Reluctance

Andrew Wyeth

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods

   And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

   And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

   And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

   Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

   And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

   When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

   No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

   But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man

   Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

   To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

   Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost

A dear family member of mine has recently died. With his passing, it feels as if a season of my life has ended. As if the time of plenty, of warmth is over; and I look around, surprised at the change, even though I expected it. Frost speaks so gracefully, “ I have climbed the hills of view/ And looked at the world, and descended;/I have come by the highway home,/And lo, it is ended.”. That‘s how I feel. And like he says, I don’t want to “bow and accept the end”, not so quickly or easily – no. I want to walk and look while thinking and remembering, I want to soak up all the benefits, all the riches of knowing and loving S, I want to stay here awhile and be still.

For You

Andrew Wyeth

	For You The peace of great doors be for you. Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs. Wait for the great hinges. The peace of great churches be for you. Where the players of loft pipe organs Practice old lovely fragments, alone. The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather. The peace of great prairies be for you. Listen among windplayers in cornfields, The wind learning over its oldest music. The peace of great seas be for you. Wait on a hook of land, a rock footing For you, wait in the salt wash. The peace of great mountains be for you, The sleep and the eyesight of eagles, Sheet mist shadows and the long look across. The peace of great hearts be for you, Valves of the blood of the sun, Pumps of the strongest wants we cry. The peace of great silhouettes be for you, Shadow dancers alive in your blood now, Alive and crying, “Let us out, let us out.” The peace of great changes be for you. Whisper, Oh beginners in the hills. Tumble, Oh cubs –tomorrow belongs to you. The peace of great loves be for you, Rain, soak these roots; wind, shatter the dry rot. Bars of sunlight, grips of the earth, hug these. The peace of great ghosts be for you, Phantoms of night-gray eyes, ready to go To the fog-star dumps, to the fire-white doors. Yes, the peace of great phantoms be for you, Phantom iron men, mothers of bronze, Keepers of the lean clean breeds. Carl Sandburg From Carl Sandburg to all of us embarking on the open door of 2019. The peace of old and new, and new appreciation of old. Old books, old places, old earth, old landscapes and seascapes, old horizons, old journeys – may they all be new to us. May we begin and begin and begin again. Each day a new moment. Happy New Year!

On the Island

Andrew Wyeth, "Starfish"

On the Island

After a night of wind we are surprised

by the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea

and leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore

this way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass

among the low whittled bushes, listening

to crickets, to the whisk of the small waves,

the rattling back of stones. “Observation,”

our Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science.

Look all around you. Some beaches

may be quite barren except for things washed up.”

A buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb

cloudy but unbroken. For an hour

my daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck.

She sings the song she’s just invented:

Everybody knows when the old days come.

Although it is October, today falls into the shape

of summer, that sense of languid promise

in which we are offered another

and then another spell of flawless weather.

It is the weather of Sundays,

the weather of memory, and I can see

myself sitting on a porch looking

out at water, the discreet shores

of a lake. Three or four white pines

were enough of a mystery, how they shook

and whispered, how at night I felt them

leaning against my window, like the beginning

of a story in which children must walk

deeper and deeper into a dark forest,

and are afraid, yet calm, unaware

of the arrangements made for them to survive.

My daughter counts her shells and stones,

my wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise

an old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky

to the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they

fold around rocks humped up out of the sea.

I can turn the wheel and blur it all

into a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light.

“A steady push of wind,” we read in the book,

“gives water its rolling, rising and falling motion.

As the sea moves up and down, the wave itself

moves forward. As it nears the shore friction

from the bottom causes it to rise higher

until it tips forward in an arc and breaks.”

On the table in front of the house

is the day’s collection: sea-glass

and starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle—

some to be taken home, arranged in a box,

laid on a shelf, later rediscovered, later

thrown away, casually, without regret,

and some of it, even now, to be discarded,

like the lesser stones, and the pale

chipped shells which are so alike

we can agree that saving one or two will be enough.

Lawrence Raab

 
 

“The weather of memory”. This is a poem of reflection, of looking forward, looking back, saving and discarding, life moments coming and going like waves washing in and out…  The writing seems easy and effortless, but the more times I read it, the more art I find. “Observation”. Yes, exactly. Observing the poem. Maybe the poem also is, for us, something to be found and collected together with others, taken home – certainly I am arranging them here, on a kind of shelf. Poems like reminders of thoughts, of days, poems to be treasured and displayed. That is my goal for this blog, I would say.( But one or two are not enough.)