The View from Mattie’s Pillow

Lingering fall.  Yesterday, driving home on a long westward stretch of road, I saw a half moon, burnt orange, resting on the mountains at the horizon, as if too reluctant or too tired to slip down below the rim to what lay beyond.  As I drove the road’s few turns, the moon seemed to duck out of sight then reappear through the spruces, as if it were playing with me as I drove through the deep darkness of a snowless fall night.  This reluctant moon, the lingering fall, all set an odd tone for the end of October here.

It’s global warming, perhaps.  We’ve seen other effects here in the Interior: the million-acre wildfires and the smoke that settles across the valley and flats in summer; the spruce-bark beetle and leaf miners that feed on our native trees; the early planting and late harvest; and on the Arctic Coast, the melting ice pack, stranding seals, walrus, polar bears.  Much of this is in the range of normal.  For every, “This is strange weather,” there’s a sourdough, “I remember when…” to top it all.  Those of us who have lived in Interior Alaska for many years, hesitate to generalize about the weather here, except to say that there’s no predicting one year by the other.

And we’re not complaining, really—even the dog mushers and skiers.  The skies are clear and sunny by day, warming to the high 30s and 40s, which is warm enough to take off gloves and hats to work with horses.  And though we have less light every day, it’s still light enough at 6:30 or 7 to do a few outdoor things, like groom a horse or roll up the hose for the second time this fall.

Today, I went out to work with Mattie, to reinforce the progress we made with longeing this summer.  She went out on the line fine, then stopped and turned towards me, ears back.  She no longer intimidates me with this–perhaps because I’ve learned to read when to back off with her.  We tried a few more starts in that direction, and I turned her to trot to the other direction.  She went a little, but I let us end with walk and whoa and stand and back, things she does automatically.  I haven’t worked with her much in the past two weeks—teaching and all that goes into it fills my days, and the weekends pass so quickly.  But it was good to run a brush and my bare hands over the deepening plush of her coat and to walk alongside her as she walked and trotted, however reluctantly.  Like the moon.

We are reluctant to give up what’s left of good weather, but we know we’re on borrowed time.  There are still green blades of grass, and a few hardy plants on the hillside perk up again at mid day.  The first real snow will be a sharp wake up to winter for us, but perhaps not so bad, because we’ve had so much time to prepare.

Poetry Challenge 31

Honoring small things.

Glow, a frequent contributor to the poetry challenge, writes that her beloved kitty, Toklas, died yesterday.

So, write about something so small that we might overlook it, but that forms a kind of glue in daily life–the purr of a cat, the sound of a furnace in the background, the feel of a good writing pen, the taste of well-brewed coffee.  Write without sentimentality, but give the small thing its due, in honor of a yellow cat.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

Thinking of the Beatles’ song with the words, “marmalade skies”. As I head out mornings to feed the horses, I step out of the house to face the sunrise over the hills beyond the corral. The other day, the clouds were orange, smudged with a smoky purple, and the light in the sky shaded from a deep yellow below the clouds to a watery aqua where the sky met the hills of the Alaska Range. I searched for a word for what I was seeing and thought of marmalade—my favorite on toast—then remembered and understood the words to the song.

We are having an unusually warm October. The last bit of tomato vine abandoned in the greenhouse when we had the hard frost weeks ago is still alive, though a bit pale in its five-gallon planter. The pansies have started blooming again, and even the small white petunias, the bells, are putting out new white flowers. I want to re-plant the garden, but it’s an illusion. Night comes on earlier each day, and with the clear weather we’re having, there’s a splash of Milky Way across the black sky, with occasional meteorites streaking down. The moon’s a thumbnail now, a shaving of its former self. It rises later and spends more time at the horizon, flame colored through the dense air.

We spent the weekend pulling out moldy bales from our hay pile. I did some research on line and found that we had the perfect conjunction of events to make our pile mold—a later cutting with more sugars in the leaf; cut and cured on ground that had had lots of rain previously, taking more time to dry; baled as the weather was getting cooler, which meant not enough hot sun to dry thoroughly; then our hay crew stacking the bales too tightly in our barn; then the unexpectedly long warm spell so that the mold kept on spreading. The mold is already on the grass leaf. One source I found said that the mold counteracts bacteria on the living plant, but grows and spreads on the cut and wilting leaf, which is why the best hay weather is hot and dry so the hay dries before the mold can start growing. We found a cow farmer who could feed the hay to his cows—cows don’t get respiratory diseases from mold, it seems, and they have all those stomachs and tongues long enough to lick their own noses.

It could have been an unpleasant task, and the discovery of the mold and figuring out what to do were no fun. But my son and I and Peter from our horse club (and his mother Marina) and the two sons of our Nepali friend put on dust masks and went at it. The weather was clear and warm, the company pleasant and playful, and we had three trucks to carry the load. Mattie grabbed a few mouthfuls as we maneuvered the trucks past the corral fence, and it was gone. Now there’s a big empty space to fill—another puzzle, as the haying season is over here—and I’m getting plenty of suggestions from horse friends about where to find replacement hay. As for me, I’m mostly relieved not to be risking giving Mattie and Sam hay that’s a noseful of spores. We didn’t lose as many bales as I at first feared.

The weather won’t last, but no one’s complaining except the skiers. Even the dog mushers are enjoying exercising their teams harnessed to four-wheelers, running down the trails. The leaves are nearly all gone, though. It won’t be long.

Poetry Challenge 30

A Birthday Poem

It’s always a challenge to write an occasional poem without getting totally sappy.  So take the challenge–write about an event or occasion: birthday, wedding, farewell to travelers, etc.–without getting, well, mushy.  This works for me as an exercise in negative space–writing about what surrounds the occasion, such as details, objects, images, rather than about the occasion itself.

I’ll post my attempt at this tomorrow.  Send me yours.

(Happy Birthday, Ira)

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Here’s a poem in response to the prompt–for all September birthdays.  There seem to be a cluster of them. (By the way, I’m not sure what happens to the formatting of these poems when I place them in a post.  I’ll keep working on that! For now, I’ll try to trick the formatting with extra periods.)

.

The Way the Season Goes Sometimes:

.

a flock of yellow warblers

fills a willow just as a few commas

of yellow leaves appear;

then yellow in the birches,

on the hearts of zucchini leaves,

in the ring of petals of a late sunflower,

or an agate shaped tomato.

.

Then the sky: yellow to orange

to deep rose, the dusky smudge

of clouds on the horizon, above white

peaks, the jig-saw at the edge

of our sight.

.

We should have known. The season

teeters on brilliance; noon

gleams with light, the blue

stretch of sky, the tease–near

warmth–of September.

.

In our hurry, these days,

to stack wood, put away

the hose, eat all the lettuce

we can, something falls

from a pocket, or flutters

from a car door to the ground.

A few white flakes zig-zag

down. The things we drop

get buried in forgetful fluff

for months to come, wait

.

for our return,

shaking off the journey

through winter,

to emerge.

——————————————————-

And this from Claire:

30

A vegan sheet cake cooked with love
before I even knew you
braces, bowl cut, tie-dyed shirt
a photo that didn’t capture the beauty of the moment

the cook since married and gone
mother of two, distant and unknowable
those singing to you, now scattered across the country.
It is the last day of September and I’m in California
watching the fog push up against the hills
and reveling in the last days of summer.
But superimposed on the San Francisco sun is an eastern fall
and despite it all my mouth fills with the memory of melted wax on frosting.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

First snow.

In the morning, when I went to feed the horses, the sky was flat gray and a drop or two of drizzle fell—not enough to wet the hay I threw out to them, but enough to serve as a warning.  The greenhouse was still above 40 degrees and I gambled that the snow that had been predicted would hold off till I came home from school in the afternoon.  But as I was packing my laptop and finishing my coffee and getting ready to leave for my 9:45 class, I noticed the first bit of white fluff among the quickening rain, as if someone were shaking a down jacket with a tear—a few fat flakes mixed among the gray.  So, instead of leisurely swallows of coffee, I went out on the deck and brought in the still-blooming geraniums, the pots of thyme, oregano, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, then took scissors and snipped clusters of still-green sungold tomatoes from the deck tomato plants.

Tonight, I went to dinner with Sam’s former owner, Kathy, and Avrille, who rode Sam two summers ago and who just had a baby. Avrille’s mother was visiting the new, three-week-old grandson—the occasion for the dinner, and we sat in Kathy’s living room in the gray light of gathering dusk mixed with snow and talked about horses, babies, dogs.  Kathy’s elderly appaloosa, Prince, wandered in the yard outside the window, grazing on the last of the summer’s grass, his back gray from the rain.  I held Oscar, the baby, for a long time, feeling his sleepy breathing and letting myself drift on the conversation and the gathering night.

We forget about night in the summers here.  We expect to be outside in the light at all hours, in mild air, and amidst the rampant green of our gardens.  Now, after the fall equinox, we begin to realize the inevitable—night is overtaking us.  We are leaving the realm of the outer, the literal, the sun-edged and settling down to the dream-like state of winter.  Not yet, not quite yet—the leaves are still orange-gold, the grass green and spiky, the sunflower still has buds, the broccoli has new sprouts, and the tomatoes in the greenhouse are just turning from green to yellow to red.

When I got home, I gave the horses an extra layer of spruce shavings and filled a five-gallon jug with hot water and took it to the greenhouse to counteract what temperatures night might bring.  I said a thank-you to the still blooming petunias that may not make tonight.  I contemplated all the chores that need to be done before snow settles in for real for the winter: rolling up the hose, taking up the portable electric fence that let Mattie and Sam graze the lawn, covering the horse trailer with a tarp, plugging in the water tank heater, and, sigh, emptying out the greenhouse.  I’ll bring a few pepper and eggplant plants in to coax a bit more growth, and pick the remaining Black Krim, Chianti Rose, and Pompeii Roma tomatoes to ripen in a drawer for the rest of fall.   Then there are the root crops—and once again, I may be chopping them out from under a frozen top layer of dirt.

So much to do, and, now that there’s night, I just want to curl up under a quilt and sleep till spring.

We Tempt Our Luck

The title poem from my new chapbook,  We Tempt Our Luck:

We Tempt Our Luck

Where we walk

there’s sun over everything:

a field of purple vetch,

yarrow, the peppery smell

of July.  Still heat, still

glinting light, still green

leaves–jagged, feathery–

but the day’s slipped

a little south now;

beneath all, a whisper

of cool.

We know what will come.

The fields lie mowed, the barley

raked in gray-green rows

for the baler.  The next field’s

plowed for seeding.  The mushroom

backs of cranes move

like shadows, dinosaur

necks stretch down

for bits of grain, insects.

A boy sits in the road

beside them, writing, dreaming

wanting his luck to stay.

To order contact Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press, Stuart, VA

http://home.earthlink.net/~astoundingbeautyruffianpress

Poetry Challenge 29

Hidden Things

Yesterday, among the zucchini leaves, I found a large zuke, as long as my forearm, lying in the dirt under a yellowing leaf.  It had been there a while.  There were pale scallop-edged patches where voles had gnawed through the skin.  I had no idea it was there, and it felt like discovering a mysterious treasure.

So, write about something that has been hidden, but emerges–an object, a feeling, a person.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

A lovely evening tonight.

Around 10pm, I went out to take a bag of spruce shavings to the horses to bed down their run-in shed. The air was cooling enough that I wore my horse club hoodie, but I still wore shorts. The sky was still clear—had been clear since Thursday—and there was a deep aqua light in the northwest sky, fading to cobalt to the south. It was deep dusk, but I could see well enough to drag the black plastic bag of shavings under the fence to the run-in shed and divide it between the two stalls. As I walked back to the corral, I could see Sam’s coat gleam in the fading light where he nibbled the last of his evening’s hay. Mattie, in her side of the corral, was a blacker spot in the deepening darkness. Above the southeast horizon floated an egg-shaped gibbous moon, pale orange, as if about to hatch more of the deep yellow birch and aspen leaves that we’re seeing increase each day. As I walked past Sam, back to the house, it felt like a pause in time, as if the season had hit a balance, a perfect pose like the moment a dancer poses in arabesque on pointe and we catch our breath and believe she can stay in that balance forever. I could stay in this season forever if it would delay what is to come.

We were haying all weekend. Yesterday we went out to the Quist farm at the end of Rosie Creek Road, the fields spread out green on a rolling bench of land along the Tanana River. To get there, we drive along a pot-holed dirt road through spruce and birch, past five-acre “homesteads,” then suddenly there’s the farm, the green fields striped with darker raked hay or dotted with squares of ten bales that tip out of the small trailer towed by the baler. Yesterday, the hay was still too wet, so today we gathered up another crew: Mike, Ira, Tobin, Peter, me, and rattled through the dust and potholes to the farm, then filled the trucks one-by-one with brome hay. The bales were still a bit heavy but dry enough that they (I hope) won’t start to mold before freeze up.

It was nearly seventy—not too hot, but warm and dry enough to dry the hay. We took turns tossing and stacking, and those of us not driving a particular truck, sat on the bales as we drove along the field from square to square. Rufus the farm dog came running up to check on us sometimes, and at the end of the field, a flock of a half dozen sandhill cranes moved slowly over the cut grass, their necks snaked down to find insects in the dirt.

When we showed up in our yard with truckloads of hay, Sam whinnied. He’s in the front side of the corral today, though I’ve been switching them about once a week to keep them entertained. When Mattie’s in the front and hay arrives, she leans into the fence and stretches her neck as long as she can to grab a mouthful as the truck backs up to the hay barn. Sam stood and watched intently, waiting for us to bring some to him. This says a lot about the difference between the two.

After we stacked the hay—the harder part of the job. I made a big bowl of penne pasta with tomato and Italian sausage sauce and carrots and purple and yellow cauliflower from the garden as finger food. We sat on the deck in the gathering dark, looking out across the river at the Tanana flats—gold patches of bright birch and aspen, dark streaks of spruce—the gold and dark green together are especially dramatic now. I said, “Sometimes I wish it could stay like this for a whole season.” Usually these colors fade in a week or two, usually with the first September rains. Then I realized that if the yellow were around long enough, we’d get tired of it and long for snow—or, as I am now, for spring again.

Robert Frost knew about yellow things: “Nothing gold can stay,” he says in his tiny poem about early spring leaves, dawn, and the sweet melancholy of transitions. For now we revel in the gold of our leaves–like the sun reflecting back to us twice—and we store it up to get us through the dark winter days ahead.

Poetry Challenge 28

Today, walking to a meeting on campus, I heard a ruckus of cranes, but looked up and saw only blue sky.  I waited, and one V after another crested the hill.  I hollered, “Wrong way!  Go back!” as if that could stem the inevitable pull of dwindling light and creeping chill that is drawing them south.  As I walked by each building on campus, I saw small groups of people standing there, looking up, awed by the force of their collective calls, and each longing to reverse the day and leap back through time to spring.

So write about a sound you’ve heard that let you know something was about to change.  Or about a good-bye that was somehow mixed with a natural event,  such as the southern migration of sandhill cranes.

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This is from Cast of Thousands by way of Glow:

the night she left me
August fireflies lay in the dew
too cold and heavy to fly,
scattered like sparks from a fire
in the damp grass.
they lay glowing,
pulsing with light,
piteously sending love signals
to each other
but none could fly.
i assume their tiny insect hearts swelled
their fiery fly emotions surged
hopelessly mired
in wet, chill desire.
i watched her headlights
fill the night, then vanish
as she turned the corner.
the dark rolled around me
while tiny desperate lights
blinked and blinked and blinked.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

We’re into late summer weather here. Early fall, really. On the willows growing out of the side of the bank and along the roads and riverbanks, there are starting to be a few yellow leaves like bright commas among the dusty green.

Overhead, the sandhill cranes flock and circle, their wide-stretched wingspan, long necks, stick legs behind. Today, I walked to campus from the parking lot and a V of geese straggled overhead. They called to each other with that slightly desperate, questioning call they have, as if they are always lost: “Which way? I thought you knew? Now what?” The cranes sound like they are having more fun. They gargle out their call as if the air were delicious to them. I watched a group of them yesterday, circling on an eddy of air, revving themselves up for the long flight to Brownsville, where they overwinter in the fields and the Laguna Atascosa wildlife refuge. There were young ones among the flock and they seemed to be teasing each other, brushing wingtips and rolling away, then righting themselves and doing it all over again.

A friend once told me that when cranes fly over, it’s good luck. We’re out standing under cranes as much as we can right now, storing all the luck we can.

And we sure do seem to need it. I’m still reeling from the loss of my friend, mentor, and colleague, Roy Bird. And then there’s Teddy Kennedy, whose life in politics has been an ongoing presence in the political consciousness of a whole generation. And then there’s the rain, the cold, and, the true mark of the coming of fall in the Interior, dark nights. We mark the end of summer with the sighting of the first star. It usually coincides with first frost.

We’ve avoided frost here in the hills, but some friends have lost their gardens already. I still have red and green romaine, purple and orange carrots, cauliflower, zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, kale, potatoes, and, in the greenhouse coming ripe just in time, luscious Chianti Rose tomatoes.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem after a walk in Creamers’ Field among cranes, called, “We Tempt Our Luck”—the cranes, the first hint of winter chill, and the boy in the poem who was writing to save his luck all wove into the poem. It’s now the title poem of a chapbook of poems that is just out from Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press, in Virginia (see Writing Links for their website). Now, I’m thinking about how much hope it’s possible to have, cranes or no cranes—then thinking of Teddy, who was a committed optimist, or he wouldn’t have reached out to as many people or crossed as many party lines as he did. I’ll dedicate some of my back-to-school energy this fall to his memory and to Roy, who reminds me to speak truth to power and to do it from my most genuine self.

Yesterday, speaking of hope, I went out on the deck as the light was beginning to turn that watery gray it gets when it’s about to pour rain or when it’s serious that night will come soon. I could see an orange tinge to the sky, flat with clouds. Somewhere behind me the north-west setting sun skipped over the northern curve of the earth and shot a ray into the rusty gray sky, arcing a perfect rainbow across the sky. Because of the orange tint in the clouds, the blues and greens were tough to pick out. But the reds, yellows, oranges glowed. A strange beauty, after much gloomy rain.

Today, a scrubbed blue sky. And the cranes.