Sailing A Different Sea

Kansas: an ocean of grass

To undertake a westward journey on any early American trail — to begin life on the Oregon or Santa Fe, the Mormon or Gila — necessarily demanded the acceptance of difficulties.

From accounts in pioneer diaries, scientific notebooks, and letters written to family and friends, it seems that Indian raids, horse rustling, gunfights, and buffalo stampedes were the least of it. More often, quotidian challenges became the undoing of even the strongest traveler. Mired wagons; swarming insects; meal after meal of crackers and tea; the combination of overpowering thirst and stagnant, disease-ridden water; all these demanded remarkable levels of commitment and persistence.

Breeze

 

Had
this breeze
refused an
evening rising,
we might have missed such
clouds; such silent, feathered
gliding down hidden, sharp-edged
currents; such easy slope toward night.
Had this breeze not risen, there might have
been no falling, nor memories at all.

 

Comments always are welcome.

Newer readers might not be familiar with one of my favorite poetic forms: the Etheree, a syllabic poem containing, in its basic form, ten lines and a total of fifty-five syllables. For more information about the form, please click here.

The Poets’ Birds: Osprey

“Osprey” ~ John James Audubon

 

Oh, large, brown, thickly feathered creature
with a distinctive white head,
you, perched on the top branch
of a tree near the lake shore,

as soon as I guide this boat back to the dock
and walk up the grassy path to the house,
before I unzip my windbreaker
and lift the binoculars from around my neck,

before I wash the gasoline from my hands,
before I tell anyone I’m back,
and before I hang the ignition key on its nail,
or pour myself a drink—

I’m thinking a vodka soda with lemon—
I will look you up in my
illustrated guide to North American birds
and I promise I will learn what you are called.

                                                                   “Osprey” ~ Billy Collins

 

Comments are welcome. For more information on Collins, a former United States Poet Laureate, please click here.

Playing The Numbers Game

Whether it was the zip code or the seven-digit phone number which came first hardly matters. Both were traumatic in their way. When the telephone exchange for my home town (PYramid2) was dropped in favor of all-digit dialing, you could hear the wails of the afflicted rising up to heaven: “They’re turning us into nothing more than numbers.”

Writing in The Atlantic, Megan Garber recalls that period of transition:

All-Number Calling—it is clear in hindsight—stood in the minds of many for the age of the impersonal, when people live in huge apartment buildings, travel on eight-lane highways and identify themselves in many places—bank, job, income tax return, credit agency—by numbers.

Stephen Baker, author of The Numerati,  contends that such simple and relatively straightforward numbers are relics of the industrial age. Today’s data miners seek to turn us into combinations of numbers as they gather, compile, and interpret information about us before drawing their conclusions about how we will — or, more precisely, how we might be persuaded to — behave.

Burned Into Memory

To pass through a fire-ravaged world — eyes stinging in the smoky haze; feet sinking and twisting in the soft and shifting ash; lips tight against bitter, blowing grit  — is to risk being consumed by irrational certainties: convinced, perhaps, that such desolation, such destruction, will last forever.  Even when burns scheduled for prairie management have been carefully planned and implemented with precision, the sight of the bleak and apparently lifeless land sears the mind as surely as the earth itself has been seared.

The Poets’ Birds ~ The Shy and Silent Ones

Juvenile yellow-crowned night heron (Nyctanassa violacea)

 

That it was shy when alive goes without saying.
We know it vanished at the sound of voices

Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises,
Though it could be approached by someone praying.

We have no recordings of it, though of course
In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed

Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed
And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers.

But its song is lost. If it was related to
A species of Quiet, or of another feather,

No researcher can know. Not even whether
A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou,

Where legend has it some once common bird
Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.

                                The Extinction of Silence ~  A.E. Stallings

 

Comments always are welcome.

A Rising Green

Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge, February 2, 2017

After weeks of fruitless horizon-scanning and radar-consulting, the roiling smoke plume rising over the southwestern horizon seemed promising. Before long, I’d found confirmation: a scheduled burn at the Brazoria Wildlife Refuge was underway, and the section being burned would be accessible by road.

February 2

I’d been hoping to visit a native prairie after a prescribed burn, and my opportunity had arrived. The January 31 burn, carried out under the supervision of the Texas Mid-Coast fire crew on 515 acres of land, would be accessible via Hoskins Mound Road, my usual route to the Brazoria refuge.

When I arrived at the refuge on February 2, a portion of the world I’d known there appeared to have been obliterated.