Dogs - June 20, 2010

Over the wide field

the dark deer went running,

five dogs screaming

at his flanks,

and his heels,

my own two darlings

among them

lunging and buckling

with desire

as they leaped

for the throat

as they tried

and tried again

to bring him down...

At the lake

the deer plunged...

he clambered

up the far shore.

The dogs

moaned and screeched

they flung themselves

on the grass

panting and steaming.

It took hours

but finally...

they woke

from fitful naps

they stepped

in their old good natures

toward us

look look

into their eyes...

here is such happiness when you speak their names!

here is such unforced loved!

here is such shyness such courage!

here is the shining rudimentary soul

here is hope retching, the world as it is

here is the black the red the bottomless pool

I have heard countless stories spoken in regretful tones from others who speak about the killing their dogs have done. Mild mannered and love-giving companions turn into frenzied packs and kill other dogs and cats in the home, not to mention the unsuspecting prey in neighborhoods, fields, and wild places. Knowing the nature of dogs I wonder why then people keep them, for they can do so much harm to what you love and what is beautiful. Their wildness cannot be easily tamed. Maybe the humans aren't trying hard enough. Maybe, just maybe, we relish their wildness and somewhere in our co-evolved human/dog DNA we don't want them to quit hunting - for their hunting is our hunting. We recall when we ran to survive, and this confused does not die easily. We look into their eyes and see reflected back how hard hope is to come by when love lives so easily with violence.

Where or to whom do you love, and yet also turn from?

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

Every summer

I listen and look

Under the sun’s brass and even

In the moonlight, but I can’t hear

Anything, I can’t see anything-

Not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,

Not the leaves…

And still

Every day,

The leafy fields

Grow taller and thicker-

Green gowns lofting up in the night,

Showered with silk.

And so, every summer

I fail as a witness, seeing nothing-

I am deaf too

To the tick of leaves,

The tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet-

All of it

Happening

Beyond all seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.

Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.

Let the wind turn in the trees,

And the mystery hidden in dirt

Swing through the air.

How could I look at anything in this world

And tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?

What should I fear?

One morning

In the leafy green ocean

The honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body

Is sure to be there.

Faith: Listening even when we can’t hear anything, can’t see anything, can’t feel anything.

Faith: What moves through us in beauty, even when we are afraid.

Faith: That the sun will rise, as will summer’s corn.

What is faith to you?

Forty Years

for forty years

the sheets of white paper have

passed under my hands and I have tried

to improve their peaceful

emptiness putting down

little curls little shafts

of letters words

little flames leaping..

forty years

and again this morning as always

I am stopped as the world comes back

wet and beautiful I am thinking

that language

is not even a river

is not a tree is not a green field

is not even a black ant traveling

briskly modestly

from day to day from one

golden page to another.

Yesterday Mary spoke of her 40 years of listening and how a few words of prose and poetry come to her as gifts. Yet the words seem to stand in the way of her total melding with life. She listens and flows with all that is, and then when she writes, she becomes human, separate. In the very act of sharing her heart's entwinement with animals, plants, and the earth, she must unravel what it means to be human, and become alone. Is her experience so different than my experience in writing this morning? In you reading these words? What are we doing not out in the beautiful wet morning?

I am just back from the wet morning - a thunderstorms evidence sparkling about and my shirt soaked through with summer's humidity. Along my path I encountered a still living armadillo on the side of the road. She suffered a crushing blow, but was still somewhat conscious. I must write, I must share, I must witness, this next typed letter no more precious than the ants swarming around her. I use words to feed my human colony to know of my heart ache over her suffering, and of my appreciation that Alachua County Animal Services will send someone out to help her. Words serve us, though the calling to serve means we step back and let our heart and mind focus on tasks and know the pain of separation from the beloved earth.

How do words serve you? How do you use words to serve?

Stars

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?

What amiable peace?...

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent-

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and wiling, and in our places?

Listen, listen, I'm forever saying.

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit-

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now

Even as the darkness has remains the pure, deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another.

Mary, the great translator. She takes the lives of animals and puts them into words. Even the dead bear and otter speak to us in that we are to listen to life while we live, and not to death. So now, in the Gulf of Mexico, the dying animals are fleeing from the outer waters to die in the marshes, alone. Or so says the morning paper. Why is it that we as a people are waking up to life by listening to death? What if we listened, really listened, and put into words the beauty of the non-oiled habitats and splashed them all over our media, and not just in isolated books of prayers and poetry? What if every word spoken or written was a prayer of hope that we might listen and love while we may, and be grateful for this gift.

What words come to you when you look up at the stars?

Am I Not Among the Early Risers

Am I not among the early risers

And the long distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider

The perfection of the morning star..

Have I not thought, for years, what it would be

Worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,

To gather blueberries,

Thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly

At the top of the field,

Her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,

Has not already done?...

Here is an amazement-once I was twenty years old and in

Every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,

And in every motion of the green earth there was

A hint of paradise,

And now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Above the modest house and the palace – the same darkness.

Above the evil man and the just, the same starts.

Above the child who will recover and the child who will

Not recover, the same energies roll forward

From one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

I bow down.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,

Or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine

In the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?

Have I ever taken fortune for granted?...

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold

Or the night too long as black as oil anyway,

Or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely

Of the second-rate, less than happiness

As I stepped down from the porch and set out along

The green paths of the world?

An acquaintance of mine says that Mary’s poems shifted over the years – that Mary had a different look on death. I wonder if I am picking up some of this here. She says she is 60 and she moves with the same grace as a 20 year old, however, I wonder if she or anyone really does. Does the brain somehow get different messages from the aging body, a general sense of being ill at ease in the world? And so we question how we have judged life and death and one another, for our bodies are feeling judged by the years. What did we do wrong to end up in this place? Why did evolution give us the brains to be aware of our aging and also serve out the fate that we age and die? Can we say it is simply a matter of endothermic and exothermic balanced equations as evolution moves towards greater complexity? Pondering meaning perhaps you say that each must get out of the way for life to meander down the unwinding unknown path of evolution. My only response to this possibility is to bow down and to offer a prayer that the next step I take is graceful and spacious, beyond wrong doing and rightdoing.

What or who do you judge?

The dog has run off again

And I should start shouting his name

And clapping my hands,

But it has been raining all night

And the narrow creek has risen

Is a tawny turbulence is rushing along

Over the mossy stones

Is surging forward

With a sweet loopy music

And therefore I don’t want to entangle it

With my own voice

Calling summoning

My little dog to hurry back

Look the sunlight and the shadows are chasing each other

Listen how the wind swirls and leaps and dives up and down

Who am I to summon his hard and happy body

His four white feet that love to wheel and pedal

Through the dark leaves

To come back to walk by my side, obedient.

I am working with a group of philosophers and ethicists concerning the relationships we have with our companion animals. We are asking questions about what humans presuppose are givens, such as “the dog belongs to me and should be obedient to me,” or “the dog is here to offer unconditional love and companionship and is happy to be with me.” Here I confess; though I love animals, none live with us. There are a variety of reasons for this, and let me offer the poetic version that Mary brings out to me in this poem. I love wildness, and the roaming fox or coyote in my yard that I cannot tame and does not answer to me brings me more joy than a dog in the house. I do not discount domestic bliss and the great blessings of sharing a life with a dog, cat, or bird. I do know though how challenging a "thou-thou" relationship is when we relate to animals after generations of domestic breeding, cultural constructs of "pets," and the capture of a wild being to keep us company in our lives. I prefer the wondrous, unexpected, and often fearful visit of sacredness than the safe companionship of that which is under my control. Perhaps we humans are just lazy, and with work we can bring out new terms of awareness that bring the dog's sacredness into a relationship that is not dominated with overtones of their "use" for us. What would it be like if we let the dog choose? Would they choose, as many suppose they did a hundred-thousand years ago, to be tamed so their numbers would multiply upon the earth? Would they answer our call, or the call of the wild? Is there a way they can do both, and a way that we can do both?

Where do you succumb to tameness and obedience?

At Round Pond

owl

make your little appearance now

owl dark bird bird of gloom

messenger reminder

of death

that can't be stopped

argued with leashed put out

like a red fire but

burns as it will

owl

I have not seen you now for

too long a time don't

hide away but come flowing and clacking

the slap of your wings

your death's head oh rise

out of the thick and shaggy pines when you

look down with your

golden eyes how everything

trembles

then settles

from mere incidence into

the lush of meaning.

My father-in-law, Jerry, is visiting us now these weeks of late spring. He brought his binoculars and his presence in the moment, for he has lost most of his short term memory ability because of Alzheimer's. He won't remember what birds he has seen, but that hasn't stopped us from looking. He asked what were the "good birds" to see and I told him of the Barred Owl who comes to our clothesline every year to hunt, and of the Swallow-tailed Kites, one who just flew over our yard a few days back. The Owl though has not returned and I wonder if he has died, for surely he would not forget us or the great hunting in our mostly uncut lawn.

Yesterday I took Jerry to our congregation that has a Sunday morning bird walk. I asked our most impressive bird leader, Caleb Gordon, if the Barred Owl had been seen lately on the grounds and he said, not so much. But that didn't keep us from looking. Towards the end of the walk the owl came in silently to the oak trees above us. The owl looked down on us and I wondered what meaning there is in the gaze the owl exchanged with us if the memory is to be immediately erased as in the case of Alzheimer's or in the case of too busy schedules that move from one incident to the next. Maybe we can't hold onto memories, but that doesn't mean that we don't look for meaning and interconnection in our days and offer what we experience to those who accompany us on our walk through life. So every day I tell Jerry about the owl, and the Swallow-tailed Kite he saw later that same day, show him pictures of them, and we find satisfaction in these moments of interconnection with one another. So maybe my owl won't come back this year and Jerry won't remember him even if he did, but for this moment, I can hold onto the grace of having family with us, now, if not always into the future. Owl of life, owl of death, our whole lives.

What do owls mean to you?