A bluebird's saurian eye

Cherry leaves unfurl 

unblemished. 

A dark-armored bumble 

rumbles, 

aground 

in violets, 

A saurian eye of bluebird,

chill obsidian, 

tracks it 

and waits for prey 

less massy and be-weaponed.

The Love Note to 2014, April 14 - 27

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I love skunk cabbage, a warm-blooded plant,
which unfurls to push away the winter,
and the pollen-dusty pompoms of the maple trees.

Porter as Anselmo the muleteer in The Man from La Mancha

I love a good hike sweat,
and the burn of trembling muscles,
and air drawn to inner-most depth of chest, deafeningly,
for a view of hawks or distant islands.

I love to see my boys becoming men

to hear the teachers say,
so comfortable in his skin,

he stands so confidently to speak,
to say his piece,
and the others - they listen.

I love their unabated curiosity -
and how their strong and agile minds
can prise out more and more
from this world
that so many take for granted.

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The Love Note to 2014, March 31 - April 13

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I love the thawed earth - 

to rake the naked garden a darker shade,
and crumble clods between my fingers;
to find the dirt no longer dormant,
full of creatures.

I love to see music being made,
Nico at the keyboard, his fingers certain
with some secret understanding that I don't share,
Porter's baritone that swells the harmonies he builds with his companions,
Monica hums a snatch of song as her coffee cools.

I love the poets whose songs have been such fearsome company:
Uncompromising Dylan,
Pink Floyd along the precipice of sanity,
Johnny Cash enrapturing on redemption,
Joan Armatrading, Tom Waits, Van Morrison,
and all the others who companied my own triumphs and turmoils.

===============================================

The Love Note to 2014, March 18 - 30

I love the sudden sproutings of nieces and nephews - re-seen after months,
limbs stretched,
eyes deeper with questions and idiosyncrasies.

I love coming home.

I love this late March rain that pounds and pools in rippling, unstill puddles,
worms uncoil in earth made wet,
and seed casements rupture from root and stem.

I love this love of dirt,
some strange inkling that I might yet be a gardener.

I love the purring of cats,
their ludicrous headbutts,
the way their passions run to tip of tail and twitch of ear.

I love the kindness of my sons, which just might be the most important thing.

I love the charm that Monica exerts on people that she meets,
because I glimpse what made me love so irrevocably.

The Love Note to 2014, March 11-17, in Costa Rica

at Rio Celeste

I love the Oropendola in their raucous colonies of woven, swaying nests - these birds whose calls ring out as penny whistle, bamboo chime, and snare drum.

I love the frigate birds whose easy grace on cliffside, seaside air belie their silhouettes so sharp and weapon-ish.

The gaudiness of honey creepers, tanagers, and colibri, fierce feathers flashing like they're made of molten metal.

I love the din of howler monkeys that hootfully proclaim a sprawling forest valley as their own.

I love to take an unknown twisting road through woods and farms and dusty villages,

To stop at some dark and shaded soda for beans and rice and icy fruit refresco.

To have my sons along so some of this weaves into who they are and will become.

The Love Note to 2014: February 16 to March 10

February 16 to March 10:

I love words.

These baskets woven of sound - these containers for some nugget that we have cut from the stream of our thinking.  We click and hiss and hammer the air and another brain catches our thoughts.

I love the murmur of a place where people gather - air vibrating as these woven baskets and their cargoes of meanings move among minds.

I love that humans play with this elaborately crazy adaptation - we joke, we sing, we pun.

I love to travel to places visited long ago.  To see the peaks of Olympus rising above the Puget Sound and think, "Oh, I'd forgotten how they loom over the city in light like this."  To see old friends who are sudden years farther down their paths and have them see me.  To replace memories that are tattered, blurred and incomplete, with new ones.

I love when memories of place get crossed - the drizzle of Seattle so exactly like the soft rain of Cork.  

I love to travel to places new.  In Costa Rica, there is a place upon the skirt of a volcano where a little seam of white turns a river an opalescent blue.  And markets where the fruit is strange and the seller must explain what parts to eat - tomate de palo, cas, manzana de agua, rambutan . . .

The Love Note to 2014, February 9-15

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I love a breakfast of sourdough bread, warm and with butter,

and black, black coffee.

I love how sunlight ricochets from icicles,

how snow etches itself upon the twisty trunks of sassafras.

I love our winter wren whose summer song bursts out in delusion or denial,

the noisy jays of winter, who'll go quiet as the summer nears,

their sudden alarms that scatter other birds like shrapnel.

The Love Note to 2014 - February 2nd to 8th

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I love the collaboration of ink and pen and paper.

I love the heft of leather-bound journal
when it's time to trek and travel.

I love maps,
and a journal that is a cartography of living

an inked approximation of place - moment - memory.

and empty pages
that are as smooth as possibility.

The Love Note to 2014, January 26th to the 1st of February

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I love:
the creak of leather,
its acceptance and resistance to all the twists of use,
this wisdom, which old leather has accrued.

I love:
cotton, worn to ghostly softness, before the fibers part.

I love that scientists admitted umami, a savory fifth taste upon the tongue alongside sweet, bitter, sour, salt.

I love the clumsiness of talk of tastes and flavors,
a language to be made that we've not made yet,
but which Monica speaks so wordlessly.

Bushy Beard lichen - Usnea strigosa

Read the rest below . . .

I love January - 19th to 25th

-

I love a joke well-told.

I love the solving of a riddle, that moment when the rigid, false facade collapses and an unexpected figure strides smiling forth.

I love:

the migration of birds

the orioles squabbling in Costa Rican palms while juncos forfeit their taiga to claim these rich south woods of winter.

the dormancy of things that stay - creatures burrowed deep to sleep.

the fierce biding of stemless roots and leafless twigs.

the genius of a queen bee, hot within her cluster, sipping summer's honey.





 . . . The whole love poem below the fold . . .

More winter loves, January 12-18

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I love that moment when a friend averts their eyes - to gather the threads of the story they intend to tell -  and we lean in to catch it.

I love the resonance of raindrops doinking gently on my black and broad-brimmed Amish hat.

I love that toads live in our cellar - warty house guards who take crickets and bring good luck - or so I'm happy to believe.

I love the eight-eyed spiders who stalk prey in high corners and leave no cobweb behind.  Jumping spiders - too quick - I love their way of moving - jerky little teleports.

I love the sunbeam that re-makes a room to a sudden work of art.  I love my wife's drowsy, feline pleasure in the warmth of slanting sunshine.

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A week of winter loves

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We can lament the time-wasting aspects of life on-line - but I'm linked with a far-flung circle of friends and phantasms though facebook posts and bloggings.   One of these friends passed on a new year's idea for keeping a jar and every day slipping in a note about something good that happened - so at some point you can empty that jar like a piggy bank of happy moments.  Another friend came to a poem exchange with Stephen Dunn's Loves, in which he rambles on and on about the things he loves.

I thought I would try to combine those ideas, and every day write down a single thing that I love.  At the end of the year, I might have the draft of a mighty poem - or at least I'll have had another tool to chip away at pessimism and distraction.  Here's a first installment.

A week of loves . . . January 5 - 11 . . .

I love the cold so bitingly mad that wind-tossed branches clack together as metal rods.  I love the mist-drizzle needles' subcutaneous dance in the blood-heat of my cheeks.  I love the gray, wet, chill air, which can be snatched away like a magician-scarf to shock me into knowing light and sun-warmth.

I love the arrogance of chickadees and tufted titmice - tiny, feathered, fearless, dinosaurian.

I love the skepticism of cats.

I love how Irish stout will not be rushed - whose churn from foamy brown to velvet black forces one to wait and contemplate.

I love the victory of laughter over shyness.

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Brooklyn Sojourn

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Monica and I have both been under-employed and money, as they say, has been tight.  But life has to be lived and so last Friday we headed into New York on the train.  Nico mostly idled the trip away on a little game player, Monica dozed and thumbed through National Geographic.  I read through Scientific American and stared out the window as autumnal, coastal Connecticut clicked and rattled by.

At 6 on a Friday evening Grand Central Station was an anthill that'd been poked with a stick, and the subway was over-heated and dense with commuters.  Nico wilted and went pale.

But in Brooklyn old friends waited, and our Poet, Denver, was preparing dinner -- soft red beans and noodles upon kale. And the Actress, Rhonda who's been swallowed by the PTA, together with the Girl, who's eight, set the table while we chatted, and made room for fresh bread torn into chunks and a platter of tomatoes, herbs and fresh mozzarella.  When the beans were ready we gathered at the table, made the Girl and Nico put down their books, and we ate.  And when it was down to crumbs and we refilled our wine and ale and water we told jokes and riddles and funny stories - on and on. Nico was on a roll,

from the idiotic . . .

Knock, knock
Who's th-
Mooo!  Interrupting Cow! 

to the cruel . . .

Where do you find a dog with no legs?
Right where you left it.

to the obscure . . . 

What does the 'B' in Benoit B. Mandlebrot stand for?
Benoit B. Mandlebrot.

It's one of the things people did before the entertainment industry colonized the home, and it felt good to laugh and strain our brains.  But eventually we'd exhausted our collective supply of jokes and riddles and so the Girl and Nico returned to their books.   (Occasionally, I would hear them quietly harmonizing some pop song together, each of them with their nose in their book.)  The rest of us talked into the night of family and politics and art and people and ideas.  And I switched from ale to water and eventually to sleep.

I woke early, but Denver had woken even earlier and fetched bread.  There was steel-cut oatmeal on the stove and smooth, black coffee.  After breakfast, he and Monica and I walked the two miles from Carroll Gardens to Prospect Park - along the streets of brownstones, and across the opalescent green scar of the Gowanus Canal by the South Brooklyn Casket factory.  The Park Slope brownstones were decorated for Halloween and little children in helmets rode on zippy three-wheeled scooters.  At the farmer's market he talked with his favorite farmers and bought duck eggs, obscure radishes, greens and apples.  We carried chocolate croissants home.

Later, I was in the park with Nico and the Girl.  A troop of brown-skinned boys ranging from about 8 to 13 were doing parkour on a boulder and the remains of a fallen tree - standing back flips, runs and twisting jumps.  They were free-range (no parents), charismatic and two were richly foul-mouthed.  The Girl and Nico sat rapt, partly in admiration of the skill and partly in fear that they were going to see someone die or break a bone.

More of our visit below the fold . . . .

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For this house in the woods, 

it's the season 

when mice try to move in, 

and the cats enact 

lengthy, 

drawn-out 

executions.

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Death among the parsnip flowers

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Here's a welcome creature nectar-sipping at my parsnip flowers. 

 Trichopoda pennipes, called the feather-legged fly.

Another bane for garden pests.

Drawn in by blossoms of the carrot family, 

she'll stay to hunt the squash bugs.

FInding one unwary, she'll lay an egg or two beneath its plated abdomen.

A hatching larva will burrow in and set to drinking up the tissues of its host.

A happy maggot soon bursts the carapace of the victim bug, 

leaving it to die.

feather-legged fly

But in the meantime, this feather-legged fly had best beware,

Because among the florets lurk those thirsty eight-legged killers.

A spider has snagged an unwary wasp and drinks.

But this gorging huntress had best beware, 

because orange-marked spider wasps

(Arachnospila)

are in the parsnip flowers and they have eggs to lay.

She'll sting a spider with a paralyzing venom, and drag her off down snugly to a burrow,

where she will lay a single egg within the body.  

Sealing off the burrow, she'll fly away to hunt again and drink of flower nectar.

And the grub, hatching in the dark, following its instinct will eat around the crucial organs, 

because the spider, after all, is still alive,

and it wouldn't do to have it die and rot before the wasp is ready to emerge.

But even in that spider flesh, the larval Arachnospila had best beware.

For there are carrot wasps among the parsnip flowers.

A carrot wasp (genus Gasteruption)

She drinks the vanilla'd nectar of the flowers now,

but soon she'll want to lay her eggs.

Needle-like she cannot sting - that spike has other uses.

A wasp or solitary bee has a hidden stash to feed its young - 

perhaps a buried, living, grub-infested spider. 

She finds that stash

and that long spike slides down the burrow and leaves a solitary egg.

Her invading grub may eat that spider and if it can, a burrow-mate as well.

(On what basis do you expect to find this universe in the hands of a 

benevolent god?)

Rhubarb's gaudy decay

_

I carved into the rhubarb

to make a backyard wine.

Discarded leaves, 

their pigments 

and their poisons

gaudily decay.

photos by A Brown

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On January 19th we were in Glendale for Esperanza's memorial service.  The Little Church of the Flowers at Forest Lawn was filled to overflowing.  Many of us were dressed in bright colors, to go with all the flowers and honor her memory as a lover of color.  Several of us read pieces that we had written, myself, her sister Alicia, her cousin Lida. Clara had composed a slide show from pictures she'd gathered.  Monica read a poem that she had written.  The Mendoza twins, Carlos and Mauricio sang the song Amigo, as she had asked them to.

The service was beautiful and powerful and Esperanza would have loved it.

Below is the poem that Monica read:

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I've often compared humankind's collective intelligence to that of a plague of toxic lichen -- mindless, yet effectively destructive.  Brian Kaller's girl takes a more constructive view: 

As we talked we decided that the rivers were the blood, the rocks were the bones, soil the flesh, and animals were the nerves.

“What kind of germs are we?”

It depends what kind of person you are, I said. Some people have been like the bad germs, making the world sicker.

“Can we be like the white blood cells?” she asked, knowing that they patrol the body and heal it. 

. . . “I’d like to be a white blood cell when I grow up,” she said.

I have to think Gaia's immune system would welcome such allies.

_

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Garden Blogging, first of June . . . 

Man . . . who seem’d so fair, 

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,       

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, 

Who trusted God was love indeed       

And love Creation’s final law—       

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

(Tennyson, In Memoriam)

For me, there are many, many reasons to garden without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, not least of which are the chemicals that I don't care to ingest and the corporations who make and market the stuff.  Gardening organically also calls for certain kinds of attention and knowledge and attitude that I find interesting and appealing.  You have to pay attention to what's going on down there or your plants can quickly end up devoured by your competitors.  It may happen anyhow, and such is life.

But I have to admit that I take a kind of bloodthirsty pleasure in the carnage that takes place in the garden. Spiders spin their traps or stalk their prey; wasps of every size and temperament patrol constantly; harvestmen pick their way slowly through the foliage; dragonflies careen through the airspace.  Catbirds, phoebes, chipping sparrows, wrens, swoop down to snatch the caterpillars.  I go out and I do what I can to help.  Right now I'm picking off the tortoise beetles and killing the cucumber beetles - and I'll do more of the same once their larvae hatch.  I'll put out beer for the voracious slugs.  But I like the fact that any leaf-muncher has to navigate a nightmarish scene of predation and danger - and the same goes on underground out of sight.

When we use pesticides we can devastate the munchers, and there's a clear, momentary satisfaction to that.  But we also devastate all these predators.  And it is a truism of nature that prey always reproduce faster and more nimbly than their predators do.  Gardeners who rely on chemical warfare and who destroy these allies, fall into a trap.  If they let up on the chemicals, the munchers can invade in vast numbers, without any natural enemies.  Waiting for the predators to re-establish themselves can mean a whole crop lost.  So I look with pleasure and satisfaction at my active, murderous allies among the leaves of the garden.  

Now if I can just train the cats to murder the voles but leave the toads and garter snakes in peace I could consider them on board as well.

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The days have not been cold - but short and damp and drear

In slippery embrace, planets and moons and rubble-rings have whirled and wobbled

A rocky clockwork turned

and a solstice sun rose up, crisp and white and promise-ful.

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