresses she undresses
scientific, atheistic,
theological design

with sprays of petals—pistils, anthers,
pollen—polysexual and
actual trinity of thine.

-Son Rivers 2005
Oh, the blog is still mine. Only the poetry is his. Crazy stuff, huh?

My Journal: 20-Mar-2005

Sunday, March 20, 2005
My Journal: 20-Mar-2005

I took one of my favorite walks on Plum Island yesterday. I parked the car at Hellcat Swamp, the last parking lot accessible to the paved road. I then continued by foot on the dirt road, which was pockmarked with potholes, helping to slow down any passing cars. There’s a quiet land of small trees and sand on one side and dunes on the other. About a half mile down the road, there’s an access road for the Pines Trail, but the road was still drifted with snow. It was easy to walk on though. In the field bordering it were four deer grazing. One lifted its head as I walked parallel to it but at least fifty yards distant. Then she continued her grazing, satisfied that I presented no clear and present danger. I took the lesson in hand, remembering it on the way back when some cars sped down the road despite the battlefield condition. But that was later and this was now.

I hit the Pines Trail. A woman walking past me told me that there was an owl in the pines, although she had not seen it. But the sound was clear. Which reminded me that too often we limit our reality to sight only. The other senses depict other dimensions of the real. To live by sight only is to inhabit a one-dimensional world. I’d say one dimensional out of five, but I suspect there’s at least one other sense, that extra-sensory one, that most of us seldom acknowledge. I stopped at the viewing platform, and sat on the bench, and soaked up the spring sun. The marsh extended miles ahead of me and the bay sparkled blue in the distance. A woman came to the platform about ten minutes later, laughing that I had found her secret place. We exchanged some pleasantries then each returned to the solitude. Mine was a bit forced though, trying to recover the moment. It’s interesting how one silent stranger can overwhelm my sense of privacy. I stayed for another ten minutes then bequeathed the spot to her, and continued on the Pines Trail.

I neither heard nor saw an owl. I trespassed the fifteen feet from trail to road on US property, although the footprints in the snow indicated that I hadn’t been the first. About fifty yards further south, I came to the boardwalk leading to the ocean. I walked through the dunes, sitting for a moment to breathe in the desert winds. Then I walked to the beach. Very low tide. I walked about a quarter mile north, and then returned. Walking north, one sees Plum Island stretch ahead, as well as Salisbury and Hampton, and in the distant, Mt Agamenticus in York, Maine. Walking south, one sees the sweep of Cape Anne capped off by the granite headland of Halibut Point. To the east of course is Atlantic. Its waves were small but strong enough to create their own world. One thing I like about walking the beach is the fact the ocean drowns out all other sounds. Its reality becomes yours and none other.

I retraced my steps for the way back. A great walk that passes through many different worlds. Early spring presents its wilderness untouched yet by most, and we become early pioneers of that new world. In the coming months comes the rest of civilization. Or at least more cars, walkers, and beachgoers. But I got in the car and drove back to civilization. I had forgotten the first law of distance walking. Bring liquids. I bought a quart of Gatorade and drove home.

Incident at the Lunar New Year

Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Incident at the Lunar New Year

The wildlife refuge at Plum Island is not a sanctuary from the everyday concerns of business, home, or everything that makes pop culture, but a place for life that’s wild, the shorebirds, hawks, coyote, deer, and occasional photographer or poet. Not everybody knows that though. Birders look for Iceland Gulls, or Northern Shrikes, and almost never look upon the land itself, that wilderness of marshes, dunes, and ocean.

But Barbara does. And so today she walks along the narrow strand of beach, her camera close at hand, and looks out on the indistinct sea, powder blue close at hand but dissolving into mist light blue skies. The tide is new moon high and soon the beach is nothing more than the steep side of dunes. The sand is soft and sloped, and walking is a chore for seventy-seven year old legs. Her breathing grows more labored, her steps unsure. Soon the only place she has to walk is in the wash of surf. With no way out she starts to think of sleeping in the dunes, despite her knowledge that a storm is brewing from the west and will bring snow and cold tonight from off the ocean.

Until she meets a man sitting on a driftwood tree writing in a journal. She stops still some feet before him. He greets her on the beauty of the day. She stares and does not answer. He notices the water lapping at her shoe. She’s old, he thinks, but healthy; her face is weathered from outdoors. Why is she walking this dangerous beach today?

He hails her again but still no answer. He notices confusion on her face. Are you alright he asks. She shakes her head indicating no. He rises and helps her to the driftwood tree and says just rest awhile. Her breathing is heavy, but soon grows normal as she then explains her plight. He answers there’s an entrance from the road just 100 hundred feet away. She just passed it in fact, he tells her. She sighs, and asks if he could walk her back and drive her to her car. And so he does.

She says he saved her life. He doesn’t tell her he’s just Coyote, but says he’s playing hooky today from work. He knows now the island called him there. He only thought he was hopping in the sun, but it had greater work for him to do. Because she loves the island for its wildness and not a place to stare at wildlife flying or dying, it finds a way to send her home, safe and sound.

To Plum Island and the Wildlife Refuge

Sunday, December 05, 2004
To Plum Island and the Wildlife Refuge

I stopped in Parking Lot 2, backing the car in to face the setting sun. Got out and walked the boardwalk over the dunes to the beach. The wind was brisk and I without a winter cap. The tide was coming in, every third or fourth wave sweeping the dark sand with phosphorous blue arcs of mercurial water. The edge of the continent was being touched by the infinite. I held my ground despite an urge to wade into eternity. Instead I scanned the horizon from Halibut Point on Cape Anne to Mt. Agamenticus in Maine, and in-between, just out to sea. I turned and walked back to the car, stopping a moment on a high point of the boardwalk to look at the marsh and river and setting sun spread about before me. A veritable dessert.

My intent was to sit in the car and soak up the final rays as the sun set, but instead I rode further into the reserve, pulling into a lot that overlooked a pond and field. In the field two deer were grazing. In the pond, two swans were floating. The deer were dark gentle shapes in a shadowy grassland. The swans were magnificently white in the dying light of the afternoon. As the sun neared the horizon, they flapped their wings, and like ponderous jets slowly rose and flew southwest. I backed out of the lot and drove back, stopping at the salt pans (ducks everywhere) to watch the sun finally dip beneath low clouds at the horizon. The sky turned pinkish, and the water reflected the same. One last look revealed a jet trail in the sky, glowing white heat in a different time zone.

Winter days are short, but a single hour at the Parker River Wildlife Refuge is filled with these rare moments. It's almost easy to take them for granted after ten years of many visitations. It's good to look back at midnight and see its wonder from a dimmer light.

Clear the Loon

Monday, November 22, 2004
Clear the Loon

This time of year Bar Harbor is a village town. No crowds haunt its streets and shops. A few restaurants are open. A couple of bars of course. Sunday at nine thirty at night the streets are deserted. Quiet. You can hear a pine needle drop.

Meanwhile Frenchman Bay is out there. During the day a few lobster boats pass by. The view from our room is for the most part wilderness and water. The empire’s frontier.

There’s a loon swimming in the water outside our balcony. The fresh water lakes have closed down and now he’s gone coastal. He dives beneath the water leaving a ripple of summer ponds and smoky skies. And then it’s November, straight-up, with winter for a chaser.

The sky above the bay is big and full of character. Yesterday there was something looking like a jet stream of clouds that rolled over Schoodic. There’s a multitude of skies out there, depending in what direction your eye wanders. Looking northwest today the sky is turning parfait blue. Southwards towards Egg Rock, clouds still dominate, although the eye of God is winking.

There’s healing going on here. I can feel it in my body. The soul can get physical sometimes, especially when it’s getting back on its feet. It stretches its arms the length of Frenchman Bay, horizon to horizon, and lets out a yawn like a loon call over a golden dawn.

Man, I needed this.


Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Day

We decide to hike up Day Mountain, or walk rather, since the small mountain is traversed by a carriage road to its modest summit. But first we followed a trail to reach the carriage road. The woods had that November emptiness. No leaves on the trees and no snow yet.

The smell of decomposing leaves filled the air in spots. A tree crossed the path. In one section the trail was wet. We crossed on rocks. Soon after we came upon the carriage road. The sky filled the emptiness above with clouds. The sun poked through every now and then.

The carriage road presents wonderful vistas of ocean, islands, and distant hills. Schoodic Peninsula and Frenchman Bay in the northeast to Camden Hills and Penobscot Bay in the southwest. Maybe thirty miles as the crow flies. And horizon out to sea.

We saw only footprints and not another soul. A hikers’ boot walking a dog's paws. A bicycle track. Deer prints jumping out of the woods, onto the road, and across. When we reached the summit, I ate an apple and she a banana.

Three crows were battling in the air above us. Two against one. An extended fight from one particularly persistent crow. They went their separate ways, and we returned the way we came, refreshed.

Acadia September

Saturday, September 18, 2004
Acadia September Preamble

Excuse me please but I’m doing another Acadia walkabout. So there’s nothing on my mind tonight but fog. That’s because I took a little walk along the ocean this afternoon and that’s all I saw. Well, not exactly. But that’s the point.

It dawned on me while looking out at the mist from Otter Cliffs that the daily concerns of our lives are much like this fog. Any chance of a mystic epiphany is shrouded in our activities. We are indeed social animals, and we can create theories for our affairs like bunny rabbits. Just ask the Easter Nietzsche.

But from Otter Cliffs you can still hear the hidden bell buoy out by the rocks despite the pea soup. It rings like a church bell. So I walked further towards Otter Point. The wind picked up as I rounded south and swells were crashing louder and more incessantly. Seagulls were turning gray and a cormorant spread its wings like an albatross. But for some reason, from that angle, I saw the bell buoy rocking in the waves.

I guess you need to trick the mist, refuse to look straight through its business, and circumvent its viewpoint until you reach that wilderness that Jeffers told us all about. There a narrow clarity becomes. It isn’t anything to found an organized religion around, but god knows it’s something. And that I’m thinking is a beginning.


Sunday, September 19, 2004
Acadia September Rain

Not one to let a little weather stop my walkabout, and remembering my slicker this trip, I went for a walk in the rain. There’s a carriage road that wends its way to the top of Day Mt. The elevation isn’t much to speak about but the length of the perambulation is about six miles. Needless to say I got soaked.

But that’s when I came to realize the importance of being water. We are more than half water ourselves, as if we rose from the primordial stew and took a doggy bag with us to go. When it rains, we are in the presence of our divine mother. We may not always like what she has to say, but we best listen.

So I did. She spoke to me of never-ending oceans and time being just another name for now. She told me how the sun had wooed her for so long his words became a constant breeze that urged her on in waves until she grew to swells and something sparkled in her surface depths like spirits of the deep. Then the wind on the mountain began to sing.

We were born of fire and water and the spiritual is nothing more than just the memory of that moment. But still, we look into the mystic like some fanatical genealogists searching for our roots. Some will fill the blanks with scores of biblical names. Others just swear they’ve been adopted. I’m waiting for the rain itself to tell me more.


Monday, September 20, 2004
Acadia September Wind

If Friday was fog, and Saturday, rain, Sunday was wind day. And that is fine weather for the Jordan Cliffs Trail, a mile long hike along the sheer eastern rock face of Penobscot Mountain. Except for the rogue shower that waltzed by before I reached the tricky part soaking the rock and roots and dirt all over. I should have turned around and went back the way I had come from, back to where I had stopped to let some hikers by so as not to be disturbed by their idle chatter while I thought of the wind as voice as creation of story in a start to make sense of it all, but followed instead their voices in the wind until I could make out these words trailing off: “I wonder…”

But I didn’t, turn back that is. I continued the hike, forgetting how difficult it was (at least for this amateur), until I reached a ten foot section that was three feet wet and wide and looked into the maw of birch trees two-hundred feet below. It was then I realized each step I took literally meant survival. I chanted my hiking mantra, one step at a time. But I annotated it with the following: one firm well-placed foot at a time, keeping balance on my rear boot until I was sure of the front, and by the way don’t look down, not just because the depths will suck at your every depression dragging you into its pit of hell but just because there’s no time to look anywhere but there in front.

Survival. It’s the yin to the yang of wonder. Survival. Wonder. But more than that, each also resides within the other. Just as there’s wonder in survival, the marvels of our families or the fascination with our work, there’s survival in our wonder. Without it, we live in that material world where every question has an answer and every reason has its why. And slowly we become dead of soul and alive only for the next purchase, drink, or cheap promotion. So I carefully grabbed a metal rung and I firmly placed my boot on that slight foothold and I pulled my weight closer to the mystery of elevation. Amen.


Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Acadia September Sun

Well, Monday was sun day in Acadia. My plan was to do the Precipice, probably the most challenging trail in the park, but after yesterday’s harrowing hike, I was too mentally exhausted to attempt anything that difficult. So I hiked Gorham Mountain instead, a smaller mountain overlooking the Atlantic.

There’s a perch half-way up the mountain that I love. It’s a triangualr ledge almost directly above Thunder Hole and looks over Great Head and Otter Point into infinity. Today light was shimmering on the water and several lobster boats circled about their business beneath the sun.

Sun is the father of all such activity of course, whether it’s the greening of trees or the making of America. It’s the literal circle of life. Beyond our searching, before our spirit, past all survival and all wonder, our life is all the meaning that there is.

I’m quite tired right now after all the activity of this weekend, including the long drive home. And being that the sun has called it quits, I will too. But tomorrow’s another day and a chance for another life. Sun willing.


Thursday, September 23, 2004
The Mysteries of Sense

Robert Frost explaining that the sound of sense is more than meaning but the mystery of voice:
I say you cant read a single good sentence with the salt in it unless you have previously heard it spoken. Neither can you with the help of all the characters and diacritical marks pronounce a single word unless you have previously heard it actually pronounced. Words exist in the mouth not in books. You can't fix them and you dont want to fix them. You want them to adapt their sounds to persons and places and times. You want them to change and be different.
The same thing with the sense of sight. When I was on that ledge on Gorham Mt. and looking out at the several lobster boats working their traps, I noticed that each would circle around the buoy, creating this circle of calm that lasted quite a while in an otherwise ruffled sea.

The Great Lobster Boat Mystery

As a lobster boat approaches near
the buoy marking where its trap is sunk,
it circles full, creating there a calm
that seems to carry on a larger chunk
of time than I had thought some likelihood
in such a busy sea. I understood

the physics following the waves and moon,
the ripples of achievement by the wind,
and even radiance of angled sun,
but why that wake could stay so disciplined
to be so calm so long eluded me.
It’s such a cool peculiarity.
But maybe you had to be there.

OBX 2004

Thursday, July 15, 2004
Chasing After Some Finer Day

For the next ten days, this blog will concern itself with all things Outer Banks; by Saturday my daughter and I will be in Nags Head, NC. Until then I’m blogging anticipation. So in the spirit of David Letterman and avant garde poetry, here’s my poem:

The Top Ten Reasons this New Englander Loves the Outer Banks

10. Life-size waves and eighty-degree-plus ocean water rules!
9 The surprise of a dolphin drive-by.
8. Sunsets over Silver Lake from Jolly Rogers on Ocracoke Island while drinking a margarita or two.
7. The yipes stripes of Hatteras Light.
6. Sam and Omies or The Froggy Dog and their buttered biscuits for breakfast.
5. The sun-filled watch of Hatteras Time.
4. Soaring on the colossal sand dunes of Jockey Ridge between the sea and sound.
3. Sea oats bending in the breeze alongside the lines of almost endless beaches.
2. The drive-thru beer stores.
1. And pelicans, pelicans, pelicans!!!


Friday, July 16, 2004
Jimmy Buffet, Kenny Chesney, and Me

8. Sunsets over Silver Lake from Jolly Rogers on Ocracoke Island while drinking a margarita or two.

Emmy reminds me that they don't serve hard liquor in Ocracoke (Hyde County, NC) and therefore it wasn't margaritas that I was drinking at Jolly Rogers. Interesting how the mind works. Well of course sunsets on the ocean mean margaritas and wasn't that Jimmy Buffet at the next table? Well the closest I ever got to Jimmy Buffet was at a restaurant in Charleston SC which had a little plaque on our table saying Jimmy Buffet sat there once. And the closest I ever got to a margarita at Jolly Rogers was a draft beer. I'd claim poetic license but I wasn't even driving on all four cylinders. Anyways, tomorrow we start our excursion towards OBX, and will be somewhere on the Delmarva peninsula tomorrow night (I can't do those fifteen hour one-day drives anymore). And don't you just love that bastardized name of three states rolled into one? Maybe I'll write an Ode to Delmarva tomorrow night. Maybe not. But we'll be listening to the new summer 2004 CD Emmy burned this afternoon. Rock Lobster, War, and that Kenny Chesney was just made for a Carolina summer vacation.


Saturday, July 17, 2004
Vacation Road Beat Oh Poem

“Roadrunner, roadrunner going faster miles an hour
gonna drive past the Stop 'n' Shop with the radio on
I'm in love with Massachusetts”(1) all the way to Connecticut
no songs no lyrics just driving interstate greenery
until “start spreading the news I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it, New York, New York
these vagabond shoes”(2) pedal on metal thru the Thruway
onto the Garden State Parkway and tollbooth proliferation
before “counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
we’ve all gone to look for America”(3) all gone
to find an arc of Delaware Memorial Bridge
to Delmarva oh peninsula of three great states
surrounded by vast insurgent Chesapeake Bay
and waters of the wild Atlantic leading ever on
towards Carolina and its endless Outer Banks
beaches all with “no shirt, no shoes, no problems.”(4)
1. Jonathan Richman
2. Frank Sinatra
3. Simon & Garfunkel
4. Kenny Chesney


Sunday, July 18, 2004
What We Did On Our OBX Vacation: Day 1

Dateline: Nags Head, Saturday, 17-July-2004. Arrived on the Outer Banks at 2PM with the Offical Song of the OBX 2004 Tour playing on the CD player, thanks to Emmy’s 2004 summer mix: “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem” by Kenney Chesney. Stopped at the Brew-Thru to pick up the Official Beer of the 2004 OBX Tour: Heineken in cans, and some Smirnoff something or other for Em. Pulled into our inn at 3PM and proceeded to check in. Rested from the drive, sitting on the balcony looking at the waves crashing on the shore. Then we went to Mulligans for the Best Hamburger on OBX (voted four years in a row). And an amazing clam chowder. Stopped at the Kitty Hawk Kite Shop and we bought a kite that resembles the Wright Brothers plane. Then back to the inn and a swim in the ocean (Emmy convinced me). The waves were huge but the water was warm and all my muscles ache as I write this. After showers, we walked to a little bookstore where everything was 60% off but not a book was there we wanted. “Ice cream” the gods were saying in clouds that rose above the banks with W.C. Wyeth drama. So we went to the Fat Cat and imbibed. Back to the inn and we put together our kite with a little patience and willpower (and we read the directions too). Now there are flashes of thunder backlighting textured clouds in the dark eastern sky over the ocean.


Monday, July 19, 2004
Outer Banks Day 2

Waves of ceaseless oscillations
that collapse and redevelop
endlessly are sounding outside:
Waking to rain but seeing it clear;
Sam and Omies and eggs with biscuits;
North Carolina Aquarium alligators and sharks oh my;
Manteo and iced coffees taking pictures of Raleigh’s sloop;
Kitty Hawk and a cottage overthrown by Isabel;
tailgated through Southern Shores, Duck, Sanderling, to Corolla
sunshine and the Whalebone Club, Currituck Light,
pedestrian bridge above a sound-side snake;
New York style pizza at Cosmos;
back to the inn for rain and incredible illuminated ocean;
driving up and down looking for a place to eat and settling for the first choice:
RV’s and seafood chowder stuffed with shrimp and scallops
chicken fingers and French fries;
watching the red sunset between the clouds and sound;
ice cream at the Big Chill;
back to the inn and lesser fireworks
before lightning again over the sea.


Tuesday, July 20, 2004
OBX Day 3

Swam in the ocean today. The waves roughed me up good. Emmy lay in the sun today. The rays roughed her up good. We’re tired; good night.


Wednesday, July 21, 2004
OBX 4

Traveled south to Ocracoke Island. On the way, we drove on the restored section of Hatteras Island. During Hurricane Isabel last year, the force of the waves washed an opening through the island, creating in effect an inlet. But the Army Corps of Engineers have repaired the breach. There’s brand new sand dunes and highway instead. We all are trying to stop nature take its natural course on the Outer Banks, and I’m as much to blame as any.. But the Banks are what they are because of those natural changes. We are just trying to stop time. But sooner or later that minute hand is going to strike twelve.

Still on the Edge after All these Years

A surge of ocean urged by wind and rain
from Isabel, a Category Two
Hurricane, slashed through dunes and NC-12.
Hatteras Island soon was severed through
becoming two distinctive isles instead,
although their permanence was left unsaid.
The government could build, of course, a bridge
and let the rude Atlantic have its way.
Or else the Army Corps of Engineers
could engineer an inlet overlay
with flattened cars, concrete, and dredged-up sand.
While waiting on the mainland's top command,
New Hatteras had fathomed things itself,
still siding with the Continental Shelf.

Gregory Perry 2004

That’s a poem that the Outer Banks Sentinel published in an earlier version. I’m not sure if there’s flattened cars beneath the road, but the Corps certainly had its way.


Thursday, July 22, 2004
On Hatteras (OBX 5)

Finally arrived to stay a few days on Hatteras Island, at The Cape. The lighthouse is within walking distance. Last year we stayed on Hatteras for the week, but this year I wanted to tour the Outer Banks and stay at Nags Head and Ocracoke for some time. That may or may not have been a mistake. But Hatteras is the real thing. The ocean water is warmed by the Gulf Stream. The summer atmosphere is timeless. Sunsets over Pamlico Sound are from another coast. Like Bubba’s BBQ (chicken and ribs combo for me, Emmy the sliced pork) Hatteras Island sticks to your soul.


Friday, July 23, 2004
OBX SIX

Hatteras Fish Story

Somewhere in an endless ocean there’s a
splash that no one sees except this surfer
looking for the perfect wave. He wishes
that he saw the same this morning fishing.


Saturday, July 24, 2004
Outer Banks Seven

Hatteras Forecasting

White caps mark the places where the winds have
influenced the waves with inspiration,
warning those of us who wade the surf line—
seas today are troubled past reflection.


Sunday, July 25, 2004
OBX 8 Going Home

We got ourselves a flat on the way home from Hatteras Saturday. That’s right. Outside of Roper NC. That tire was flatter than week old road kill. Trouble was that we were riding this loud almost concrete US64 highway that makes all your tires sound flat so I thought nothing until the sound changed to something more supersonic. Pulled over to the side of the road bordering a peanut field and walked on over to the rear passenger side and there it was looking awfully sorry and good for nothing more than someone’s tire heap. So Emmy and I emptied the back of the car of luggage and all and thank goodness that tiny old spare was looking right filled and healthy. So I jacked up the car and replaced the flat with the temporary spare and hobbled on into Plymouth looking like three dollar bills and small change and looking for a tire warehouse but found instead a full service Phillips 66. They hopped on it right away and before you could say “get your tricks”, we were riding off towards the North Carolina later morning. Emmy said "This car goes like 60 on our new tire." "Sixty nothing," I replied, "we're doing 66!" Or so I’d like to think we said.


Monday, July 26, 2004
Best of the Outer Banks (OBX over and out)

The following best-of-list should really be called a superb-of-list, because no way did we sample everything on OBX. So be it. But I’m using my poetic license officer.

best babyback ribs: Outer Banks Steak House (Nags Head)
best NE style clam chowdah: Mulligans (Nags Head)
best frozen custard: Uncle Eddy's (Buxton)
best way to get around Ocracoke: rental bikes from the Ocracoke Harbor Inn
best cheap t-shirts: Pirates Chest (Ocracoke)
best island for a bookworm: Ocracoke (Java Books and Books to be Red)
best seafood stew: RV’s (Nags Head)
best seafood bisque: Pilot House (Buxton)
best attitude north of Key West: Ocracoke
best ocean water for swimming: Hatteras Island
best arrangement: squadrons of pelicans flying over the sea (OBX)
best sunsets: Canadian Hole (Avon)
best ice cream: Udder Delights (Avon)
best road: NC12 (even includes a ferry)
best sand dunes: Jockey Ridge (Nags Head)
best biscuits: Miller’s (Nags Head)
best supporting actress: waitess from NZ at Pilot House
best overall breakfast: Diamond Shoals (Buxton)
best pony show: this white horse on Ocracoke that waited for an audience before standing
best hats: Lee Robinson’s General Store (Hatteras Village)
best use of a Thoreau quote (“Everyone should believe in something...I believe I'll go fishing.”): Sam and Omies (Nags Head)
best coffee on the banks: Ocracoke Coffee House
best entrance: Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge to OBX
best scallops south of Digby NS: Pilot House (Buxton)
best cheap beach stuff: Wings (almost everywhere on OBX)
best southern bbq: Bubbas BBQ (Frisco)
best lemonade: Jolly Roger (Ocracoke)
best song (“No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” – Kenny Chesney)
best vacation hangout: Jolly Roger (Ocracoke)
best free entertainment on the banks: ferry to Ocracoke Island (Hatteras Village)
best water moccasin: Currituck Sound at Whalehead Club
best aerobic workout: climbing to top of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
best shipwreck with sharks and all: Monitor replica at NC Aquarium (Manteo)
best microbrew menu: Howards (Ocracoke)
best NY style pizza: Cosmos (Corolla)
best OBX beach book: The Keeper's Son by Homer Hickham
best picture: Hatteras Time

Purple Loosestrife All Through My Brain

Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Purple Loosestrife All Through My Brain

I took a walk on the road along the river this evening. The purple loosestrife is beginning to spark on the roadside. The wetlands soon will be in violet flames. But tonight they were loud with red-winged blackbirds, more than a hundred of them. That and the wide calm river and the smudge of red bleeding through the low clouds in the western sky literally made me stop and breathe in deeply. It was as if life was just too full.
In Heat

The purple loosestrife sparks
July—the wetlands will
ignite and burn in arcs
above the chlorophyll
infested undergrowth.
I hear the redwing quoth
the green grass nevermore—
yellow is making hay.
The sun is paramour
to this auto-da-fe—
it’s more than just the source.
We’re its intercourse.

Gregory Perry 2004

That’s probably what happens when you begin reading and blogging Thoreau’s journals. But damn, these are the moments when you realize you’re not delighted to be alive—you’re alive to be delighted! Excuse me while I kiss the sky.

Happy Fourth from Bar Harbor

Sunday, July 04, 2004
Happy Fourth from Bar Harbor

We drove up to Bar Harbor yesterday. On the way up we listened to NPR and heard a woman read a poem about an acrobat on his death bed telling his daughter it was the land he loved most after all. The idea was good but the follow through, as Jon Stewart would say, not so much.

So this long weekend Beverly and I will mostly be tourists and not hikers. Yesterday we lived up to that intent. We had dinner in our favorite restaurant, Galyn’s. The lobster bisque was delectable. I had the prime rib which was also delicious. Beverly had the lobster stew and the filet which needless to say was also yummy.

After dinner, after taking a walk on the waterfront and pier, where one young man asked us if should jump off into the cold Maine waters and did although I advised in the negative, we went to our favorite bar, Geddy’s. Not only is the atmosphere funky, but it’s Maine, which means one can have a bourbon with his beer.

When asked what kind of bourbons they had, the bartender, Woody, advised me they had this great sampler of 4 premium bourbons: Knob Creek, Baker, Basil Hayden’s, and Bookers. Of course I had to try. Sam (no, the third bartender’s name was not Coach, but Rocket) poured them and I tasted with my favorite beer as a chaser, Thunder Hole Ale, brewed right here in Bar Harbor.

And the winner was: Baker’s. It had a nice warm bite that did not overshadow the nice flavor. That’s all for now. I’ll tell about the Duck Fart at a later date. We’re off to our favorite breakfast place, Jordan’s, and then off to our favorite park, Acadia! And fireworks over Frenchman Bay tonight! Happy Fourth!


Monday, July 05, 2004
Valley Cove Serenade

Valley Cove is one of the places in Acadia where few visit even on the Fourth of July (on the other hand there were more cars parked on the Ocean Drive than I ever seen in my many visits there.) It’s on the western shores of Somes Sound, a fjord that separates Mount Desert Island in two (the only fjord in America,) and the western side of the island is the quiet side.

After passing Echo Lake, you look for Fernald Pt. Rd on the right hand side because there’s no signs otherwise. Driving almost to the end of the road, there’s a parking lot. Most of the visitors are hiking Flying Mountain, a small mountain above Somes Sound, but this weekend there is no hiking going on with us.

So we walk along the fire road leading into Valley Cove. The cove rests beneath Flying Mountain and the sheer cliffs of St. Sauveur Mountain. In the cove, sailboats are mooring courtesy of the National Park. And beyond the cove, boats go back and forth along the sound. Across the sound some of the great summer cottages of the infamously wealthy can be seen. In any other land they would be called mansions.

Beverly and I rest on a large flat rock courtesy of the latest glacier and listen to someone playing guitar on one of the boats. Jimmy Buffet maybe? The tide goes out and time melts away. A sea gull cries. The flutter of sails from a boat tacking back towards the Atlantic echoes against the red cliffs. Somewhere in the nooks and crannies of that wall peregrine falcons are nesting. Somewhere in the very near future fireworks will sound over Frenchman Bay. Right now quiet is going on. God Bless Acadia.


Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Seeing Acadia through the Fog

Fog ruled Acadia yesterday. We sat on Otter Cliff and listened to the bell buoy resonate out of nowhere. The ocean waves crashed onto the rocks below out of nowhere. The sun out of nowhere we know was barely warming the rocks we sat on. But if you closed your eyes you felt the sun everywhere. And you could see the bell buoy rocking in the waters, and the waves crashing on the ledges nearby, and a lobster boat circling the buoy while raising its traps, and the rocky stretch of Monument Cove sweeping towards our left with the pink granite of Gorham and Champlain Mountains rising above it, and the little golden crescent of Sand Beach nestled in the curve of land, and across the mouth of Frenchman Bay, Schoodic Peninsula looks to be the last point of land before Nova Scotia invisible except for maybe some mysterious cumulus clouds on the distant blue horizon.


Wednesday, July 07, 2004
I=M=A=G=I=N=E Poetry

I’m home and exhausted, but have this imaginary poem to share from Little Hunter’s Beach in Acadia, a cobblestone shore of countless rounded rocks. After every wave, there’s a swirling clatter made as the water returns through the stones. Listen:


Friday, July 09, 2004
Fog on the Fourth

As I said in a previous post, fog ruled the coast of Maine this long Fourth of July weekend, as it often does. We went to see the ocean Sunday and Monday and never saw more than the waves crashing on the shore. The fog kept a constant presence. This, on the other hand, is a rough impermanent draft preceded by its later rough revision(updated 12 hours later):

Colossal Fog (rev-1)

The fog remembers when sheer sea was all
the earth knew, before land became the god
called Turtle, worshipped by the ones who left
to over-fish its once abundant cod.
(They gather at shores flirting with the sun.)
It wishes for them this oblivion
the Gulf of Maine concocts with dew point, depth,
and Frankenstein inventions from thin air.
So no one believes in monsters any more—
but those who know this coast of Maine beware.


Fog on the Fourth (original draft)

The fog remembers when its sea was all
the earth knew, before land became the god
called Turtle, worshipped by the ones who left
to over-fish, in time, abundant cod,
and gather at its shores, flirting with sun.
It wishes for them this oblivion
the Gulf of Maine concocts with dew point, depths,
and Frankenstein inventions in thin air.
No one believes in monsters any more,
but those who know this coast of Maine beware.

Gregory Perry 2004

Acadian Landscapes of Rhythm and Rhyme

Saturday, June 12, 2004
Acadian Landscapes of Rhythm and Rhyme

I’m an isolato this weekend, as Ron Silliman would put it. Some folk join together in Westchester and some strike out alone to Acadia National Park to hike in meter and rhyme. Silliman again: he set up Timothy Steele yesterday as a straw man to pontificate on the music of poetry, choosing a single stanza of a Steele poem (out of context and unadorned with any of the man’s better efforts,) in which I would agree with Ron: Steele crash landed reaching for a rhyme.

One word at a time. Or one step at a time when you’re hiking. Never look too far ahead. Never take your eye off your next footstep, be it iamb or trochee. Certainly anapestic. It’s the easiest way to fall. I suppose it could be a life lesson as well, but it’s certainly a tenet when writing in meter and rhyme. Never look too far ahead, but if you must, always prepare to backtrack when necessary.


Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Renovation: Revising a Poem
Just some notes on revision tonight. And these are purely personal. I have thrown away the book of poetry commandments. I dislike fundamentalism in religion. And so too poetry. Write what you damned well want to write. To paraphrase "uncool", if there must be fifty ways to leave your lover, then there must be fifty-thousand ways to leave your blood on the tracks (or not,) to paraphrase "cool." First some fun with html, or seeing the baby and the bathwater (clean copy here:)

Cold-Blooded Observation

Roots have been exposed along the trail.
Persistent hiking boots have worn away
the earth around them. (They look the way I feel—
even thelike some spruce trees have turned completely gray.)
I see a snake!. At first I think it’s just
another tendril loose from all that years of wear.
B—but then I see spot its tongue. In woods we trust
but everything is soon in woodlands dwell in states of disrepair—
except but not this snake. It slides with certain charm and grace
reminding me that movement is itself
a blessing. I locate a resting place
and watch it twist and turn genuflect from up above.
I may not be eternal immortal in this form
but if when I keep on moving I’ll stay grow aroused I keep stay quite warm.

I find myself writing first for the general gist, trying to get the meter and rhyme right. Although there comes a time, like this one, when I take my eyes off the road and finish with an ending like this:

a blessing. In the open marketplace
we bury everything at rest we love.
The rest is still for sale, a value—nice!
But things that talk provide a lovely price.

In such times I try to start that section over again. But of course there are times when I try to put the poem together anyways and end up with a Rube Goldberg-looking contraption, but one that doesn't even work.

But if I succeed in rewriting, then I turn to revision:

Most often, I discover the "meaning" of the poem or at least partial understanding after that first "successful" draft. I may change words or phrases in order to clarify that understanding or at least tease it into the poem.

On the other hand, there may be traces of perception that require immediate execution with extreme prejudice.

I may play with words for sound value or visit add-a-trope.

I may have a stubborn idea but the sentence fails to cooperate. I bring out the tool belt in these instances and begin hammering and wedging and swearing up a storm until it either fits or I give up.

I may not like the looks of a rhyme.

I may want to do something clever with the meter. Usually I try to write the initial draft in "perfect" meter, with little or no substitutions, except for initial trochees maybe. Although I am trying to deviate. But not into metrical perversion mind you.

And 49,994 other reasons which escape me at the time.

I'm not trying to be encyclopedic here (plus I've already gone over the readable blog word limit by 189, no, make that 205,) but just talk to myself. Feel free to eavesdrop.


My early ventures in rhyme and meter were filled with awkward bushwhacking to that next rhyme I wanted so desperately to use. Or in a similar fashion, I would bend my language to some stilted slope of speech just to suit my meter. I think I’m better at staying on the path these days, but I know there are still many times I plummet to some disastrous end.

There is a secret I think, and here I would like to shift my metaphor from hiking to surfing (being Acadia I have the luxury of both mountains and ocean at my side,) not a skill of mine but imagination is a wonderful thing. When writing in meter and rhyme, and wishing to write in some kind of regular speech, whichever kind that may be, it’s necessary to surf on the surface of the poem, and be willing to let the wave of meter and rhyme take you. It really is a matter of control. Give it up. Veer here and there, always using your skills to the best of your abilities, but also feeling the movement of the wave. Go with the flow. They used to call it the muse; you can call it the sea.


Sunday, June 13, 2004
A Realist in Acadia

From my perch high above the sea, I watched the dance of lobster boats and sea gulls. The sky was unnaturally blue. There were some cumulus clouds above the land but it was completely clear all the way to the horizon. But if you followed that line where the sky meets the ocean northwards, you could see a distant tracing of cumulus clouds. Landfall!

A Realist in Acadia

The sky appears synthetic blue
above the sea. The lobster boats
keep circling in their private wakes
while seagulls follow, sounding notes
of counterfeit condolences.
It doesn’t matter what He says,
no God would make this story up.
I look across the Gulf of Maine
and see a slender scalloping
of clouds. I’d like to entertain
the thought it’s Nova Scotia’s shore,
because I know it isn’t Labrador.

Gregory Perry 2004

I discussed this fact with a fellow hiker I met on the trail. Nova Scotia, he said, was 100 miles across the Gulf of Maine. He was skeptical and I agreed I wouldn't bet my life on it. "I wouldn't start paddling," he laughed. He hiked on and I stayed looking at that thin line of clouds. Luckily I wasn't kayaking.


Monday, June 14, 2004
Graceful Movement

Although Acadia National Park is a most beautiful spot (paradise in New England,) the wildlife is limited to the flying kind. Maybe a deer will be seen here or there, but not much else. That's why a simple snake can register such surprise.

Paradise

Roots have been exposed along the trail.
Persistent hiking boots have worn away
the earth around them. They look the way I feel—
even the spruce trees have turned completely gray.
I see a snake!. At first I think it’s just
another tendril loose from all that wear.
But then I see its tongue. In woods we trust
but everything is soon in disrepair
except this snake. It slides with certain grace
reminding me that movement is itself
a blessing.

Sorry to end it so abrupt. Last night I thought it was finished, but this morning I realize the last 3.5 lines were very wrong. For anyone interested that first revision is here. Sometimes the most graceful movement in writing a poem is pressing the backspace key.


Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Getting Back Up

My poem crash-landed yesterday because I was reaching for a rhyme for no good reason (which is sadly ironic considering my Saturday posting.) It was late and I must have been getting tired. After all I had just hiked all the livelong day and I'm definitely not getting any younger. Which was what this poem was supposed to be about. But then I found myself in the open marketplace babbling about value and price. WTF! So, let's try this again. (I colored the old text gray, except the title which the only words changed. Although I did add parentheses in L-3/4.)

Cold-Blooded Observation

Roots have been exposed along the trail.
Persistent hiking boots have worn away
the earth around them. (They look the way I feel—
even the spruce trees have turned completely gray.)
I see a snake!. At first I think it’s just
another tendril loose from all that wear.
But then I see its tongue. In woods we trust
but everything is soon in disrepair
except this snake. It slides with certain grace
reminding me that movement is itself
a blessing. I locate a resting place
and watch it twist and turn from up above.
I may not be eternal in this form
but if I keep on moving I’ll stay warm.

Gregory Perry 2004

There! It's still in draft form but at least it goes where I was headed.

Three Maple Trees

Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Three Maple Trees (part 1)

Last week, two old maples trees were cut down, down the road from me here in Pleasant Valley. Until this winter there had been three, but a storm partially destroyed one and the town completed that business a day later. Last week someone finished off the whole damned thing. Now there remains three great stumps.

These trees were exceptionally old with diameters at the base of four to five feet. I haven’t counted the rings but I’d guess they were more than 200 years old, if not more. The house whose property they had lined was built in 1793, for Josiah Worthen, a shipwright. It’s my guess they were planted around that time, if not before.

They would have been there when John Greenleaf Whittier came rambling down the road visiting the home of Moses Huntington (an old map I have of Amesbury indicates the Huntingtons lived approximately where I now live) to attend Quaker meetings and discuss topics such as God, the abomination of slavery, and underground railways. Not only was this a pleasant valley it was a civilized one as well.

In "Mabel Martin", Whittier tells a story in verse about an Amesbury girl whose mother was hung during the Salem witch scares, the only woman from north of the Merrimack to meet such a fate. In an introductory note, he writes “Sussanna Martin, an aged woman of Amesbury, Mass., was tried and executed for the alleged crime of witchcraft. Her home was in what is now known as Pleasant Valley on the Merrimac.”

In the poem, Whittier first describes that valley:

And, through the shadow looking west,
You see the wavering river flow
Along a vale, that far below

Holds to the sun, the sheltering hills
And glimmering water-line between,
Broad fields of corn and meadows green,

And fruit-bent orchards grouped around
The low brown roofs and painted eaves,
And chimney-tops half hid in leaves.

No warmer valley hides behind
Yon wind-scourged sand-dunes, cold and bleak ;
No fairer river comes to seek

The wave-sung welcome of the sea,
Or mark the northmost border line
Of sun-loved growths of nut and vine.

Here, ground-fast in their native fields,
Untempted by the city's gain,
The quiet farmer folk remain

Who bear the pleasant name of Friends,
And keep their fathers' gentle ways
And simple speech of Bible days;


Thursday, April 01, 2004
Three Maple Trees (part two)

Whittier portrayed this Pleasant Valley as a land with “Broad fields of corn and meadows green, / And fruit-bent orchards,” but that’s not the picture any longer. There’s an upscale development of sumptuous houses instead of orchards, and manicured lawns rather than fields of corn or meadows green. Yet in some ways the essence of this valley still remains despite the disappearance of those fertile farms.

Maybe it’s the fact that on one side of the main road running along this valley, a margin still remains undeveloped. River grass, high reeds, a few majestic white birches, a single cedar, and a Huckleberry-look border a wide blue current on this side, looking across towards a rough landscape of mountain laurel and tall white pines, which make up Maudslay State Park, on the other. It’s a wild river scene with no sign of human habitation.

Whittier writes of the view from that other side of the river 140 years ago in a poem called “Our River”, the first four stanzas of which I reprint here:

Once more on yonder laurelled height
The summer flowers have budded;
Once more with summer's golden light
The vales of home are flooded;
And once more, by the grace of Him
Of every good the Giver,
We sing upon its wooded rim
The praises of our river,

Its pines above, its waves below,
The west-wind down it blowing,
As fair as when the young Brissot
Beheld it seaward flowing,--
And bore its memory o'er the deep,
To soothe a martyr's sadness,
And fresco, hi his troubled sleep,
His prison-walls with gladness.

We know the world is rich with streams
Renowned in song and story,
Whose music murmurs through our dreams
Of human love and glory
We know that Arno's banks are fair,
And Rhine has castled shadows,
And, poet-tuned, the Doon and Ayr
Go singing down their meadows.

But while, unpictured and unsung
By painter or by poet,
Our river waits the tuneful tongue
And cunning hand to show it,--
We only know the fond skies lean
Above it, warm with blessing,
And the sweet soul of our Undine
Awakes to our caressing.


I wrote a poem back in November describing it then in this painterly way:


November River View #9

This river view (its shores and flow) is not
the stuff of most contemporary art.
Water sedge --the color apricot--
and plum reflections in the flood impart
a measure deeper than the current sounds,
keener than eastern pines on higher grounds

of countryside across the stream from me.
There isn't any irony, despair,
or unresolved surreal obscurity
in what the river means to laissez-faire
economies of cultures old or new.
For in the end, it’s just a point of view.


Whittier’s point of view was that of a 19th century New England Quaker. Mine is that of a twenty-first century New England agnostic, living in a brick apartment building at the very western edge of the valley, writing 4 months before the disappearance of those three great maple trees discussed in Part One. In other ways though the essence of the valley changed with the disappearance of those trees. And that seems to make a difference now, and one I will need to explore in Part Three.


Sunday, April 04, 2004
Three Maple Trees (part three a)

For almost ten years those three maples were a corporeal presence for me whether walking or driving past them. The road is narrow to begin with, and the trees were literally contiguous to the pavement, so when driving, for me especially when driving home, they loomed as treacherous objects, and that’s one reason why they may no longer be there. They were a danger to traffic.

I moved here in June of 1994 after separating from my wife. It was a difficult time. My daughter remained with her and I missed her greatly. Pleasant Valley was therapy. Its natural setting was a curative and my almost nightly summer walks along the river did much for my damaged psyche.

I live on the second floor of an apartment building and directly downstairs from me lived an older couple who were very loud. They ran a printing business out of their bedroom, and at 3 AM I could hear modems dialing and printers snapping and whirring away. They were originally from Texas and were larger than life in that Texas kind of way, especially when in New England. Liam was an amateur historian and Betsy was once a practicing lawyer. Liam would tell me some local history and Betsy just talked about whatever was on her mind. They were interesting characters to say the least.

Across the hall from them lived Jim. I was never sure but I think he had a machine shop in his apartment. He was always doing things with metal, including welding. He had a sailboat that he kept on the river, and that was his passion. From early spring to late fall, he was down by the river, clearing the reeds that were dauntless and cutting the grass that grew like wildfire in that damp environment. And when he wasn’t landscaping, he was sailing on the river.


Monday, April 05, 2004
Three Maple Trees (part three b)

These three neighbors were retired but lived their retirement without resignation. For me, they were the essence of the apartment building. They had been there when I got there, and acted as if they owned the place but were willing to share it with you. They’ve since passed away, and the place seems that much smaller without them. The people that have moved in are pleasant. They’re somewhat younger and definitely quieter. No longer will I hear Betsy and Jim outside at the picnic table late at night smoking cigarettes and talking about their lively pasts.

I think I feel somewhat the same about those lost maple trees. Pleasant Valley seems that much smaller, to paraphrase Robert Frost, a diminished place. I guess that's the danger of living in any location for an extended period of time. Places change. They’re always changing. Whittier’s Pleasant Valley isn’t mine. And the Pleasant Valley of ten years ago isn’t the valley of today. But of course, Whittier’s valley wasn’t the same valley of the Pennacook Indians either.

More to come about that in Part 4.


Monday, April 12, 2004
3mt-4: nuclear family
Before John Greenleaf Whittier strolled along the road through Pleasant Valley, and before the first ferry transported travelers from Boston to points north, and before the first Europeans settled the banks of the Merrimack River, bands of Central Abenakis settled on its shores from the Atlantic to Lake Winnepesaukee. They were called the Pennacook Indians, a loose confederation of tribes held together by family interrelationships and the river. The Pawtucket tribe lived on the southern part of the Merrimack, from Haverhill to Newburyport, and would have called the surrounding area home. It’s since changed:

Still, some places once occupied by Indians are now unrecognizable as such. A site where Pawtucket Indians once carefully buried their dead today is a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, N.H. Other former Indian encampments are now a trash incinerator in Haverhill, the Plaistow, N.H., dump and a construction company in Kingston, N.H.

So much for three downed maple trees.


Thursday, April 15, 2004
3mt-5: The Merrimack River Before 1620
Before European Contact, the Merrimack River was part of a network of riverways and trails for a 'nation' of Indian villages, consisting of families interconnected with other villages through intermarriage and social commerce centering around agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Over thousands of years these communities developed in ways now lost to history. What we do know is that between the years 1617 and 1619, historians estimate that between 75% to 90% of the Indian population of New England died in an epidemic of viral hepatitis or chicken pox passed on by ailing European sailors. Thomas Morton described a village near Massachusetts Bay in his “New English Canaan”:

For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive, to tell what became of the rest, the livinge being (as it seems) not able to bury the dead, they were left for Crowes, Kites, and vermin to pray upon. And the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations, made such a spectacle after my coming into those partes, that as I travailed in the Forrest, nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new found Golgotha.

For the Pawtucket Indians on the Merrimack River, this “Algonquin apocalypse” left them vulnerable to attacks by their Eastern enemy, the Tarrantines. The Pawtucket chief Nanepashemet at that time held together the largest confederacy in New England. Their center was at Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack (now Lowell) but their territory extended south to the Mystic River, west to the Concord River, and east to the coast. David Stewart-Smith writes in his doctoral dissertation:

The Merrimack was deeply underpopulated with some villages abandoned. The Tarrantine came in raiding parties from their new location at Penobscot, to bring home corn, captives, and plunder.

And somewhere near Malden, Mass, in 1619, Nanepashemet made his last stand against the Tarrantine, and was killed. Such devastation was precursor to European settlement beginning with Plimoth Plantation 1620. Life on the Merrimack would never be the same.


Friday, May 07, 2004
3mt-6: The Poetry of Passaconaway
After the death and devastation from the Algonquin apocalypse, some of the Indian villages along the Merrimack River were completely wiped out and the ones that weren’t struggled to remain active communities. Maybe because of their distance from the coastal epicenter of disease, the Pennacook Indians, whose village was far upriver in what is now Manchester, NH, were less affected. Accordingly their chief, Passaconaway, became the great sachem of the entire Merrimack Valley, the first leader of what historians call The Pennacook Confederacy.

William Wood in his "New England Prospect" describes Passaconaway’s extraordinary talents:

The Indians report of one Passaconawaw, that hee can make water burne, the rocks move, the trees dance, metamorphise himself into a flaming man. Hee Will do more; for in Winter, when there are no green leaves to be got, hee will burne an old one to ashes and putting these into 'water, produce a new green leaf, which you shall not only see but substantially handle and carrie away; and make a dead snake's skin a living snake, both to be seen, felt, and heard. This I write but on the report of the Indians, who confidentially affirm stranger things.

This may be the mythological world view of the Algonquin, but nevertheless it describes a powerful man, yet one who could not resist the European invasion. Charles Edward Beals, Jr. relates in his “Passaconaway in the White Mountains” the great man’s final speech:

Hearken to the words of your father. I am an old oak that has withstood the storms of more than an hundred winters. Leaves and branches have been stripped from me by the winds and frosts-my eyes are dim-my limbs totter― must soon fall! But when young and sturdy, when my bow-no young man of the Pennacooks could bend it-when my arrow would pierce a deer at an hundred yards-and I could bury my hatchet in a sapling to the eye-no wigwam had so many furs-no pole so many scalps as Passaconaway's! Then I delighted in war. The whoop of the Pennacooks was heard upon the Mohawk―and no voice so loud as Passaconaway's. The scalps upon the pole of my wigwam told the story of Mohawk suffering.

The English came, they seized our lands; I sat me down at Pennacook. They followed upon my footsteps; I made war upon them, but they fought with fire and thunder; my young men were swept down before me, when no one was near them. I tried sorcery against them, but they still increased and prevailed over me and mine, and I gave place to them and retired to my beautiful island of Natticook. I that can make the dry leaf turn green and live again―I that can take the rattlesnake in my palm as I would a worm, without harm―I who have had communion with the Great Spirit dreaming and awake-I am powerless before the Pale Faces.

The oak will soon break before the whirlwind―it shivers and shakes even now; soon its trunk will be prostrate―the ant and worm will sport upon it Then think, my children, of what I say; I commune with the Great Spirit. He whispers me now―'Tell your peopie, Peace, Peace, is the only hope of your race. I have given fire and thunder to the pale faces for weapons―I have made them plentier than the leaves of the forest, and still shall they increase! These meadows they shall turn with the plow―these forests shall fail by the ax―the pale faces shall live upon your hunting grounds, and make their villages upon your fishing places!' The Great Spirit says this, and it must be so! We are few and powerless before them! We must bend before the storm! The wind blows hard! The old oak trembles! Its branches are gone! Its sap is frozen! It bends! It falls! Peace, Peace, with the white men-is the command of the Great Spirit―and the wish―the last wish―of Passaconaway.

Although there is some doubt as to whether these are actually the words of Passaconaway, there is little doubt they were his sentiments. And so fell a mighty oak that dwarfed our maple trees.

Dateline Acadia

Saturday, April 17, 2004
Dateline Acadia

Beverly and I have traveled up to Acadia National Park, and we are staying in Bar Harbor for the long weekend (Patriots Day is somewhat of a holiday in Massachusetts and of course is otherwise known as Marathon Monday) in search of transcendental hiking and relaxation.

Frenchman Bay is right outside our balcony door. Listen. The waves are noisy at night. From the balcony, you can see the length of the Bay from the harbor out to Egg Rock Lighthouse and beyond to infinite ocean. When we arrived the sun was just setting. The sky directly above was overcast, but the western sky remained clear at the very margin. The sunlight shot onto the Porcupine Islands directly opposite our balcony and tinted the trees with a goldien hue.

This island touches my soul like no other place I know. All my normal defenses come down. Inhibitions melt away. And the spirit that lies still all winter long begins to flow.

Today I'll hike some trail that skirts a waterfall, ambles along a rushing brook, climbs a granite overhang, to reach a peak of intermittent island views and endless ocean vistas. Or maybe take it easy and ramble on a carriage trail around the circumference of Eagle Pond. I'll let you know tonight.


Saturday, April 17, 2004
Eagle Lake

The last two years I’ve walked the carriage road around Eagle Lake for my first hike of the season, and today marked the third. The older I get, the wiser it seems to begin slow. It’s more than a five mile walk on a gravel road (limited to hikers and bicyclists) with a small climb off-road to the top of Connor’s Nubble. That trail is short but includes some nice rock-scrambling, and the view from the top is exhilarating. The mountains of Acadia ring the southern perspective and Frenchman Bay and distant blue mountains of Maine, the northern. Directly below, Eagle Lake stretches more than two miles in length. Seen from above it looks quite phallic. Maybe that’s why it’s such an invigorating start for the season.


Sunday, April 18, 2004
Hawks Over Eagle Lake
While walking the carriage road this afternoon, large shadows crossed my path. I looked up and counted ten hawks passing by. Later, while on Connor's Nubble, two hawks made a number of drive-bys. It's always thrilling to watch a hawk soaring BELOW you. While nestled in the cranny of a clff, I started writing this little ditty:

Hawks Over Eagle Lake

Two hawks come roiling by,
their wings a sandstone brown
and scalloped like the teeth
of plows. They shovel down
within the wind and lift
the air, letting it sift
between their feathered grates
seeking a golden prey,
prospecting far-flung sky
while turning ground away.


Monday, April 19, 2004
Sunday Hike

It begins at the shores of Jordan Pond, a one-mile long lake surrounded by mountains. Then it continues along a carriage road through spruce-pine forest with occasional teasing ocean views. At one point the road crosses a stone bridge which spans a small rushing brook. A cliff wall looms into view and then the trail which skirts that same cliff wall appears: stone stairs, a short rock scramble, a walk along a ledge guarded by a wooden railing, a short wooden bridge, another walk along the cliff side, and a final long climb around the overhang. The granite southern ridge of Penobscot appears. It navigates a mile-long course marked by small inukshuk-shaped cairns for more than a mile: sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean; a multitude of islands; bays, harbors; mainland mountains; blue sky; April sun; to the summit marked by a large rockpile and sign. The trail then descends into a wooded col between Penobscot and Sargent Mountains: a small secret round pond, still frozen. The trail then declines along a brook, iced-over in some areas, water running beneath: rocks, roots, dead leaves. The trail ends at a different carriage road, the brook is a frozen waterfall now disappearing beneath another stone bridge. The road runs along the base of the mountain above Jordan Pond, and returns to the shores.


Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Returning

Returning from a weekend of walkabouts is always a disorienting thing. There is a spriritual aspect to these hikes that sometimes take a spell. In time, I may even be able to verbalize it. Until then, here's a stanza from a poem begun last year while on Connor's Nubble.

Scrambling over rocky stretches,
I gain the windswept summit.
All perspectives look ecstatic
despite the modest heights.
Each direction is a course in essence,
some spirit world of mountain, lake, and sea.


Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Hawking an Acadian Poem

After I saw the ten hawks in the sky I knew I had to write a poem. But I had no idea where it would lead me until I started writing it. After I wrote the first line, I knew I needed to go somewhere mathematical with it. It wasn’t just the fact that I had seen a number of hawks in the sky. It was that number: ten. It's so accurate, precise. I've attempted to be somewhat the same in the language, which for me, in an Acadian poem, is an experience in itself.

Metrics of Hawks and Me

Ten hawks pass overhead
in random order, just
a temporary sum,
a magnitude that must
decline if hawks are true
to being hawks. A few

will start to separate
in circles like a cell
dividing from itself
itself, in parallel
geometries of chance,
a reckoned elegance

that leads me to this one
experience of flight.
Much later, on a peak
of granite, I will sight
a single hawk below
and measure vertigo.

If it had been three, maybe the poem would have gone on some spiritual journey. If it had been four, maybe it would have had more direction or at least some earth tones in it. If seven, maybe I would have been more fortunate with the outcome (although to be truthful I kind of like where it ended.) But ten cries for metrics, in content as well as form. So on this one I let the rhythm and the rhymes take me to where they wanted to go, which was to that other hawk sighting in a completely different manner.


Thursday, April 22, 2004
A pond is a pond is a pond

One of my favorite places in Acadia National Park is Sargent Mountain Pond. It is accessible only by mountain trail, and lies between two open granite summits: Penobscot and Sargent. There's such a variation in environment compared to that of the long southern ridge of Penobscot, an open slope exposed to wind and sun and expansive ocean views. The pond is small and surrounded by trees. The wind is almost nonexistent in the col, and on a summer day, the proliferation of life there is such a contrast with the mountain's. Dragonflies and frogs are just the more obvious dwellers on this threshold. This Sunday was the first time I had ever seen the pond iced-over. It was such a change, but yet it wasn’t. That’s what this poem tries to relate.

Pondering the Medium

That Sargent Mountain Pond
lolls lushly in a col,
amid stark mountaintops,
provides the wherewithal
in place to call it mystic.
There’s such a pantheistic

conception to this spot.
Neither stream nor rill
supplies its source; it is.
Imagine if you will
this slight round pond no more
than fifty yards from shore

to shore and circumscribed
by birch and evergreen…
This April though I saw
its surface opaline
with ice, and pondered why
I deemed it still July.

Again I’m using language shorn of most imagery, kind of Donald Davie meets Li Po, tempered by my own inadequate dexterity. Having been blocked for many weeks though, I will take whatever comes my way. This was one that I needed to write in order to understand my own reactions to this frozen pond. My first was one of simple surprise. But there was an underlying sense of wonder which I felt yet could not verbalize. Why, despite the presence of ice, was there still a palpable warmth to the place?


Friday, April 23, 2004
Poem about nothing

Am I boring you with all this Acadia writing? I apologize. But I’ve been unblocked and I can’t help myself. Listen. I was on the carriage road. It runs along a rockslide beneath Penobscot Mt., above Jordan Pond. I sat on one of the large rocks that border the road, to rest. Listen. That sound you hear is absolutely nothing.

Sonic Break

Beneath a russet cliff
this twisting gravel road
is balanced on a rock
slide. My episode
of trail-descending done,
I’ll break here as the sun

continues its decline.
There’s not a single sound:
no flow nor waterfall;
no squirrels stir the ground;
no birdsong nor jet plane;
no buzz, no breeze, no rain.

All glaciers have slipped north
and engineers spun home.
Summer is still to rise
while spring is yet to roam.
A crow beats overhead;
its wings would wake the dead.

Donald Davie and Li Po again, but this time someone else showed up in the background. I don’t rightly know his name, but he’s responsible for S1,L3 and S3,L1-2. He’s asking for a bit more leeway. I may have to let him have his way. He can be such a spoiled brat.

Misplaced Inspiration

Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Misplaced Inspiration

I made my first spring walk this morning and was greeted by a north-west wintry gale that chilled one side of my body, while the other warmed with strong high-pressurized sun. Weather like this clears the air. The sky accordingly was bottomless blue and the river sparkled with daylight and white caps.

I passed an American flag whipping up a frenzy in the wind. Nothing else moved in the yard. Further down the road, at a construction site, carpenters were about to begin their daily routine of hard work and easygoing conversation. I heard an occasional word: ‘girlfriend’, ‘weekend’, ‘basketball’. But the crack of hammers soon drowned out every sound including the morning songs of birds.

At the signal old maple tree, I turned to walk back home, and saw a tall man out walking his dog. The stranger wore a long black coat with a deep black hood. I felt a piercing in my left side like a hypochondriac confronting a sudden certainty and felt a dizziness rushing to my head.

It’s a wicked time in which we’re living. Terror and revenge have been blowing in the wind for so long now that its energy has bent our minds like the mountain spruces one will see at tree line. Seldom a day goes by without its drumbeat drowning out domestic voices in some unkind way.

Even poets lose themselves in its overwhelming shadow forgetting all about everyday passions and emotions in favor of politics and partisan prose. Turning back is difficult though. It’s not an academic issue to be bandied about like so many angels on the head of a pin.

There’s a necessity now to affirm life in no unqualified terms. Whitman called for democratic poets of the west to rise, but his voice has been silenced by the cliques of dissimilar codes. And fear is overwhelming; I know its darkness sends a chill into my heart paralyzing my very actions.

But still I walk on knowing that warmer weather has to dawn. The calendar is stronger than our fears, and to turn Thoreau around, time is life-consuming. So I pray for some kind of insight although there’s nothing I can do right now but avoid the intermittent occurrence of oncoming cars rushing their way to work.

While stepping to the side of the road, I notice a flock of Canada geese on the riverbank hunkered down, their heads turned inwards. They look like so many soulless poets. And I know the feeling. All I can think about is readying myself for work to make that long commute to somewhere other than where I want to be.

Before Inspiration

Sunday and the river is peaceful. It’s the quiet before the spring when a virtual crossword puzzle of docks goes in, boats with clever names are launched, and people stroll the complex of marina shouting nautical salutations. By summer more than a hundred boats will fill the shoreline and several more will slide in the current rolling up and down the river. Sounds will be everywhere.

But right now, right here, there’s a brilliant silence. Not a boat is navigating the river and all the docks are still stacked up in the boat yard. The surrounding land is also serene. There, it’s the quiet before the storm of spring when buds bloom and flowers blossom and trees begin to leaf. But right now there’s this emptiness. Even last week’s snow is melting in most places.

The swollen tide is going out to sea. Two Canada geese float by. An eagle wanders the atmosphere every now and then. The sky is mostly cloudy but a few patches of blue intervene and a stray ray of sunshine lands at my feet.

Right now: the river sparkles upstream. The water turns from slate gray to a burnished silver. A hint of navy appears. The snow across the river brightens and pines across the river turn a lighter shade of green and grow in character, no longer a monolith of shade. My hands warm as I write this.

It’s been four months since I last stood here and watched the vista from this vantage point. In-between winter happened. Now spring is just about to. But now nothing happens. Everything is still. Not even a poem is being written.

Spring Comes to the Merrimack

The first sign of spring arrived today. Every year here, like the swallows to Capistrano, there's one thing that always announces spring's arrival. For the ten tears I’ve lived by this river, its appearance is the one true indication that winter’s hold has been broken. Not ice-out. In fact there have been two or three winters in that span when the river didn’t even ice up at all. And mild winters are still winters.

It’s the trill of the red-winged blackbirds. It’s an unmistakable sound. Their song consists of two verses. The first is a clicking noise like the sound a chipmunk makes (“tch”), a chiding timbre scolding the cold weather for its recent cruelty. The second is a thick trill, an almost throaty sound, a luxuriant resonance reveling in the rising warmth (no spelling can describe it.)

Today I saw several red-wings in the tall brown grass along the river. They’re early this year. Usually they arrive sometime late in the second week of March, maybe the third if it’s been a long cold winter. Here, January was bitter but February turned warmer quickly, and the last week or so has been downright springlike. The groundhog was mistaken. But the red-wings never lead you in the wrong direction.

I wish I was keeping a weblog these past years, or at least an old-fashioned journal. Then I would know the dates of every year the red-wings arrived. I could graph it on Excel. Or better yet, I should have written an ode each year to their majesty. Well, last year I wrote a little ditty about them, so I know the date in 2003.


The First Wave 3.14.03

Reconnaissance arriving from the sun,
the red-winged blackbirds carry on their wings
insignia—crimson epaulets—homespun.
Their trill along the river heralds spring’s
return. The morning bursts with southern sound
as they prepare these northern borderlands
for occupation. Light will seed the ground
for growth and heat unshackle deadlocked sands.
Next week the equinox will land unseen;
its armaments will burn the country green.

Close Encounter with the Primitive

Monday, March 01, 2004
Close Encounter with the Primitive (prose version)

Fifty-five degrees in February deserves our close attention so yesterday I went hiking in the woods. Maudslay State Park stretches for some miles along the southern banks of the Merrimack River in Newburyport and on a day like yesterday is full of folks walking their dogs or simply strolling along on a Sunday. But I like to hike in its further limits where few people go.

The paths I walk lead to quiet meadows, unknown woods; run along still-frozen swamps, up the ruins of once landscaped hills; and finally follow the river for an extended stretch until you reach the limits of the park itself. And there I stopped to read an orange sign posted on a tree informing the few who reach that point the land beyond is a tree farm: there is absolutely no trespassing.

I didn’t have time to think about that though because in that same tree twenty feet above me there was a sudden rustling noise. Looking up I saw a bird --an eagle!-- depart its perch (probably bothered by my disturbance below) and wing its way over the river. Awestruck, I watched him fly.

And wanting to get a better view, I quickly moved down a small slope towards the edge of the river bank. But the ground was still frozen beneath pine needles and I slipped. My feet flew into air and I fell, then slid down the slope and off the bank onto the thick ice that still remains on the river shore.

My left hand between thumb and index finger had been punctured and was bleeding. My right hand had twisted when I tried to catch my fall. It felt sprained. My backside hurt from both falls and I was drenched from the melting ice. But still I watched the eagle circle low above the river, turn and fly just over the trees above me.

That’s one version of the story. If I were a "primitive” man raised in a different culture, there would be another. In that one, I would tell of my encounter with an eagle and how it’s power lifted me from the earth. I would describe my ecstasy of circling over waters with my eagle brother, my arms spread out in mystical flight. And I would end with the eagle flying over the trees, its power receding from the river bank, and my returning back to earth. Stunned but delighted.

My hands hurt as I type this. My left hand bears a small bandage and my right hand appears slightly swollen at the wrist. My back is still a little sore. But my spirit still thrills with that memory of a time in flight soaring with the primitive.


Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Close Encounter with the Primitive (verse version)

.
A Close Encounter with the Primitive
Maudslay State Park; 2-29-04

I reached the limits of that park;
a sign nailed on an evergreen
read “No Trespassing” but something slipped
within its branches. This hurried scene:
an eagle stirred its wings and flew
from cover; it soared above that blue
free will of river. Moving fast,
I slid upon some unseen ice
--my feet flew out from under me--
and arms extending, sensed the vise
of gravity become a thing
no longer holding with its cling
my being. Up I reeled to meet
that eagle in an atmosphere
unknown to me before that day.
Soon everything was quick and near--
the river, wind, and cloudless sky.
An eagle rose. I fell on high.


This is still a work in progress, a third revision. As of late I've been reaching towards 20 or beyond. Not that it's been any help. Ask the editors at The Formalist from whom I received another rejection slip tonight.

But this has been an interesting project, something that blogging I'm sure will encourage. I wrote the prose version before the verse. And it's been helpful in keeping the poem true to the original inspiration. For example, the last line was written "The eagle left. I fell from high." But upon reflection, that was not saying what I wanted to say. In that context, it sounds as if there was a declension in spirit after the eagle flew away. But that was not the case. If there was a fall, it was from an ordinary state to something higher.

But as I was saying, this is just a draft, and I'm sure will undergo more changes. Yet, that said, tonight I'm encouraged by its direction. But I find that writing is a manic-depressive act for me. Come tomorrow morning, I'm sure I'll regret posting this poem, and wonder why I even try my hand at these vanities. Ah, life.

Merrimack River Ice Reports

Sunday, February 15, 2004
Winter Reflections #2

The river starts to open. Today the buoys before the run past Point Shores float in open waters. Last month the river was clear only at the Chain Bridge and the I-95 Overpass. Waterfowl and seagulls congregated there. An eagle called the waters home. Upriver those buoys before Point Shores were stuck in ice, tilting always in the same frozen direction despite the tide. But it's just a matter of time before we see ice-out and that stretch of river winding westwards suddenly opens. It will seem to happen overnight. One day the river will be white with ice from January's freeze. The next day March will flow towards the sea. That moment is why one stays in New England. There's nothing quite like it. The anticipation is maddening. The blood rises. Every day the sun sets a minute later and every morning one more bird is heard in the nearby woods. Then one day the river will flow blue like the wind. I'll feel it break through my slow and silent winter spirit like a ray of light. And that one shining moment will be worth more than any tropical getaway. I like to believe.


Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Merrimack River Ice Status Update

Last evening I noticed the river had broke through the ice at the narrows by MacKenzies Marina and Maudslay Rocks. The current runs swift there. Upriver is an expansive stretch that curves and billows like a half moon. But at the narrowing, the river runs. The force must have broke through the ice creating an opening the size of two olympic swimming pools. Ducks were swimming there. Seagulls were flying in for try-outs. By Athens, this river will again lope through its marathon from the White Mountains to Atlantic Ocean. Much sooner: by Boston and Patriots Day. I can feel my spirit limbering-up.


Friday, February 20, 2004
Lower Merrimack River Ice Report #3

Ice out: this morning the ice had all but disappeared from Point Shores. All that remained was the rime of isles in denial, smallish and almost transparent plates of floating ice waiting for delivery to that infinite Atlantic. After today’s sunshine and temperatures in the forties, the Merrimack will be clear from the Powow River to Black Rocks.

But a stubborn ribbon of ice remains upriver past Pleasant Valley, but for that break near Maudslay Rocks. This January was cold. In the ten years I have lived by this river, I’ve never seen the ice so thick and flat. If I was a betting man, I would have walked across from Amesbury to Newburyport and enjoyed the arctic scenery. But I’m not, so I didn’t. And so I’m here to write this river ice update: look out down below, the ice flows cometh.


Monday, February 23, 2004
Merrimack Ice Report #4

Ice out! Almost.

But the river here at Pleasant Valley is still frozen. There’s no longer ice at Point Shores though. The mouth of the Powow River is even clear. The stretch of river to Hatter’s Point is open too. The current runs swift past Goodwin’s Creek and Maudslay Rocks. And although the run along the Valley is still iced over, the surface is slush and tentative. Any minute its world will let go. Winter will be in the sea and spring freshets will swirl. This is the way of the river, inevitable and brilliant. God, I love this time of season.


Saturday, February 28, 2004
River Ice Update 5: Pleasant Valley Sun Days....

Ice is out along Pleasant Valley so this then will be the last river ice update. The river along the valley stretches for about one-half mile, this side of the Merrimack being mostly wetlands and the other side forested banks of Maudslay Park. It’s a beautiful stretch to begin my morning commute and this week watch the winter melt away.

The river opened in vectors day by day. Although the Merrimack is expansive here, the channel itself is narrow. Within that channel, the ice melted first in lengthy stretches of maybe 300 feet at a time. Like a black tongue of water it slowly licked the ice. Large chunks on either side fell away and floated down stream, like ice cream cascading from a cone on a hot summer day.

Therefore all week archipelagos of ice slowly drifted downstream towards the Atlantic. But it’s a tidal river here, so at times those islands would reverse direction and flow back upriver. Things are more advanced downstream; the river was shook like a cocktail at a Christmas party.

And overnight, blooms of thin ice will form and then melt during sunny mornings. It’s not spring yet, and I’m sure a belt of cold Arctic air could reverse the ice-out process temporarily and send the river reeling into solidity again. But the sun is climbing in the sky and soon the red-winged blackbirds will return to perch precariously upon the river grass and trill. It’s just a matter of time.