Jean Connor, Poet Extraordinaire

I want here to celebrate one of Vermont’s literary treasures, Jean Connor, a poet who, after a long career as a librarian in upstate New York, now lives at Wake Robin, a retirement community in Shelburne.  I offer such celebration for no especial reason save that I’ve lately been rereading her 2005 collection, “A Cartography of Peace.” The book is beautifully produced by Passager Press, whose savvy editors specialize in the work of older writers.

I’m not sure I can improve on the jacket comment of my friend and former Vermont College colleague, poet Robin Behn, who notes that “only some art knows how to teach us how to live, and in a way that we are ... ardently willing to be taught.” Ms. Behn quite rightly puts Jean Connor at the head of this rare class.

Though W.H. Auden once advised us that “poetry makes nothing happen,” I feel things happening in myself at every turn in “A Cartography of Peace.” Ms. Connor, given her wonderful modesty, will likely balk at hearing me say so, but hers is a poetry of moral instruction. It is that very modesty, in fact, that allows such instruction. The poet’s lessons on how to live both a practical and a spiritual life are far from hectoring; they’re offered obliquely, and her work therefore demands particularly close attention. One can too easily miss its thematic forest for the trees of its keen observations, particularly of nature.

Consider, for one of myriad examples, Ms. Connor’s response to a natural harbinger in “Late August”:

            Then, not as an intruder,

            but as one accustomed to the place,

            the hour, a cricket began to sing,

            steady, sure, and as he sang

            the world slowed to meet

            his pace, found itself webbed

            about in peace. The grasses

            sleep-heavy, wet with dew.

As I say, one can easily –and profitably– dwell on the sureness of notice here, but as we meditate on these passages (and these poems demand just that, meditation)– as we meditate on these words and many others in her opus, we understand that the beauty and clarity of her language is itself the product of a meditative soul. Here the cricket is a perfect stand-in for the writer, who has the same capacity to induce peace. No, she is not an intruder but part of a composed scene.

There is simply no physical context, nor, so far as I can see, any season that escapes this fine author’s contemplative and ultimately redemptive response. In “Now, in March,” for instance, she speaks of a month that most upper New Englanders might consider the year’s least redeemable.

            Outside, drifts of brazen snow

            and the bitter hour glass of cold.

            Inside, pressed against the pane,

            pots of green and the first white

            geranium, tenuous, unfolding.

            and hidden deep within, the stubborn

            candle of my will, ablaze,

            steady, before that duality,

            death, a February thing, and life,

            which reaches out to April

            and on occasion sings.

What quiet brilliance here! If we recall that at the publication of this, her very first book, the author was 86 years old (at 96, she continues to write beautifully), one might suppose that the poet herself would be the “bitter” one, the sands in her personal hour glass falling apace. One might also consider her very urge to write a “brazen” impulse.  But no, those attributes belong to the apparently inauspicious landscape. Ms. Connor is subtly “stubborn,” not brazen; she willed herself in 2005, as she has done ever since, to sing about those things that can sustain us no matter where or when we look on ... if we allow them to.

Again, however, my object is less literary criticism than appreciation. The poet’s own words always seem sufficiently convincing on their own, as is manifest in another short poem, quoted here in its entirety:

            Overcast

            The day, of no great merit,

            ended– a dandelion gone to seed,

            minutes squandered, hours spent,

            no bright gold. Yet in the ledgered

            plainness of the day, overcast, common,

            some subtle brush of meaning

            held me. Was it those unexpected

            words of thanks, or the single lilac

            plunged in a paper cup,

            there on a stranger’s desk?

            Something, a fragrance,

            lingered well past dusk.

When I consider much contemporary poetry, which is premised on highfalutin intellectual theory, and which glories in wordplay for its own sake, I wonder if its authors, let alone its readers (such as they are) can possibly be moved by what is presented on the page? As Maxine Kumin once remarked to me in conversation, “If you aren’t moved by what you write, why do you bother?” Jean Connor’s poems move me greatly, in part because, although her intelligence is clearly profound, she wears it lightly, rightly implying that intellect on its own is not, as Wallace Stevens said, “what will suffice.” Here is a poet who believes that words not only have meaning but also consequence.

I’ll close with an observation, based in part on the passages below and many others in Ms. Connor’s work. Some may consider it quaint, even sexist, but so be it. I say what I do only because I believe it: Jean Connor’s verse is feminine. Mind you, I use that adjective in no way but honorifically: I mean that her poetry is short on ego, astoundingly attentive to eloquent detail– and long on charity, in the sense that Paul describes it in Christian scripture. She manifests a love so deep that the mere word “love” can’t describe it. To my mind, charity is what makes the world go round, and Ms. Connor herself mounts no effort to describe it. She simply enacts it.

In a poem aptly entitled “The Women,” she notes, among other things that

            ...there are more women than you might imagine who

            take care of old men who have forgotten

            the names of the women

            and the names of the sons and the daughters .

            These are the men who are not sure

            of a spoon. Sometimes they can be told

            how to hold and lift it.

I urge any reader of this blog likewise to read “A Cartography of Peace” for her- or himself, because I reduce its value by suggesting a single overarching moral gesture. Be that as it may, one sure thing we learn from this woman’s personal and artistic example is the virtue, not of resignation, but of acceptance, two very different matters. We learn that what is immediately before us, no matter what it be, is the thing that should demand our participation.

:

            Nothing here should surprise us.

            More women than you imagine

            teach themselves to live

            in that slim space between now and tomorrow.

Jean Connor is one of the women who have taught themselves to occupy that space, and having done so, she can teach us all.

Surviving Strangeness

                   My bachelor uncle, actually my mother's uncle, owned a farm, on which I spent every  moment I could from childhood into late adolescence. It has now, alas, been devoured by the great plastic octopus that goes by the name, incongruous to me, of development. Back then, though, it had the woods and fields and critters I craved and still do. 

I was fascinated by the ample cellar under the old man's old house, and especially by an odd sound (an archaic water pump, I now suspect), which emanated from far back in an unlit corner. I was at once scared and intrigued by that noise, and recently decided, some six decades and more later, to recall, as best I can, some of the feelings that came upon me not only on hearing the strange report from Whatever-It-Was but also on doing some of the earliest reading I can recall. 

Interior

Some oddities can settle forever

Within a mind– like that noise from within

My bachelor uncle’s cellar,

The unimaginable, deepest part

Where gravel gave way to dirt:

First, an almost inaudible whining,

And then that awful, protracted wheeze,

As of some strange animal fighting

In the gloom to muster its own air.

I’d make myself stand right there

By the steps to listen, every visit.

Not that I ever dared to walk  

Toward that recess, hidden

And dark. No, darker than any dark.

My little flashlight’s arc

Played over the mouth of what seemed a cavern,

The beast inside now a wolverine,

Now something vaguely like a lion

Or a scaly dragon from picture books

That stood by my bed in their nook.

Today I can make my own grim cave

In thought, where hordes of monsters crouch

That could carry my family off.

My ears have tinnitus, constant ringing,

Which almost recalls the breathing

Of the dreadful thing. That gruesome sound.

I can all but see the tight-coiled snake

That waits for someone alone

Like me. The bird flu, SARS, ebola–

All can be bears or bulls or

Outsized scorpions, jackals in packs.

And I doubt I’ll ever fathom why

One Little Golden Book

About a clan of peaceful gorillas

Should with each reading have thrilled me

And frightened me so, above all the mother

Ape’s last words to her infants at evening.

Some oddities live forever.

“Sleep,” she told them. “Don’t suck your thumbs,”

Which meant night was coming on.

Grandiosity and guilt

Am I alone in occasionally finding a spurious link between my own errors of omission and commission and major events, often tragic? I know at least that Norman Mailer (in whose company I'd quite happily NOT be seen) shared this surmise, connecting the assassination of one of the Kennedys to an illicit sexual foray on his part. Please. 

I'm aware that such thinking is at best narcissistic, and as a rule I dismiss it in a timely fashion. But my absence from home when my wife, yanked off her feet by a squirrel-chasing dog, broke her collarbone in a nasty way late in October, momentarily dipped me into such an idiot trough. The advent of the New Year, with its conventional impulse to resolutions, combined with that grandiose feeling of guilt to produce the following.

       I Should Have

Our dog was not used to a leash.

I should have been holding the dog.

The squirrel was used to leashed dogs.

The dog chased the squirrel to the end of the leash.

The squirrel seemed pretty blasé.

The dog is a strong yellow Lab.

She pulled my wife off her feet.

My wife broke her collarbone.

It was our granddaughter’s birthday.

I should have been at the party.

The whole family was there at the park.

I was in North Dakota.

I should have been holding the dog.

My bones are more tough than my wife’s.

Next day her little dog died.

Not the one that caused the trouble.

Rather, the poor old–blind–deaf spaniel.

He was my love’s special pet.

Our son drove here from his house.

Then he took his mom and her dog to the vet.

I should have been holding the dog.

Our son had just bought the house.

He and his wife were excited.

It was very unselfish to do what he did.

Our son dearly loves his mother.

I love her too beyond words.

It should have been I who drove her.

A man shot eight people soon after.

That mess was way out in Alberta.

I can be grandiose.

I can dream up phony connections.

I can think all bad things are my fault.

I should still have been holding the dog.

Such killings don’t happen up there.

But this was the second last year.

Such things should not happen anywhere.

Two of the dead were young children.

Then the man turned the gun on himself.

“This is awful for us,” said the chief of police.

The weapon was a 9 mill Glock.

It was stolen eight years ago.

But the murders went down in 2014.

So did those other bad things

Meanwhile I stood there or sat.

I paced. I slept. I did nothing.

What could I have done?

It’s five a.m. on New Year’s.

I should have found something to do.

I’ve been thinking of choices I’ve made.

I can think they have big consequences.

I should have been holding the dog.

More consequences than they do.

Oh I’m often so grandiose.

I think of a James Wright poem.

I think, “I have wasted my life.”

My reasons for thinking that differ from his.

In the grand scheme my choices mean nothing.

I accept that. I have no choice.

My wife once hung up a magnet.

Let go or be dragged, it said.

I’m physically stronger than she is.

I’m not so otherwise.

I should have been holding the dog.

taking care

There were, at the max, sixteen people at our Vermont house over Christmas, five of them under 7, the youngest 6 months. Though it is -2 degrees as I write this, we have no snow even now to speak of : rather, the freakish thaw that preceded Christmas day had made for some treacherous icy spots in our neighborhood, and for whatever reason, I began to reflect on the various falls on ice I have experienced –some epic, one leg-breaking–  and how careful I am at 72 (which I turned on 12/22) to avoid such accidents. I surmised that one compensation for advancing years is that I may have learned to be more careful with the rest of life too. An infant granddaughter in my arms enforced such a notion:

      

 Care

forgive me   I’m surely wrong

to think that no one’s ever seen

the likes of my oldest daughter’s daughter

only six months old

she should in fact be younger

having arrived a month too soon

though it couldn’t be too soon for me  

I hold her   healthy   on Christmas morning

our climate gone all wrong

no snow on the mountain

but for clumps here and there under trees

the green of open hay fields looking

like April    our middle daughter

is home and planning an autumn wedding

when she was this child’s age one day

I took a hike   that baby at last

in her crib    her mother drained   asleep

on Stonehouse Mountain

at height–of–land

I trod onto snow   all blank

but for a moose trail   underneath

lay ice from the past week’s freezing rain 

and down I fell but got up    unscathed

too soon our children grew and went   and

once the last of them did we walked one noon

my wife and I    along a backwoods tote road

likewise a blank stretch of land

once more I’d forgotten

to take care with my footing and tumbled

and again stood up    oh there was pain

but I escaped with a bruise

lucky not to be lame

or not so that lameness would last    for certain

my hip’s discoloration faded more slowly

than it had those years before

I’d almost forgotten

till now this wooden teething ring

shaped like a moose

which    as she babbles and squirms

the small girl gnaws   antlers to tail

my hold on her remains both gentle and firm

I know some fatherly things

or at least I hope so   I mustn’t let her fall

I take a lot of care these days 

now the kitchen windows suddenly ring

with sleet   oh which of us foresaw

this grim change in weather

it’s good in my later age to be careful

it took the melting of youth

to show me   old or youthful  

no matter   you should value care above all

though of course you may be forgiven

for not knowing that in that far-back season

when being other than young 

was something you never foresaw

Rhyme, Poetasting, and Light Verse

I have by now visited just shy of 100 Vermont community libraries to talk about my chosen art, this in accord with the aim I announced on being installed in 2011 as the state’s poet laureate. If, in that span, there is one issue I have encountered more than any, it is the matter of rhyme in poetry. A grumpy gent in Arlington, for example, announced to me that so far as he was concerned, “if it doesn’t rhyme it isn’t a poem.”

I acknowledged that rhymed poetry was indeed less common today than once. But I pointed out– gently, I hope– that rhyme is not a requisite in poetry, nor was it during much of the art’s past. The Homeric classics do not rhyme, for instance, nor do the great Psalms of David, nor do the great blank-verse passages in Shakespeare. In his preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton goes so far as to call rhyme “the invention of a barbarous age.” (He is referring to what we used to call the Dark Ages, the period in which, via Roman Catholic chant, rhyme first became an arrow in our bards’ quivers).

Rhyme is a tricky challenge. One must use it not merely to keep a particular scheme going, though that scheme, once chosen, must be consistently honored; but also to move the poem along dramatically, even as its language strikes the reader as feasible and apt. One must resist the temptation to facile rhyming, because when rhyme exists for its sake alone, the fact seems pretty obvious as a rule, and quite lame. I am a longstanding lover of vernacular musical idioms, but must admit that we encounter a surrender to that temptation with considerable frequency in pop, rock, and blues (although –harrumph– rarely if at all did Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Willie Dixon, or Cole Porter succumb to it).

I am not the anti-fan of the Beatles that I was back in their early, bubble-gum, sock-hop days of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” etc., but I confess I’m still no great enthusiast: Lennon and McCartney can, yes, now and then come up with a pretty or a catchy melody, but consider, in one such tune, “I don’t want to leave her now”– so far, so all right– “You know I believe, and how...” And how? Well.... Dante it ain’t.

Of course, the Fab Four never sin in the manner of the late Jim Morrison, alleged “rock poet”(please!) buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery, of all places (yipes!):

“Like a dog without a bone,/ An actor out on loan,/ ”... “There’s a killer on the road/ His brain is squirmin’ like a toad/ Take a long holiday/ Let your children play....” How does one begin to critique such a mess? What on earth is an actor out on loan, and what has he to do with a boneless dog, a squirming toad, and on and on? I could proceed to impugn the poetic genius, as some oddly consider it, of Bob Dylan. I have too many friends, however, who are his devotees, and I don’t want to start a fuss with them.

Of course, I am a language nerd. But I think poets need to be language nerds. Though many seem to assume that poetry consists of vague and billowy language, I agree with W.H. Auden that its truer aim is to use language that is in fact as precise as possible. That’s a hard thing to do when addressing such common poetic themes as death, loneliness, joy, anger, love, memory, and so on. Throw the demand for chiming end-words into the mix and the challenge may grow even more acute.

We nerds wince to hear “his influence can’t be understated” when the speaker actually means “overstated.” (Has anyone else noticed the current prevalence of this inversion,  lately used even by the super-bright Cokie Roberts?) Please don’t tell us that someone addressed a letter to “my wife and I.” (I recently heard that on a BBC broadcast, of all places!) When someone says “anymore” for “nowadays,” I mentally red-pencil him or her. Mock me for all that if you like. “It is what it is,” to cite a buzz phrase traceable to the odious prevaricator Donald Rumsfeld.

Yes, these are the sorts of concerns that attract my thoughts. (Go ahead, tell me to get a life.) And the other day, as I considered the matter of rhyme, it occurred to me that those most taxed with inventive rhyme are the authors of so-called light verse. In what I have always considered a shorthand response to Rainer Maria Rilke’s fabulous poem of the same title, for instance, the late, great Ogden Nash composed this one:

The Panther

When called by a panther,

Don’t anther.

That is scarcely among Nash’s greatest poems– and they are indeed great. In the interest of space, I merely use it as my own shorthand.

We do not, however, at least to my knowledge, have any eminent light verse poets in our day. Oh, Billy Collins can be funny, all right; so can others as diverse as Stephen Dunn, Marilyn Hacker, and Charles Fort. But comedy is rarely their sole aim. I find this something of a pity, though I haven’t the resources to do anything about it myself. I’m told I’m a fairly amusing guy in person, but for some reason almost my every effort to be funny in poetry goes awry.

Here’s the strange thing: in order to get their greatest comic effects, light verse poets actually use rhyme that does exactly what I’ve argued against in other sorts of poetry. The wackier, more improbable, and conspicuous the rhyme, often enough, the better.

All of which got me to remembering George Starbuck, who died in 1995, and who was sometimes referred to as the thinking man’s Ogden Nash. Though he participated in Robert Lowell’s famous Boston University workshop with fellow students Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, the latters’ confessional poems have survived better than Starbuck’s technically and intellectually masterful inventions. Even in his lifetime, though his first book was selected over Plath’s for the Yale Younger Poets series, he had more a cult reputation than a general one. He did not help his own case after Oscar Williams anthologized his “A Tapestry for Bayeux” in the highly influential Little Treasury series, only to drop it when someone told him that the initial letters of the first 78 lines spelled out “Oscar Williams fills a need, but a Monkey Ward catalog is softer and gives you something to read.”

I got to know George a bit, because I had been one of three judges to award his “The Argot Merchant Disaster” a lucrative Lenore Marshall Award. I found him a remarkable human being as well as an astonishing writer. For two decades, he valiantly and without any self-pity battled the Parkinson’s disease that would kill him at a young 65. Another intriguing detail from his life is described by Eric McHenry in a 2004 article appearing for Slate:

“No poet was more scrupulously attentive to words and to the ways in which even the subtlest manipulation of words can bring about seismic shifts in meaning. Starbuck, who was born in 1931, is actually the reason loyalty oaths are illegal in the United States. When the State University of New York-Buffalo fired him in 1963 for refusing to sign one, he fought the university all the way to the Supreme Court and prevailed.”

I could make a claim for Starbuck as among the dozen most technically gifted writers in the history of Anglophone literature, but I’ll let him speak for himself. Those of us with backgrounds in old-style English teaching will identify with the author here...because we are all, as I say, language nerds, sensitive to proper or brilliant or improper or outrageous spellings, word combinations, and usages.

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can't?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.

You won't get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I'd sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I'm on their side. I better be, after my brush with "infinitessimal."

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.

And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, "George..."

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
"Their their," I needed to hear them say, "their their."

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."

I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."

"Om?" they inquire. "No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you've only got two more guesses
And you only get one more hint: there's an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers' bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that's all the time extension you're going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don't be surprised if it's the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys."

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini's Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other "Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!" and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.

Another "new" poem

I was attempting the task of cleaning up the Augean stables– I mean, my office, when I came across a version of this poem, composed, I believe, over thirty years ago. It was pretty awful, but some possibility seemed cached within. For all I know, it's still awful...but is is, at any rate, changed.

     1981: Solace, Stone

I had recently known great sorrow:

my young brother was gone. So I set out alone.

Deep in Breaux’s Gore– where I’d never been

until that morning– a headstone leaned.

It was quiet. Never such quiet. 

Who can recall that marker but me?

Who is there even to know about it?

Doubtless someone. Hunters must see

the canted slab now and then,

there since 1841.

It only bore one name: John Goodridge,

wife- and childless. Water and sun

had worn its shoulders round.

Home late afternoon, near evening,

I moved from woodpile to shed and back,

less as if working than dreaming.

Scents rose in autumn dusk

then settled, odors of duff and rain.

I settled too– in the wheelbarrow’s bed,

like a chunk of oak or rather stone

that might passively ride along.

Forty years since, that I bore witness

to the marker. Even birds had gone mute.

I’d never known so complete a silence.

I wouldn’t forget it. Never.

I would never not hear that stillness again.

Our little family was set for winter.

We’d soon be soothed by the iron stove’s hum.

I turned from our surfeit of firewood,

And felt at once that a gentle something–

from above the trees, from far over our woodshed

and down through all leaf, all dust– was falling

into my bone and flesh.

I thought back on the morning, so laden with silence,

as if I could move beyond joy or sadness,

stone-quiet myself, and that meant solace.

"Muddling through," E.M. Forster called it– a good thing

               
I turned 72 yesterday. That struck me as pretty old, though I am blessed with good health and more than reasonable physical vigor. Understandably, I have been meditating on what I have learned and have not in seven decades, and for whatever reason, the fact that I feel I know less now than I ever did feels right and oddly comforting. This poem had been a-borning a while, and that feeling helped push it through a complete draft.  




                    I Impugn a Victorian                       

                                                                                   

 There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he 
takes up a pen to write.                                                                                                                              –William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)         
                                                                                                                                    

Or within a woman.  Or maybe

Old Thackeray was delusionary, yearning

To believe that, simply by being a writer, he could write

And thoughts just show up. It’s been far too long since I read

About his Becky Sharp and others for me to judge if in fact they do

Arrrive in his Vanity Fair or elsewhere in this eminent Victorian’s work.

Maybe he’s only vain. But I also yearn to believe.

I read that quotation somewhere and I jotted it down 

Because its words must have spoken to something inside me.

That is, now that I take up the pen’s contemporary replacement–

Now that I write, their gist will reveal itself as, well, perhaps not thought

Precisely, but as subject or theme that will ring somewhat true. At least I hope so.

Or, on a better day, if you’ll forgive my presumption, 

It may even instruct. How long, however, dear William,

Must I keep composing these lines without any deliberation

Before the thoughts you speak of supervene? I’ll settle for one.

It’s exacting to keep all this up, dimly expecting some higher level
Of mental engagement as, meanwhile, the feeder by our window teems

With the same old, but delightful, birds of winter:

Redpoll, pine siskin, minuscule brown creeper, nuthatch,

The usual horde of chickadees, a tufted titmouse, hairy and downy

Woodpeckers, and now and again, to the alerter birds’ consternation,

And mine –though I confess its beauty also thrills me– a sharp-shinned hawk.

Fixed on murder, he skulks in the high bare limbs of that paper birch until it stoops

Upon some pygmy victim, or, more curiously,

Merely perches there, declining to dive and wreak

Its hell and havoc. Your comments have made no peace in my mind,

Mr. Makepeace. I took you at your word and here I am, less far in fact along

Thought’s avenue than I was at the beginning.  I’ve been pressing and prosing ahead

For five desultory stanzas now, and I must conclude, since I must move toward conclusion,

That like so much of life as I have known it,

All but the tiniest portion of this time has consisted of waiting

Without a clue. Not of course that there aren’t a lot of much worse

Concerns to fret about than my bemusement. I haven’t yet gone down

To the village store to fetch the newspaper, doubtless full of instances of such

Worse things. But meanwhile: Look at all these birds– so vivid, brilliant, scribbling

Their eloquent little marks there on the snow,

Even the ones without a clue they’re close to death.

                                                                                                            –for Bob Demott