Prince Buzzard - January 9, 2010

Prince Buzzard,

I took you, so high in the air,

For a narrow boat and two black sails.

You were drifting

In the depths of the air

Wherever you wanted to go,

And when you came down

With your spoony mouth

And your read head

And your creaking wings

To the lamb

Dead, dead, dead

In the fields of spring

I knew it was hunger

That brought you’

Yet you went about it

So slowly,

Settling with hunched wings

And silent

As the grass itself

Over the lambs’s white body-

It seemed

a ceremony,

A pause

As though something

In the quick of your own body

Had come out

To give thanks

For the dark work

That was yours,

Which wasn’t to be done easily or quickly,

But thoroughly-

And indeed by time summer

Opened its green harbors

The fields was nothing but flower, flowers, flowers,

From shore to shore.

I am out on the edge of water this morning, the sun barely awake.  Over the Calooshatcee River in Ft. Myers the first Turkey Vultures begin to sail by around 9 a.m.  It’s cool, perhaps this is why .They await the heating of the day to form the thermals that bare them aloft. Or maybe, there just isn’t that much death so early in the day.

This is probably just another human delusion.  Beings and dreams have died all through the night, we just can’t see it.  Migrants of all kinds won’t make it to the next morning, whether it is blackbirds and doves falling from the sky or humans  from Mesoamerica, seeking a better life.  I am reminded of them as I went out this morning to buy coffee, finding it in a convenience store where I was the only non-native Spanish speaker.  They are here, and how many thousands are not, or will never know a life that flowers into full possibility? 

If I were brave, I would go out into the darkness with my flashlight and look for death to remind me that it all around, happening constantly though I sit here comfortable and pleasured, sipping coffee, on a deck of a house with a pool, Jacuzzi, multiple couches, and an HDTV.  No wait a minute. If I were truly brave, I would go out in the darkness with no light at all, and give myself over to death, so that there would be even more flowers on the morrow.  If I, if we, did this, then we might return to a world where the spattering of ducks and coots now on this river near me would cover this river from shore to shore?

Mink

A mink, jointless as heat, was

tip-toeing along the edge of the creek,

which was still in its coat of snow, yet singing-I could hear it!-

the old song of brightness....

the mink had a hunger in him

bigger than his shadow, which was gathered

like a sheet of darkness under his

neat feet which were busy

making dents in the snow. 

He sniffed slowly and thoroughly in all

four directions, as though

it was a payer to the whole world...

For me, it was a the gift of the winter

 to see him.  Once, like a hot, dark-brown pillar,

he stood up-and then he ran forward, and was gone. 

I stood awhile and then walked on

over the white snow:  the terrible, gleaming

loneliness.  I took me, I suppose,

something like six more weeks to reach

finally a patch of green, I paused so often

to be glad, and grateful, and even then carefully across

 the vast, deep woods I kept looking back.

In the winter of our lives, are there patches of experience for which we can be grateful? And the ultimate test, can we see beauty in the harshness and the dying back?  My sister recently was diagnosed with bone cancer, probably metastasized from a previous bout of breast cancer.  For me, this is devastating news.  There are some hard years for her coming up, and I'm guessing, not too many of them either.  Yet, in our phone calls she has times of laughing, nearly giggling.  Yesterday her retort to the mess her affairs are in, was, "At least I got to see a hawk."  She had seen a Sharp-shinned hawk foraging around in her snow covered bushes for sparrows, and fly away talons empty. 

She is like a beautiful sleek mink, and now is the time for me to look at how her life is a prayer to the whole world.

Who or what is your mink in the winter time?

Of Love

I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but not less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway beautiful people to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed. Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some—now carry my revelation with you—
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world—its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself—I imagine
this is how it began.”

I am startled that Mary knows that love was the core of her life.  How many of us can say this?  I imagine that you strive to make it so, but do you sense that you fall short? For if you truly touched love with your very essence your life would be lived in bliss. Right?

I think not.  For to be in love is to ache with the separation that is ever present.  To be in love is to know the intimate caress of loss. To be in love is to give oneself over completely to that which is loved.  This doesn't sound like happiness to me, but torture. 

Oh Lord, who would want it any other way?

May we begin this day with the innocence of first love, so hungry to love that we do not take our eyes from the sun or the infinite beloveds that surround our days in beauty.

With whom have you been in love?

Summer Story

When the hummingbird

sinks its face

into the trumpet vine

and the funnels

of the blossoms,

and the tongue

leaps out

and throbs,

I am scorched

to realize once again

how many small, available things

are in the world

that aren’t

pieces of gold

or power–

that nobody owns

or could buy even

for a hillside of money–

that just

float about the world,

or drift over the fields,

or into the gardens,

and into the tents of the vines

and how here I am

spending my time,

as the saying goes,

watching until the watching turns into feeling

so that I feel I am myself

a small bird

with a terrible hunger

with a thin beak probing and dipping

and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat ahead of breaking

and I am the hunger and the assuagement

and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,

and, like them, I am full of delight and shaking

These are Los Dias de los Muertos – the days of the dead, and all Souls and Saints days. I cannot arise this morning without death before me, and recalling the Aztec cultures that brings us these traditions in part. Stories and myths about hummingbirds abound in the Aztec culture, a bird who brings bounty as well as mediates death and rebirth. Without consciously putting all this together, this morning I donned hummingbird earrings. Then I sat down to read my poem of the day, and here is Mary speaking of hummers.

Her poem mediates my deep hunger and vulnerability. I long for a world where beauty and care abound. Given our lack of justice I am but a small bird amongst mountains and storms. What can I do when death and oppression threatens? I am thinking that I can dip my tiny self into my inner being and see the earth’s heart breaking. This is so scary for it means I am nothing, but a feather falling to the earth, or floating up to the sky. May we this day give up everything, so that we may receive everything.

What does this time of Samhain, Halloween, and these Days of the Dead mean to you? Where do you feel small or feel death?