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A magazine of sound and fury
Dana Wilde
Dana Wilde
Nebulae: A Backyard Cosmography
A companion volume to The Other End of the Driveway that looks up and outward to the stars and planets.To download an e-copy or get a paperback, click here.
A companion volume to The Other End of the Driveway that looks up and outward to the stars and planets.To download an e-copy or get a paperback, click here.
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November Notes
Back in November my son, Jack (age: now purchases beer legally), and I flew to Jacksonville, Fla., for my niece's wedding. My nomadic impulses have subsided in recent years, and I guess I forgot the world beyond Maine looks different. The irregular hills and ruts of Maine are burned deep in me, and Florida's gauzy, half-drunk summer landscape -- in the middle of November -- plastered my mind's eye like some immense dew.
November is not our most cherished month, at least not here in the accelerating seasonal rounds of the spruce-northern hardwood forest area in the Troy woods. It's the harbinger of winter, after all. It's a pause, like a held breath, just before the deep cold.
Your eyes get used to November looking like November -- brown, gray and copper. Maple, birch, ash and popple by midmonth turn into skeletons. They leave a rough, brown, dead-acorn-smelling rug on the woods floor. Milkweed, aster and goldenrod stalks are lace-frail cadavers. Corn stubble and pumpkin vines are bent old men. Cattails, which were rich brown in August, are frayed and corroded sticks. Red winterberries glare out of bare tangles.
Crows, chickadees and nuthatches hang around the empty hardwoods and in spruces and hemlocks that are less like life and more like dark green blankets. The wild turkeys march through single file from time to time, and the blue jays seem bright against the copper oak leaves. But the juncos who hopped around in the leaves like exuberant fifth-graders during October are gone, and so are the warblers, most of the sparrows, and the hummingbirds who split in September. The purple martins see it coming even earlier, and vacate in August.
Somehow this sense of an impending ending that gathers like storm clouds carries a certain clear, sober comfort: I've seen these gray-brown woods teetering on the still point of the turning world many times, and taken this deep breath ahead of the great white wall of winter. And I -- or someone, anyway -- will see it all again. November's great stillness is a blessed evening, you could say.
So my eye could not make sense of Florida's lightning colors. The big-finned palms and vines, the moss hanging off giant live oaks were like flakes of botanical flame to my New England-centric eye. Fruit was still ripening on my brother's lemon tree. In November? Not only were his jalapeno peppers still reddening, but his basil, thyme and coriander (which simply doesn't survive at any time at our house) were thriving in the little garden of his low-slung one-story, hurricane-proof house with windows about a foot from ground level. Cardinals, some kind of scrawny blue jay and exotic sparrows visited the garden; what might have been a red-tailed hawk monitored things from high up. Watch out for alligators and water moccasins, and sure enough I saw a brown-backed snake slither through a patch of unmown grass. By 10 a.m. it was 75 degrees, humid and blurry.
To me, this all seemed like a riotous lack of seasonal decorum. Everything was drunkenly angering for life when it should have been soberly reflecting on the cusp of winterfall and the end of this year's everything.
But the gold side to these unseasonal green sides: Jack seemed to fit right in. He had his shorts and T-shirts ready to go when we got there. He sank his toes in my brother's shag-carpetlike lawn. He drank beer easily with my brothers, which (since we're from Maine, after all) did not take me by surprise. But then during the wedding reception he suddenly had a highball glass in his hand, which turned out to contain a high dose of vodka. This glass with twizzle stick and lime disoriented me more than ever.
But when I paused and reflected, I recollected times when all of nature, no matter where it was or when, synchronized with my imagination and the flatlands of elsewhere were as inspiring as the betangled and rutted Maine woods. In those days the whole world was a teeming green home, whether it was the gray trees of central Maine or the lavender-flowered garden of a cozy Florida flood-plain house. When Jack was just a little boy, we walked up through winter flowers to the top of the Pnyx hill in Athens and looked out toward the Acropolis with just that feeling of flame and morning. That was as intoxicating to me as the immense dew of Florida is to Jack.
At the end of autumn, the backyard in Troy looked exactly like Thanksgiving, I am happy to report.
Back in November my son, Jack (age: now purchases beer legally), and I flew to Jacksonville, Fla., for my niece's wedding. My nomadic impulses have subsided in recent years, and I guess I forgot the world beyond Maine looks different. The irregular hills and ruts of Maine are burned deep in me, and Florida's gauzy, half-drunk summer landscape -- in the middle of November -- plastered my mind's eye like some immense dew.
November is not our most cherished month, at least not here in the accelerating seasonal rounds of the spruce-northern hardwood forest area in the Troy woods. It's the harbinger of winter, after all. It's a pause, like a held breath, just before the deep cold.
Your eyes get used to November looking like November -- brown, gray and copper. Maple, birch, ash and popple by midmonth turn into skeletons. They leave a rough, brown, dead-acorn-smelling rug on the woods floor. Milkweed, aster and goldenrod stalks are lace-frail cadavers. Corn stubble and pumpkin vines are bent old men. Cattails, which were rich brown in August, are frayed and corroded sticks. Red winterberries glare out of bare tangles.
Crows, chickadees and nuthatches hang around the empty hardwoods and in spruces and hemlocks that are less like life and more like dark green blankets. The wild turkeys march through single file from time to time, and the blue jays seem bright against the copper oak leaves. But the juncos who hopped around in the leaves like exuberant fifth-graders during October are gone, and so are the warblers, most of the sparrows, and the hummingbirds who split in September. The purple martins see it coming even earlier, and vacate in August.
Somehow this sense of an impending ending that gathers like storm clouds carries a certain clear, sober comfort: I've seen these gray-brown woods teetering on the still point of the turning world many times, and taken this deep breath ahead of the great white wall of winter. And I -- or someone, anyway -- will see it all again. November's great stillness is a blessed evening, you could say.
So my eye could not make sense of Florida's lightning colors. The big-finned palms and vines, the moss hanging off giant live oaks were like flakes of botanical flame to my New England-centric eye. Fruit was still ripening on my brother's lemon tree. In November? Not only were his jalapeno peppers still reddening, but his basil, thyme and coriander (which simply doesn't survive at any time at our house) were thriving in the little garden of his low-slung one-story, hurricane-proof house with windows about a foot from ground level. Cardinals, some kind of scrawny blue jay and exotic sparrows visited the garden; what might have been a red-tailed hawk monitored things from high up. Watch out for alligators and water moccasins, and sure enough I saw a brown-backed snake slither through a patch of unmown grass. By 10 a.m. it was 75 degrees, humid and blurry.
To me, this all seemed like a riotous lack of seasonal decorum. Everything was drunkenly angering for life when it should have been soberly reflecting on the cusp of winterfall and the end of this year's everything.
But the gold side to these unseasonal green sides: Jack seemed to fit right in. He had his shorts and T-shirts ready to go when we got there. He sank his toes in my brother's shag-carpetlike lawn. He drank beer easily with my brothers, which (since we're from Maine, after all) did not take me by surprise. But then during the wedding reception he suddenly had a highball glass in his hand, which turned out to contain a high dose of vodka. This glass with twizzle stick and lime disoriented me more than ever.
But when I paused and reflected, I recollected times when all of nature, no matter where it was or when, synchronized with my imagination and the flatlands of elsewhere were as inspiring as the betangled and rutted Maine woods. In those days the whole world was a teeming green home, whether it was the gray trees of central Maine or the lavender-flowered garden of a cozy Florida flood-plain house. When Jack was just a little boy, we walked up through winter flowers to the top of the Pnyx hill in Athens and looked out toward the Acropolis with just that feeling of flame and morning. That was as intoxicating to me as the immense dew of Florida is to Jack.
At the end of autumn, the backyard in Troy looked exactly like Thanksgiving, I am happy to report.
Open Seas
By Alistair Noon
Yesterday was too rough to write:
my life-raft stayed barely aright.
Out here, navigation is not
a length of steel rope but a knot
like the strokes the Chinese
weave into a sign. My knees
are crushed into a ridge. I see
summits colliding in the sea,
valleys grinning. The reel
of the hull is stomach-real:
I survive on dry bread
above the fathoms where billions have bred.
And when I look out, I'm unsure
if a far thin line might be shore
in the horizon's changing orange-red,
the brightest chart here I've yet read.
From Across the Water by Alistair Noon, available from Longbarrow Press.
By Alistair Noon
Yesterday was too rough to write:
my life-raft stayed barely aright.
Out here, navigation is not
a length of steel rope but a knot
like the strokes the Chinese
weave into a sign. My knees
are crushed into a ridge. I see
summits colliding in the sea,
valleys grinning. The reel
of the hull is stomach-real:
I survive on dry bread
above the fathoms where billions have bred.
And when I look out, I'm unsure
if a far thin line might be shore
in the horizon's changing orange-red,
the brightest chart here I've yet read.
From Across the Water by Alistair Noon, available from Longbarrow Press.
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More writings like this from the sun-line-cave world
are available electronically and in paperback in The
Other End of the Driveway at www.booklocker.com.
Download it right now.
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The Greeners Get Greener
By Ross Timberlake
Rock and roll finally catches up with the rest of the arts world in the 21st century by abandoning its equipment and all the waste and everything else it produces ...
The Greeners were just ending their press conference when I arrived. The event was taking place outside the
coffee shop in Burlington where Kettle, Kip and Karl first played.
“By meeting here today,” Kettle was saying, “we are making the point that we are truly going back to our roots. No more bars or concert halls. No more
agricultural fairs. The streets will once again be our venue of choice and by doing this we will no longer be using amps and light trees or anything else that requires juice to make our sound.”
more
By Ross Timberlake
Rock and roll finally catches up with the rest of the arts world in the 21st century by abandoning its equipment and all the waste and everything else it produces ...
The Greeners were just ending their press conference when I arrived. The event was taking place outside the
coffee shop in Burlington where Kettle, Kip and Karl first played.
“By meeting here today,” Kettle was saying, “we are making the point that we are truly going back to our roots. No more bars or concert halls. No more
agricultural fairs. The streets will once again be our venue of choice and by doing this we will no longer be using amps and light trees or anything else that requires juice to make our sound.”
more
Living in the Questions
A 21st century talk before the Pennsylvania Poetry Society
By William Hathaway
I’m delighted to talk to the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, but I can’t call myself a Pennsylvania poet because I’ve only lived here a little over a year. I like it here. I was living in Maine which is a very beautiful place, but I’m having more fun here and there is beauty here as well and the people are a lot less wintry. Having said that, I’m still not a Pennsylvania poet. Over the years my poems have appeared in Montana, New York and Louisiana poetry anthologies, yet I’ve always felt awkward about being represented equally with poets whose themes are passionately regional. Reed Whittemore had a poem I liked about watching “his bird” in “his tree,” but when his bird flew away to his neighbor’s tree he was seized with instant resentment. I was once fulsomely introduced to a Sheboygan, Wis., audience as a Wisconsin poet, but when I rose to admit that all I’d done in Wisconsin was get born there a palpable chill filled the room. If you can accept me as a guest Pennsylvania poet for the day, I’ll gratefully proceed.
more
A 21st century talk before the Pennsylvania Poetry Society
By William Hathaway
I’m delighted to talk to the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, but I can’t call myself a Pennsylvania poet because I’ve only lived here a little over a year. I like it here. I was living in Maine which is a very beautiful place, but I’m having more fun here and there is beauty here as well and the people are a lot less wintry. Having said that, I’m still not a Pennsylvania poet. Over the years my poems have appeared in Montana, New York and Louisiana poetry anthologies, yet I’ve always felt awkward about being represented equally with poets whose themes are passionately regional. Reed Whittemore had a poem I liked about watching “his bird” in “his tree,” but when his bird flew away to his neighbor’s tree he was seized with instant resentment. I was once fulsomely introduced to a Sheboygan, Wis., audience as a Wisconsin poet, but when I rose to admit that all I’d done in Wisconsin was get born there a palpable chill filled the room. If you can accept me as a guest Pennsylvania poet for the day, I’ll gratefully proceed.
more
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Behind the ice veils in summer.