Category: issues of nature and environment

AFTER READING W. HENRY FOX TALBOT’S ACCOUNT OF HOW “NATURAL OBJECTS CAN BE MADE TO DELINEATE THEMSELVES WITHOUT THE AID OF THE ARTIST’S PENCIL”

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[beauty] compels awe and awe/is well known for its capacity to silence           

—Louise Gluck

I went at dinner, summer evening before nightshade and the persistent red eye of the sun, a stoplight above the foothills in the white haze of smoke and ozone of a year. I pulled into the gravel parking lot for the southside of the reservoir, the “wild” side where speed boats and water bikes don’t dare venture past the signs for low water, for hidden objects. This time the riparian cusp between river and woodland, between marsh and field where the rangers lead out plodding strings of horses had shrunk so much that the ridge at the knife edge of trees rose above the water like a fin. What means the most to me here?   Just a few days earlier, I had watched a young boy paddle his kayak after his father, yelling into the very trees where I, too, had paddled after everything —kingfisher and white-billed coots and the rookeries of egrets. I thought of Talbot who lamented upon seeing his first “photogenic drawings” how they were “destined to have such a brief existence,” and how beautiful, he said, the light made them. And so, in silence, I watched the long-boned heron.

Note: Talbort, a scientist and linguist in the 1800s, used nitrate of silver to create an image on paper. Sunlight on the paper would turn the nitrate of silver dark, while the shadow of the image would remain white.  He, at first, could only view his images by candlelight— daylight destroyed the image.  He finally hit upon the combination of a salt solution on the paper that sometimes transformed the  “shadow-image” into shades of lilac.  He discovered, too, that a wash of iodine turned the image a “very pale primrose yellow,” which, when set near the heat of a fire, turned a ”full gandy yellow.”  Cold, the image returned to light.     

Mist Nets: After the Uvalde Shooting (Finalist for Terrain.org’s 13th Annual Contest for Creative Nonfiction)

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Mist Nets: After the Uvalde Shooting at Terrain.org.

On April 20, 1999, when the Columbine shooters were hunting through the school library, our nine-year-old daughters were locked in an elementary school gymnasium a mile away from Columbine highschool. I was in a meeting at a company I would soon leave. This time, on May 24, 2022, when the Uvalde shooter killed two teachers and nineteen children, one of my daughters was teaching fourth grade in the Roaring Fork Valley and I was taking photos of killdeer at Yellowstone National Park and wouldn’t know of the shooting until we drove home.

The essay I wrote, Mist Nets: After the Uvalde Shooting, was one of four finalists for the Terrain.org 13th annual contest in creative nonfiction and is now published on their website. The essay started for me when I ran across this quote by Roland Barthes: “Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is all.” I think it is the enormity of “that is all” that carried me forward into this essay.

Catching Light for the New Year

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What We’ve Lost: The Species Declared Extinct.

                        —Scientific American

elk near cabin

I’ve learned some are so lost that there is no common name to list for them, like the beautifully named have, like Dusty Sea Snake or Long-Spine Bream or Lily-of-the-Valley-Tree. I walked out one morning into the sodden grass, name-less to me still and heavy from the night’s rain, the golden light I’d come with my camera to shoot fractured and paling. All summer, before my half-stepping there, through the fields, the grasshopper sparrows darted white-tailed in front of me, floating just beneath my hand’s reach, just out of the dark canopies of grass I draped back, what I learned to do so carefully, fearful for their newly-born, their freckled eggs broken into frog-mouthed nestlings, yellow-beaked and gone now, but for these words.

Golden Mole or Sheetweb Weaver or Tall Thimbleweed:  what have I mourned that’s lost? A mother’s life? A child’s love? 

The roar and whistle of a bull elk zippered over the spiraling trees through the golden light. Somewhere, my hunting neighbors were haunting their little acres of woods as if the gods had turned them from men to trees, to camouflage and coyote urine, to blue metal rifles and muzzle-loaders. Again and again, I heard the bull elk calling, and so I blew, as I once had as a child, past a blade of grass I held tightly between my thumbs, the sound like broken glass when it silences the squalling jays or sometimes like yearning. 

I kept holding my eye against the camera’s eye, waiting, crouched there I don’t know how long beneath the long-limbed aprons of these trees. But then, the bull elk wandered in from the east, what I wanted to save, and it gazed to the north, all lazy torpor amid the sun spill, its rack of years I could count and count lit up.

So beautiful and named is this elk I am finding again in the heartbreak of firing leaves, in this list of the lost I keep carrying—Flame Tetra and Golden Toad, Mystic Leaf-Roller. Cold and metal-smooth was the air the elk and I breathed that day and then I opened the camera’s shutter to fix the shadows, the “most transitory of things,” Talbot said, with light.

A NOTE:

from Henry Fox Talbot (1839) who invented ‘photogenic drawings’ in which nitrate of silver is brushed over paper and the paper is then placed in sunlight, with the shadow of an object cast over it. The light blackens the paper except for where it is shadowed:

“Now, since nothing prevents him from simultaneously disposing, in different positions, any number of these little camerae, it is evident that their collective results, when examined afterwards, may furnish him with a large body of interesting memorials, and with numerous details which he had not had himself time either to note down or delineate.”

3 a.m. and taking the new puppy out to pee beneath a waning moon

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one by one flowers open, then fall
Wang Wei, 701-761

moon snail shell

I suppose it was the 3:00 a.m. mewling, the new puppy nudging me into suburban dark and moon milk, that made me think of the moon snail propped on my study window sill between the photos of a moth orchid and the winter’s Wilson’s Snipe I fashioned into postcards. How long now has this moon snail gathered dust there, shifted my afternoon sun from light to richest shadow? I found it, nameless to me, at the edge of tidal spume and broken cockle shells, and carried it from the sea to here— a spiral in my palm perfect of nipple-brown apex and hollow umbilicus where once a foot and seven rows of teeth and feathered gill lay. Leonard keeps asking me why we are here. Why this cup of tea? Why this pen we write with beneath a soda straw width of galaxies uncountable? Nights, the predatory moon snail plows nocturnal shores, drills the shells of clams with holes we’ll string and wear. Or it lays a thousand eggs into collars of sand, shaped, we’ll say,  into ones our priests wear. And now this puppy, everything new to it: the curly cues of dried snail and earthworm it finds beneath the gutter spout. Or the blue bachelor button in sudden fall bloom it chews happy at the driveway’s edge. Once conjured with my camera into dark and shadow, this moon snail pixelated into swirls of pigeon-blue and rose-flesh: somewhere, someplace else, a constant sea rain of tiny moon snail and this moon I blink beneath.

Finding a Cabbage White Butterfly at Castlewood Canyon

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unless Soul clap its hands and sing
—William Butler Yeats

Researchers found that the small cabbage white butterfly likely originated in eastern Europe and then spread into Asia and Siberia when trade was increasing along the Silk Road.

from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

I suppose it’s the name, not the butterfly’s, that caught me first, Silk Road. Then the butterfly’s, lowly cabbage-eater I keep imagining clinging, white-winged and green speckle-eyed, to a shining hem or a sleeve woven from a silk cocoon some ancient silk farmer boiled just before the silk worm’s emergence. That strand of silk, kept intact by that farmer’s boiling, spun longer than this walking path in a sunken canyon, itself millions of years old. And that Silk Road? Some seven thousand miles away and gone centuries with ancient dynasties and Ottoman Empires and Xanadu courts. Where was I now? With an ancient farmer eating a boiled silkworm and a cabbage white butterfly stowing itself away across worlds and tall ships and iron horses to be, here, with me. No wonder Leonard calls me from sleep at three a.m., no moon for a poet, to stand groggy and awed on a cabin porch beneath a universe called Observable, despite the billions of galaxies we still can’t see spiraling over the Milky Way— our Scattered Straw, our Silver River, Way of  Birds. And so. It’s the cabbage white butterfly I am thinking of because a Master Birder told me of beautiful birds in a canyon and I went, to catch in singing the White-throated Swift or the Lazuli Bunting or the Plumbeous Vireo I could hang extant in a simple black frame by my kitchen window. But all I could find was a butterfly, plain as a moth and hanging upside down on a purple weed. Instar is a molting, I have read, the cabbage white butterfly’s exoskeleton shed every time for something new. Now the head black. Now the yellow clypeus of the face. Now those tiny green dots I love.

cabbage white butterfly on flower blossom
Pieris rapae

Late Summer Wasps

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One by one flowers open, then fall.
Wang Wei

My ears are thick with them, the yellow jackets levitating out of this vole hole to hover through our scarecrows of gold banner and harebell. Murmuration is a word even without the starlings’ imprint above this leaf light. It is almost too beautiful to write: the birds I cannot see clustering at night beneath the Milky Way, river of light, their absence silence, and then the wasps I thought bees vibrating over the wet leaves, the pulpy flies, the destroying angels I’ve walked through. These wasps fly in and out beneath the metal sky into the dark cupboards of earth, thousands, while I plunge my arms through bees snout-deep in late blossom, everything and me until the first glittering frost alive.  

Bee in Blossom
bee in blossom

On Beauty and Finding a Dead Flicker

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[Beauty] compels awe, and awe
Is well known for its capacity to silence.
Louise Glück

       

I’ve been thinking about beauty and how these blue birds ahead of me keep throwing themselves off the aspen snags.  Like a hinge, the mind already calling them ‘beautiful” and “sky,” though I don’t know really what beauty is or how to make it so in a poem about a gravel lane I keep writing. Leonard never sees the bluebirds, though he wants to, but, every day, I walk into them, little chips of sky I might touch. When Leonard was a boy, his mother taught him to sing a song about pockets and falling stars and he sings it to me now, when we are happiest. In just this hour, fall has towed in its clouds like blue barges. Beautiful. And I am remembering the earliest summer morning, not in this here, not in this now: tree swallows flushed above the sedge and a guttering of flickers. And now this perfect silhouette in the dirt I thought to photograph at my feet because there was light and there were wings and nothing to grieve, door nor earth.

flicker impression in the dirt made of feathers

The Butterfly: Apiculus and a Poem

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I found this on a flowering weed in Castlewood Park on a day I was looking for birds. Butterfly? Moth? To be honest, I didn’t know. And then I learned that the butterfly has a bulb at the end of its antenna, unlike the moth and its feathered one, and a hooked tip called the “apiculus.” The name of this butterfly? Such beautiful names to wander through: Swallowtails and Hairstreaks, Elfins and Metalmarks and Gossamer-winged. Just the names begin to find a poem. This little guy is part of the Grass Skippers Family, perhaps a Least Skipper, weak in the wings, or an Orange Skipperling, its eggs orange-ringed and its larva rolling up in a single blade of grass. I don’t really care which butterfly it is: I woke up and couldn’t sleep and now a coyote has wandered down the suburban drainage ditch a block from our house to sing and I’ve been thinking about poetry and found this poem by Pavel Friedmann, who wrote this one day in 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp beneath a white chestnut and gave it to me, tonight, and now me to you:

The Butterfly

He was the last. Truly the last.
Such yellowness was bitter and blinding
Like the sun’s tear shattered on stone.
That was his true colour.
And how easily he climbed, and how high,
Certainly, climbing, he wanted
To kiss the last of my world.

I have been here for seven weeks,
‘Ghettoized’.
Who loved me have found me,
Daisies call to me,
And the branches also of the white chestnut in the yard.
But I haven’t seen a butterfly here.
That last one was the last one.
There are no butterflies, here, in the ghetto.

https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/the-butterfly-by-pavel-friedmann/

Octopus on a Sea Dock: New Poem at Split Rock Review

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this lovely image popped up from Split Rock Review on Facebook
with the link to my poem

So another prompt-inspired poem, this one from an April 2021 National Poetry Prompt at NaPoWriMO:

“Go to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and choose a word to work with.” I chose “onism”: awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience, which seemed apropos for that past year’s solitude. And then I thought about imagination and memory and went places I never expected, certainly one of the joys of writing poetry.

Octopus on a Sea Dock

It floated out from a sea bucket
into the silver spilt water
of the sea dock we’d come to visit,
so quiet at our feet
that the fishermen nearby were oblivious,
their fishing poles . . .

Read the rest here at Split Rock Review

Pre-orders for Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic are open until November 29. Flying Beneath the Dog Star was a semi-finalist for the Finishing Line Press 2020 Open Chapbook Contest. The chapbook, fingers-crossed for a lightening of the shipping boat snafus, comes out at the end of January 2022.

Morning on the Cabin Porch

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My beautiful visiting bee this morning reminded me of this poem I wrote last spring. It will be part of my chapbook, Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic, to be published this January by Finishing Line Press.

The hummingbird mistakes
me for a flower: something
half-wan and camouflaged
in a wild iris shirt.
The aspens riddle my slant
of sun like snakes of shade.
Far off,  past the pines,
a meadowlark trills
from the draw where, yesterday,
I found bear scat fresh,
flies swarming it.
I walked, clapping my hands
at the dark of woods
until they hurt.
Now the air stirs.
A hummingbird zips
past the porch, circles,
hovers, a tiny god at my face.
I am all blossom and sepal,
sweet petal and wing dust.
And at my feet, a tiny bee
crawls for the first time.