Dark Harbour Seawall seen from Western Head, July 2025

Dark Harbour is one of the most mystical places on Grand Manan. It’s on the western shore, which is too precipitous for harbours and settlements. Those basaltic cliffs extend for the whole length of the island, the gift of shield volcano the spewed up columnar basalt from the ocean floor a few millennia ago. The seawall is the ocean’s work, other than the channel at the far end leading out into open water. That needs to be opened up every spring with heavy machinery. The sea has a penchant for curves. It knows the earth is round and feels it. It has piled up this curving spit of rocks and topped it with driftwood timbers. It adds to the composition every year with the help of winter storms.

In the pond stands a herring weir—one that hasn’t been strung with twine for a few years—and hiding behind the leaves a salmon farm that’s working to rewild New Brunswick rivers. When the tides are on—low enough that the seaweed in the intertidal zone is exposed—dulsers haul their dories over the seawall and motor along shore to their chosen spot for picking. Then they haul their dories back and head to spreading grounds, where the dulse will dry on stones heated by the sun. People around here eat dulse like popcorn. Visitors tend to say, Well, it’s an acquired taste.

The buildings on the seawall are camps once used by dulse harvesters. Now they tend to go home to enjoy their Netflix, and the camps have become getaways for those of us who consider peace and quiet a good adventure on the weekend. I bought one from my friend Elton Green a few years ago. He built it well—and picked a site safe, so far, from winter storms, though I anticipate the sea will take it one day.

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Dragon Camp. July 2026

I called it Dragon Camp because one day when I was walking on the seawall with friends, Larry Small found a huge weathered timber washed up on the rocks. It had probably once been part of the cribbing built to hold open the channel or else a wharf support beam. It seemed to have an eye and mouth. Must be the seawall dragon, he said. That would look good on your deck. Sure would, I said, but how the heck would we ever get it there? Soon thereafter Elton showed up with a couple of guys and the Seawall Dragon in their pickup. They’d hauled it off the rocks, towed it across the pond with a dory, loaded it up on the truck, and, low and behold. I had a dragon on my deck. And Elton’s Camp became Dragon Camp—-though most of us still call it Elton’s Camp. That’s the way we do things in this community, carrying our history forward into the present. There’s a place on the main road everyone refers to as Kenny’s Garage though there hasn’t been a garage there for, oh, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five years.

After spending eight months in the Sonoran Desert each year, I find returning to the Canadian Maritimes in early June a marvel. Trees newly leaved, the chartreuse of their first expression of spring, a tentative green—not yet the confident profusion of summer. Some deciduous stands are bolder—the red-leafed maples downright flagrant in announcing their force. I feel great joy seeing this, and for the first time this year I wondered what the trees feel—this bodily sensation of rightness with time and place and fruition. Is my a joy a projection of theirs? I like thinking this way—feeling that the trees have a sentience capable of something we would call joy.

The island is slower—birches just unfurling, lilacs tentative in opening their perfumed buds. Even the blackberries are hesitant. They look bare and I think—ah ah—this is the year to trim them back before their bramble asserts its will over mine.

Lu and Lloyd came over in the morning to help me unpack the car. We needed an hour of conversation before the work could commence. Coco was overjoyed to see them again. Their winter was hard—the hardest in many years, some old timers said. Two feet of snow then two feet of snow then two feet of snow. Lloyd’s from Saskatchewan, so he knows winter. But he expected the island to be temperate, as it usually is, storms dissipating out to sea. Lu‘s a New Yorker, so she knows snow too. They brought tulips from their garden which now sit in a pink ceramic vase—vintage art deco-ish thing left from my mother’s things.

I don’t think this will be my last summer here, but one year it will be. Just saying that makes me shudder. I am invested in this place—tending a few acres of land where I know every tree and have watched many white birches and black spruces grow from sapling to giant. I’ve seen dozens of them die and mourned what that meant to the land that had held them for fifty or one hundred years. The lands holds me too and calls me to pay attention and so I do.

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I turned eighty this summer. My friends Peter Cunningham and Ara Fitzgerald threw a fabulous party for me on their wharf in Ingalls Head. Here’s a picture he took of me three years ago when we had all gone to Connecticut for Lucinda’s “Indigo” exhibit at the Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington. We made a stop at the one-room Pine-Grove Schoolhouse, where I began my education. I so loved that school that one day I threw a tantrum when my mother came to pick me up. I cried all the home, struggling to open the car door, so I could get out and go back to school.

Photo by Peter Cunningham, Avon, Connecticut, February 25, 2023

A wonderful book Disappearing Before Our Eyes of Peter’s photographs and stories about the island is just out from Goose Lane Publications. Here is a piece about it from Maclean’s Magazine.

As for me this summer, when I’m not tending the yard or trails, I am at the desk working. This month I completed a major revision of my new essay collection Mobius: A Meditation on Art & Science. Stay tuned for information on its fate. I will be giving a talk “The Biological Roots of Art” at the Grand Manan Museum on August 4th and another in October at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. Thrilled to be out there celebrating art and science as mutually enhancing ways of knowing the world and ourselves.

Photo by Claire McLane, AHD Birthday 2017, heading to Kent Island.

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Temple of Apollo on Mount Parnassus from which the Oracle Spoke

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In ancient Greek society women were monsters or goddesses—Circe, Medusa, Athena, Hera. As ordinary women, they were non-citizens, invisible, except the Spartan women who turned a farmer’s sickle into a warrior’s weapon.

Spartan Warrior, outside the Diros Cave, Peloponnesian Peninsula, Greece

So what are we to make of Pythia, the oracle priestess of Delphi, who sat over a crevice in the earth inhaling ethylene fumes and giving out prophecies said to be transliterated from Apollo himself through the voice of a woman on a natural high. What is it we want from such a site, we who are deaf to Earth’s voice and bereft of the panoply of gods to whom people for millennia could turn for comfort and counsel?

The oracle’s lineage is long. One version of the story says that when Apollo shot his first arrow he killed the serpent Python who guarded the sanctuary of Mother Earth at Delphi. More than a serpent, the victim was the son of Gaia. To atone for the slaying Apollo exiled himself and lived for eight years tending flocks in Thessaly. The murder marks the hard-won end of the old religion of Mother Earth and the start of a new religion with fourteen Olympian gods and goddesses—plus another 3000 minor gods. And it marks the beginning of a ritual of purification and atonement after a homicide rather than bloody retaliation. Greek scholar Ionna K. Constantinou writes that Apollo’s voluntary self-punishment as the guilty person “betokened the awakening of a moral sense, a first step towards the humanization of justice.” Self-responsibility and justice remained keystones to the Oracle’s teachings.

Etienne DeLaune, French artist, 15181586, National Gallery of Art

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Apollo named his priestess Pythia. His temple was built atop the crevice that had been Pytho’s lair, just as in Mexico the Spanish friars built their sanctuaries on sites holy to indigenous religions. The place remains holy and becomes instrumental in religious conversion.

In truth, there were many Pythias, the rituals practiced for over 1,000 years. Sometimes divinations were in such demand that three Pythias served at one time. Spiritual preparation for consulting the oracle included purification at the Castalian spring, paying the ritual fee of a honey cake, and making an animal sacrifice, usually a healthy goat, aspersions of its blood sprinkled at the temple and its meat fed to the hungry. The supplicant remained outside the temple, their question delivered by the priests who gathered around Pythia. What was their role and what was hers? Was she in truth a seer and the priests her messengers? Or was she a tool of their patriarchal power, speaking intoxicated gibberish that the priests interpreted to suit their aims? Or were they equal partners in divination? The questions have not been answered in two thousand years. In any case, the Pythias became women of vast influence.

“The Oracle of Delphi Entranced,” wood engraving by Heinrich Leutemann, 1880

Requests ranged them the personal to matters of state: from Tinder to the Council on Foreign Relations. Pythia’s words were cryptic enough to let the supplicants hear what they wanted to hear. Plutarch served as senior priest at Delphi for many years and wrote three major philosophical dialogues dedicated to the oracle and temple. His reports make clear how useful ambiguity was in protecting the oracle’s authority.

He tells of Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia in the 6th century BCE, who ruled over an enormous kingdom. He consulted the oracle before launching a war against Cyrus the Great of Persia. The Pythia answered that if Croesus crossed the Halys River, he would destroy a great empire. Croesus took this as a guaranteed victory.

He amassed armies, crossed the boundary between his territory and Persia and marched confidently into battle. The Persians crushed his forces. Cyrus captured Croesus, burned his capital at Sardis, and annexed Lydia into the Persian Empire. The great empire destroyed was Croesus’s own.​

Centuries after Greece’s heyday, Roman emperors consulted Delphi. Nero visited in 67 CE. According to ancient historian Suetonius, the Pythia warned Nero that the number 73 marked his doom. Nero interpreted this to mean he would reign until age 73.

He left satisfied, continuing his tour where he competed in chariot races and musical contests. The prophecy meant something entirely different. In 68 CE, Galba, age 73, led a successful revolt. The Senate declared Nero an enemy of the state. Facing execution, Nero committed suicide at age 30, having ruled only 14 years. The number referred not to Nero’s age but his successor’s.

In 362 CE, shortly before Christianity became the Roman Empire’s dominant religion, the Roman Emperor Julian sent an ambassador to Delphi. The Oracle gave her final response:

"Tell the king, the fair-wrought house has fallen. No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves. The fountains now are silent; the voice is stilled."

Why am I drawn to these ancient sites in ruin? I love the way art holds religious feeling even after the religion is gone. I love the hunger for religious feeling more than any organized religion. When we took a small boat trip into the Diros Cave, I wondered what the ancient world would have made of stalagmites and stalactites, the weeping Earth, her tears hardened into beautiful forms. Do not forget me, she prays. I am the underworld of stone that hoards the mineral wealth you crave. I am what maintains the living earth as a household of planetary vitality. If the ancients knew the caves, paddled a reed boat into its snaking caverns—thirty kilometers worth—they would have seen them without the strand of electric lights that guide us but in darkness, their little pitch lamps revealing so little of the splendor. It must have felt like a passage into a deep eternity. Indeed, the Underworld.

Bless them for their wisdom and curiosity and courage. We now stretch to regain a faith in the future that they dwelled within. The gods might fuck with them, but they also demanded justice. And what is faith that dwells not in the house of justice but another misread prophecy?

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This will be my last of three posts about my travels this spring around the Peloponnesian Peninsula. I’m finishing this post as I sit in my summer place in the village of Castalia on Grand Manan Island. Some of the island’s settlers were very well-read. Up next will be summer dispatches from the Bay of Fundy.

BUT NEWS: I am happy to celebrate that the wonderful Nautilus magazine has awarded my anthology THE GIFT OF ANIMALS their Gold Award in Poetry. Yes, indeed, BETTER BOOKS FOR A BETTER WORLD! Available in all the usual places.

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The Charioteer of Delphi, ca. 470 BCE

Tin came to Greece from England, the Bronze Age spurred by the Cornwall region’s 4000-year-old tin mining. When combined with copper, tin makes bronze. Swords, daggers, shields, helmets, sculpture, and cooking pots. The human story grows in beauty and terror. The Greek currency fueling the global trade in minerals? Olive oil

.We drive through a million olive trees, ancient gnarled trunks, some gutted open from age, all holding their leafy branches like quiet bouquets. They twist into artful shapes as they grow. Always clockwise. The older the tree, the slower it grows. The slower it grows the more it twists as it becomes more sensitive to Earth’s rotation. The Coriolis effect, by this theory, influences the shape of the trunk, as it does the wind, storms, and moving water. On Crete there’s an olive tree old as the Bronze Age—between 2000 and 4000 years old. Hard to pin it down. It still produces olives that are pressed into oil. Its trunk is more than 15 feet wide. For millennia it has stood and withstood all that has happened around it, an unimaginably peaceful life testifying to endurance and a culture that kept its promise to the land. Olives are wise trees. They’ve seen it all. Not with eyes but with arboreal sentience, so placid compared to the way we keep hurling ourselves forward, dissatisfied with all we possess. Keepers of mystery, the olive trees. The ancients said that mystery was what we experience with closed eyes. Who needs eyes, the olive trees say.

I wish someone would write a book about olives as illuminating as John McPhee’s Oranges. All the orange trees in Florida are dead or dying, thanks to climate change and us. His book, written in celebration, now is a memorial.

Olive Tree of Vouves, Crete. Declared a national monument in 1997.

Olive trees keep us company as we climb the hillside toward Mycenae, a panorama stretching below all the way to the sea. Hazy green leaves, braiding trunks, a worker pruning limbs. We’re traveling a thousand years back from the time when Epidaurus and the Acropolis were built. Back into myth and history, though here it is difficult to tell them apart. What lasts of the ancient world? Stories and art. The wars are over. The blood that has stained this soil is reduced to life-giving elements. Stones have been unearthed that have a lot to say.

The Lion’s Gate entrance to the citadel of Mycenae. 1350 - 1200 BCE.

A young German boy growing up in the early 1800s, schooled from an early age on the Iliad and Odyssey, believed those epics to be fact not fairy tale. He announced that he would find Troy. And he did so. Beginning in 1870, Heinrich Schliemann excavated the site in Turkey. He uncovered nine layers of ruins. A year later he began excavating Mycenae. He proved that the Trojan War was an historic event, fought for mineral wealth not for Helen. But as an amateur archaeologist, his methods were crude, his findings not entirely accurate. Troy lay at a deeper level of excavation than what he found, and in his haste he destroyed many artifacts. Nonetheless his childhood imaginings led him to make profound discoveries at the intersection of myth and history.

It’s a weird feeling to stand on the ground where Clytemnestra waited for all those years to avenge Agamemnon for killing their daughter Iphigenia. Maybe he didn’t kill her. Some versions of the story say that he took pity on her and killed a deer instead. All at the whim of the gods, so that he could go forth and wage war with their divine blessing. Homer, if there was a single Homer, wrote the stories down five hundred years after the Trojan War. The stories had traveled through oral tradition before being written down, so multiple versions are no surprise. What’s remarkable is the spillage of history into myth, which can keep a story alive over millennia. What of our time will enter the millennial story hoard? One must treasure a story to pass it on. I fear we are too multi-tasking, too ever-entertained, too ever-horrified by news, too distracted by screens, to linger long enough to savor much. Which I suppose is why I write this: to slow it all down and, in the presence of art, to feel time as calm, deep water rather than a cyclone.

Tholos tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus

It’s an even weirder feeling to visit the Treasury of Atreus—not a bank but a tomb--where Agamemnon may or may not have been laid to rest. Certainly, some king or series of kings were entombed in the monumental beehive structure. A long corridor built with stone blocks leads to the entrance. Enormous conglomerate stone carved and assembled into walls that climb two stories high. Cyclopean Walls. How did they do it? Not a chisel mark in sight, just smooth, perfectly fitted stone. Imagine the hands. Imagine the hand tools. Imagine the skill and hardship of those makers. The ache of their labor. Built around 1400 BCE taking more than 20,000 worker-days stretching over years if not decades. Imagine being part of a culture holding such faith in its future that they would build structures to last thousands of years. Imagine having the engineering and design skill to pull it off. “A permanence of stone,” Neruda wrote of Macchu Picchu. And, yes, we can critique now that it was done in service to power, just as we can critique Bach, Rubens, Michelangelo, Caravaggio for being in service to the imperialistic Catholic era. But power wanes and art remains to glorify the beauty of which we are capable.

The tomb’s corbelled dome

Buzzing. Whispers of buzzing. They echo inside the tomb. Impossible not to think it is the voice of the dead, some spirit remnants refusing to leave their last home on Earth. Spirits of the mourners who had sat in a circle keening into the resonant dome, giant stone blocks rising and narrowing in thirty-three circuits to capture the sound. But it was only bees, we find as we enter the space. They must recognize its form and enjoy the spaciousness of this hive. Remarkable bees, I had learned on a previous trip to the site. They employ aphids to gather their sweets—the “honeydew” aphids excrete. I described the process—and the feeling of being at Mycenae--in a poem published in my most recent book Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower.

What remains? Art and nature--and art is only nature expressed through our genes.

Honey bee collecting honeydew off an oak leaf.

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MYCENAE

The tragedies are all

just stories until

you’ve stood on the hilltop

and surveyed the silver haze

of olive groves that descend

all the way to the sea

the view from which Clytemnestra

spent ten years sharpening

the blade of her vengeance.

In faithless Agamemnon’s

beehive tomb stone benches

line the wall

for mourners to sit

in their keening

the domed ceiling

vaulted high to hold

their cries. Even now the dead

stay three days

in their house while people

come to sit and cry

professional mourners who can

fill a vault with grieving.

Forest bees on these hillsides

collect nectar

from the pines by way

of aphids. The insects

feed on tree sap

digest amino acids

and excrete sweets

that bees gather

from aphid bodies--this amber

honey in the jar

a story about how to find the sweets

in the most bitter forest.

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Red Hen Press link

by C. P. CAVAFY

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TRAVELING THROUGH RUINS

“To philosophize is to learn to die.” Michel de Montaigne

Athens. I sit in the colonnade of a hotel with coffee, a place that a few decades back was the residence of the Greek Prime Minister. I learn this from the cheerful young man at the front desk, who tells me, Sure, you can sit in the colonnade at the marble table with your notebook to write.

Above me strings of white mini lights hang like crystal threads of rain, paper flowers scattered among them. Rose, sunflower, delphinium, cosmos. A cold morning but coffee helps and these artful signs of spring.

I am on a mission to try to understand our time in history, as it refracts through the time of classical Greece’s flowering of art, philosophy, and science. This is to be the strand in my writing that tracks my pagan sensibility back to a polytheistic landscape. I want to hear the word “pagan” as neutral--not freighted with centuries of monotheism. A friend once told me I am pagan because I see deity not in things but as things. Paganism as a system of beliefs that asks one to live a life of questioning and purpose enveloped in the aesthetic majesty of the natural world.

In a New Yorker piece on Tennyson, I read that the Romantic poets lived during a time of drastic decline in the metaphysical status of human beings, from being made in God’s image and granted dominion over all creation and guaranteed eternal life, ‘to fleeting in the long seasons of the earth & minuscule in the immensity of the cosmos.”

And so I ask, what is the time in which I am living? A time of fleeting surfaces and no depth. What do I mean by that? I mean our rabbit-holing of attention, our doom scrolling, the flood of games and TV and pop stars and unbearable news. E. O. Wilson wrote, “we are drowning in information and starving for wisdom.” So, given our tender lifespan in a universe of violent making and unmaking, how can we not be called to deepen our life, seeking meaning and usefulness and care for one another’s travails in uncertainty?

*

Grey sky. Grey sea. Swells and chop trouble the water. The Galileo passes hills and invaginations along the shore where tiny ports glimmer. The land looks dark and mysterious. Anything could be brewing in those mountains, a story of the ordinary lives of gods who go about their business of vengeance and betrayal, fucking around and toying with the products of their invention. There is Demeter keening over her daughter Persephone’s disappearance. There is Hera, pissed at Zeus’s latest affair. There is Daphne, escaping rape by turning onto a tree. Oh, how she flowers. The old gods offered stories for human suffering to lean on. They taught what they loved. They labored toward goodness and beauty.

We motor at night from the island of Poros, where we walk after dinner along the waterfront. Harbor calm, bundled fishing nets covered with tarps piled on the quay. Yachts and fishing boats at rest. Shops and restaurants shuttered. The tail end of winter in Greece. A few cafes open, customers seated beside gas torches for heat. Some watch basketball of a big screen. Some linger for talk and companionship. The waiters glance hopefully toward us, but we swim by like fish that won’t take the hook. We are adrift by choice.

The driver who brought us from our Athens hotel to the port of Piraeus told us he comes to Epidaurus every summer to see at least one play. Plays written and performed in the same theater 2500 years ago. Plays that had won a contest. The Olympiad of artistic genius in the ancient world. Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes. The theater has survived because it was buried in rumble and earth and scrub for centuries, sheltered by that burial.

I lie awake at 1 AM. The ship’s engine purrs, vessel creaks. Through my porthole I catch a glimpse of towns, small stars isolated in night’s landscape. It is comforting to see the human presence here as diminutive. It’s a lie, of course. The living planet keens over our excess and brutality. But on this journey, I am determined to see the good in us.

Maybe the gods were not after goodness and beauty but wisdom—Athena for whom the Parthenon was built. Athens is her city. Stelae once ran like movie trailers across the temple’s pediment. The only one discernible to me after centuries of erosion is a centaur wrestling a man. Both rock muscular. I think the sculptor favored the centaur. Hercules will win the battle, as the story goes, as he will the other eleven tasks it took him to ascend to the dining table of the gods. But the hand that shaped this struggle gave the upper hand to hybrid animal form, honoring the roots of our becoming. It’s a hell of a fight to overcome our animal nature.

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Wisdom. What is it? And why can’t we speak of it without a taint of irony or cynicism? Without assuming arrogance or vanity? As if to love wisdom were to be in love with power. We have learned hard lessons of what happens when a person loves power too much. The centaur is power, locked in stony combat with a man, but this struggle plays on the outer facade of the greater home of the goddess. And she is wisdom, a structure built with columns that earthquakes can’t fell.

I came to Athens by way of science. Psychologist Alison Gopnik writes in The Scientist in the Crib of wisdom being in the catalog of developmental tasks that are the human project. Why do we live so long after the years of our reproductive viability? If one lives long, pays attention, and follows one’s curiosity, wisdom arrives. Our task in old age, she writes, is to gather wisdom and share it.

The Galileo docks at Naphlio, the first capital of Greece after the war for independence in the 1830s. It became a free state after 400 years of Ottoman Empire occupation, beginning with the fall of Constantinople (“the mother city” to the Greeks) in 1453. We are traveling today into the classical period, 5^th and 4^th centuries BCE—500 years before Christianity, to Epidaurus. I suppose this is a good place for thinking about what going deeper might mean. Theater for the ancients was about catharsis—a beautiful word, says our guide Evgenia, an archaeologist by training who followed that education with a three-year program of study to become an official tour guide in Greece. That training says a lot about taking one’s nation’s history seriously.

The theater of Dionysus at the Acropolis is the first recognized theater in the world. The second is Epidaurus—the best one for acoustics. Tiered seats for 15,000 spectators were built with limestone into the hillside. “Upstage” is the forested hills behind the performance space, so the performance is connected to the landscape. The acoustics are best when the theater is full. Evgenia has been here when there were 12,000 people in the audience. She could hear an actor on the stage inhale and exhale. She tells us that the Greeks never showed violence on the stage. Terrible violence was part of the plot—Oedipus kills his father and stabs out his eyes when he realizes he has married his mother. But this is narrated, never shown, because the goal is to leave the theater a better person not to normalize violence. Compare this to the Romans who glorified violence, celebrating violent death as a vehicle of imperial power. In the Roman Coliseum over 500,00 people and one million wild animals were killed during its 390-year history. During the opening games hosted by Emperor Titus in 80 A.D., over 900 animals and 2000 people were slaughtered. But the ancient Greeks saw theater as a healing. That’s why they visited the adjacent Sanctuary of Asclepius before the performance. There they could sleep well, eat well, and exercise. Snakes helped with the healing.

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Snakes were sacred for the Greeks because they knew the underworld. They were medicine at the Sanctuary of Asclepius, traveling by tunnel at night from the circular tholos where they were kept to the sleeping chamber, where their bite might offer healing. Artemis had a temple here for protecting childbirth. If rituals and sacrifices were made, these happened outside of the temples. Inside stood statues to honor the gods.

Euripedes was an avant-garde playwright interested in female psychology. He created powerful female characters. The most compelling is Medea, honoring the agony of betrayal and the extreme a woman who felt agency might seek to avenge it. Her story has cut me deeply every time I’ve see it—once as a teenager with Dame Judith Anderson and recently with a hyperactive Fiona Shaw on Broadway. The play is performed at Epidaurus every summer.

“Scratch the surface of every myth,” Evgenia tells us, “and you find the truth.” Jason was not after golden fleece but gold in Kolchis, what we know as Ukraine. The Greeks went to Troy not for Helen but for its mineral wealth—copper. How well the ancients understood the power of metaphor to turn a story that fleets into a myth that stays.

More to come from my travels.

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Photo from today’s NY TIMES

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On September 12, 1996, I was interviewed by Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm with Robert Hass and David Abram. I can’t recall why we were all in LA at the time. I might have had a reading at the Lannan Foundation, as I did around that time. Or perhaps it was some conference that has now fallen out of both my mind and my C.V. I’m sure I felt intimidated by my fellow interviewees. Robert Hass had been an important influence to me. I found his work early in my writing life, discovering in his poems something I had been searching for without knowing exactly what that was. It had something to do with marrying the intimacy of the practice of poetry with attending to the world beyond the self. Something to do with being a citizen in the art. Something about savoring life while bearing witness to its anguish. And Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous was very hot, riling up conversations about whether language had robbed us of our intimate engagement with nature. I was new on the scene with my first book Science and Other Poems having its moment of buzz. Most memorable to me was Silverblatt’s commitment to books and writers, his deeply engaged and playful spirit, his invitation to join him and his companion Jim for a walk later that day.

We met in Santa Monica, where I was staying at a boutique hotel near the pier with its buzz of commerce, skateboarders, beach crowd, ferris wheel, and ceaseless traffic. It all stopped, when we were caught in the electrical blackout that darkened the city. And that’s when the poetry started. In memory of dear Michael Silverblatt, I’ll share the poem I wrote for him that day. It was published in my 2006 collection Stairway to Heaven. And if you are seeking consolation for our current anguished American moment, consider “blackout” a metaphor, and you’ll have a answer to the tired old question, does poetry matter?

WALKING WITH MICHAEL AND JIM IN THE BLACKOUT

A woman on the hotel veranda said

how will I get ready for the party

without a hairdryer? Traffic lights

went null, ceaseless traffic

crawled up Ocean Ave

contracts written on the spot

for who would go and who would stop

twelve lanes of orderly improvisation

playing at the pace of who knows what.

Shops closed, accordion gates descended

but the bookstore, sweet cloister,

stayed open. We shopped by flashlight

and charged, such license, without approval

(so apt, Calvino’s Numbers in the Dark)

bought water at the liquor store

waiting in line until the bouncer

announced our turn. On the street

no news no phone (I wouldn’t want to be

in South LA tonight, the bouncer said).

The outage covered three states, no, six,

all the way to Mexico. Who knew?

We chose to sit it out on the pier,

ferris wheel empty after fire ladder

rescues, sunbathers blase

on beach—did they even know

the power was gone? We read aloud

galleys of the poet laureate, a man who

reinvented the role of public poet

by speaking for rivers, dragonflies,

the state of the planet. We took turns

and made a rule the one reading

had to sit in the middle of our bench.

When we finished the poem that pegged

the problem of our species as

“half-mated longing” carrried

from childhood, I got stuck

on the phrase. It seemed to render

each of us as irreparably solitary

yet incomplete or maybe it was a call

to put childhood to rest, tuck it in

somewhere safe and move on.

The poems were broken by helicopter

noise. Vipers I called the news crew

whose job it was to show us the worst

when the pixels returned. Come down

with your macro lens and shoot us

perched beside the birds-of-paradise

in love with poetry and friendship

and questions that bring quiet to the day.

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Rest in Peace, Michael

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Alden Nowlan was born into poverty in rural Nova Scotia in 1933. His mother was fourteen years old when he was born, his father a laborer. Alden quit school at age fourteen to work in a village sawmill. On weekends he walked to the library for books. He referred to his homeplace as Desolation Creek. He became a prodigious author of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and plays. He served as writer-in-residence at University of New Brunswick for many years, and his work was honored in 1967 with a Guggenheim Fellowship and Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry. He died in 1983.

Great Things Have Happened

By Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

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I’ve been sorting my “archives,” i.e., boxes of notes and research folders sequestered in my garage, files spilling out of three file cabinets, journals I’ve written since I was nineteen, and box after box of letters that have found their way to me from four or five generations of letter-writing kin. I keep finding wonders that make me rethink what it means to have come from a literary lineage. This makes me think, especially on this day when the Washington Post fired its staff working on their Books section, that I have work to do in keeping this lineage of the American story alive on the page (a.k.a. screen).

This post features a short essay on creativity that I wrote during the first Trump reign, on invitation from someone who wanted me to speak on the subject. I have no idea who that was. If that someone is reading this, please let me know it was you and what was the occasion. On rereading, I found I liked the piece enough to share it—with a few updates that nod to the malevolence of the current regime.

ON CREATIVITY & MALEVOLENCE

By Alison Hawthorne Deming

The Canadian poet/novelist/playwright Alden Nowlan had an interest in Mi’kmaq legends of the Maritimes. He retold them out of respect for “the people who are gone” accompanied by illustrations by First Nation artist Shirley Bear. My favorite of these tales is “Brother to the Bears.” A small boy whose parents were dead wandered from one wigwam to another in the village. “Because the lonely find their loneliness easier to bear when they are alone,” Nolan wrote, the boy preferred to spend his time in the forest. One cold night, having wandered far and not finding his way back to the village, he came upon the lights of a wigwam in the forest and heard the soft notes of conversation from within. He pulled back the blanket door to find an old sow bear and her two cubs at home. The sow invited him in to sit by the fire. The cubs took one look at his face and burst out laughing. The sow gave him meat and a birch bowl filled with berries. The boy thought he had fallen asleep and was in a dream. Since he was in a dream, there was no need to fear that the bears would harm him. Soon enough, after eating the meat and berries, the boy fell asleep. When he awoke, it was spring. He had slept all winter with the bears and woke as if the season had been one night.

The sow treated him as one of her own, taught him the games her cubs played and took him fishing for smelts. The boy learned many “secrets of the forest that have been hidden from men.” The boy had never felt so happy. The sow taught him to hide from men who came into the forest to kill them. The boy promised when he grew up he would gather all the bears together and make war on men. The cubs, who easily beat him at wrestling every day, laughed. The old sow reminded him that he belonged to the people called men. The boy wept. “You are my mother, and these are my brothers.” He imagined himself sprouting long black hairs and paws strong enough to break a man’s neck. He stared at his face in the river and despite what he saw, he said, “I am a bear.” But the boy was so weak compared to his brothers that he could hardly snatch a single fish from the river, while they feasted on their catch.

After the boy had lived with the bears for a year, the old sow took him aside and told him that she was sending him away. “But I am of the bear people,” the boy protested. “Do you wear the skin of a bear? Are your hands a bear’s paw? Is your face the face of a bear?” She told him that out of her love for him she was sending him back to his place among men. She warned that as a bear he would be weak and clumsy in the forest, that his sense of smell was too weak to detect hunters, and that the hunter who killed him wouldn’t even bother to skin him, so worthless was his pelt. He would be left to scavengers. But as a man he could become a great warrior and hunter, he could teach the language of bears to his children, as their children would teach their children. And so it was “that his descendants can converse with bears to this day.”

Here are the lessons I love in this story: 1) In existential loneliness, a human being can find solace among the animals. 2) The fiercest of animals practices the mothering art of nurture. 3) Delusional thinking gives comfort to one alienated from his own kind. 4) Evidence-based thinking is a form of nurture that may lead one to one’s highest expression of self. 5) Imagination makes it possible to converse with the wild, in the mind as in the world--and here “wild” means the inexplicable force of nature.

A story is a cosmology. A story is an ecosystem. A story is a house. A story is one of many forms of creativity that are hallmarks of being human. A story is the imperative toward form taking place in our heads, the imperative that made the universe coalesce out of the Big Bang. Energy falls into matter, matter falls into Earth, Earth falls into DNA, DNA falls into seeds and leaves, plankton, and eels, DNA falls into us, we fall into story. This falling is like spring rain, the origin of new growth, the emergent in all things. Not a fall from grace. A fall into grace. Grace to live. Grace to feel and think. Grace to make and embrace. Grace to be an expression of Earth’s compulsive imagining.

By story I mean a making in words that puts together time, place, character, and meaning into a plausible concoction that has a voice. By story I mean the arts broadly defined as all making that creates something new and worthwhile: it occurs in the studio, the lab, the kitchen, the garden. Creativity is an irrepressible force in human beings. It occurs when we sleep, dreams emerging out of nowhere to make wild stories ring true. “Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work,” writes Heraclitus, “and helps make something of the world.”

Yes, creativity can be directed to malign ends. Intentions matter. Trump’s morally disastrous crew of incompetents and murderers work to create a fake reality while calling the real a fake. They are malevolent improv artists, one mean and mendacious act after another performed at blinding speed. Violence, greed, and vendettas replace service to the cause of democracy and justice. Or simply put, the cause of kindness. Such cruelty is creativity corrupted to malign intent. I believe in a creativity that serves as counterforce to such malevolence. Hence, MAGA = Make Authoritarians Go Away.

I’ve learned since childhood to look to nature as a model for how things work. The rules are simple: 1) Everything is connected. 2) Beauty is everywhere and it fades into decay. 3) Decay fuels the next cycle of emergence. Unfathomable complexity lurks within those principles, but the core is true. When Neruda wrote “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees,” I hear the eros of romantic love, natural force, and creativity as one. What spring does with the cherry trees is what I feel I must do with myself, with my art, with my culture. Always a flowering, no matter how harsh the winter, how virulent the parasite, how fierce the predator. Always somewhere and somehow the flowering. Life set off like a wild fire on this planet. Its force is enormous. Creativity is that force in us, rich with promise and danger.

The neuroscience of creativity complicates the right brain/left brain canard made popular by Julian Jaynes’s 1976 bestselling The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Right brain: creative, passionate, poetic. Left brain: analytic, logical, organized. Newer brain imaging techniques say otherwise: everything is connected. If not everything, then some specific regions of the brain and their functions. In a 2013 Scientific American blog post “The Real Neuroscience of Creativity,” Scott Barry Kaufmann writes, “Creativity does not involve a single brain region or a single side of the brain.” Rather a dynamic network involving relationships between several regions of the brain are at play in creative practice. Kaufmann lines out four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Depending on the task, different networks will be recruited from both the left and right side of the brain in a cognitive process both conscious and unconscious.

The Executive Attention Network helps to focus the mind. It recruits communication between the outer regions of the prefrontal cortex and the back of the parietal lobe. It makes decisions and draws conclusions. The Imagination Network constructs mental simulations, remembers the past, thinks about the future, and puts it all together in the present. It recruits areas deep inside the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe and spurs communication with outer and inner regions of the parietal cortex. The Salient Network monitors external events and internal stream of consciousness and picks out what’s best to solve the problem. This network recruits the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insular. It is important for making dynamic switches between networks at various stages and getting them working together. Some get in each other’s way, as Kaufmann quotes regarding the research of Rex Jung.

Their review suggests that when you want to loosen your associations, allow your mind to roam free, imagine new possibilities, and silence the inner critic, it’s good to reduce activation of the Executive Attention Network (a bit, but not completely) and increase activation of the Imagination and Salience Networks. Indeed, recent research on jazz musicians and rappers engaging in creative improvisation suggests that’s precisely what is happening in the brain while in a flow state.

I don’t know much about the neuroscience of creativity, and my gloss of this research, now more than a decade old, is surely superficial and outdated. But understanding the beautiful complexity of mental processes is helpful in demystifying the myth of individual genius: the artist waiting in solitude for something akin to creatio ex nihilo to be delivered from on high. My studio looks as messy as this process suggests. Months of preparation in the form of notes, research materials, stacks of books on a wide array of topics relative to current projects and some as stylistic models, crumpled paper from failed drafts or blind alleys abandoned, old family photographs, photos of a trip with fishermen to seine a herring weir, wads of bubble wrap (not sure why but there you have it—it’s a messy business), broken binoculars, notebooks notecards, an old hash pipe, Post-it notes. And this, a note in my journal from a Scientific American article, citation long lost: “Openness to new experiences is the strongest and most consistent personality trait that predicts achievement in the arts and science.” Good thing, because the floor and desk of my studio say nothing if not openness to the mess of possibilities.

Then in a remote, protected corner of the studio, neatly printed typescripts of four completed chapters, and pinned to the wall the drafts of two new poems, and on an easel stand the proposed structure for eighteen chapters of the work-in-progress, each keyed to one of three main thematic concerns for the book, to be verified after further incubation and illumination. And then, here at the keyboard, typing these words, which are not what I intended to say when I agreed to write a few pages on creativity, words that are the flow as it emerges from the process taking place in the materiality of my brain which is somehow beyond me. And that too, I remember, reminds me of something I meant to say differently than the way I am about to say it now. All I am after is presence of mind, truth, and beauty. How hard should that be? But “I” am not fully in control of this process.

This idea of creative process as recruitment of a network goes beyond what happens in the brain during creative practice. In Writing the Sacred Into the Real, I spoke to the functioning of artists as culture makers.

“Culture is both the crop we grow and the soil in which we grow it. And human culture is the most powerful evolutionary force on Earth these days. The grief we feel at abuses of human power is the first positive step toward transforming that power for the good. Legislation, information, and instruction cannot effect change at this emotional level—though they play a significant role. Art is necessary because it gives us a new way of thinking and speaking, shows us what we are and what we have been blind to, and gives us new language and forms in which to see ourselves.”

Evolutionary biology too leads to an assessment of creative practice as a cultural action. Anthropologist Joe Hendrich explores the role of culture in the success of our species in The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.

“I think the idea that innovation depends on individual geniuses is misguided. History shows that inventions invariably build on earlier findings that are recombined and improved upon. Most of the things we use every day are inventions that no single human being could ever design within their lifetime. Rather than the product of individual innovators, these inventions can be thought of as the product of our societies. Innovations rely on individuals l learning from others—in that way, human society functions like a collective brain.”

No one can create a bear. The MacGyvers of genetic engineering say that we are not far from being able to bring back the extinct wooly mammoth. Or at least one wooly mammoth—granted, a very lonely beast bereft of its habitat and mates. Even its ancestral microbes. Cinema can create a bear, but it is a mechanical simulation of the animal and not a real bear. No one can create a bear. Yet anyone can imagine a story about living in peace with bears or waging a war against them. Anyone can choose which story is worth telling. Maybe both are worth telling.

But Heraclitus tells us that “the soul is dyed in the color of its thoughts,” and in these perilous times it is important to be mindful of what we create, to take responsibility for it, because the soul, the body, the culture, and the planet are dyed in the color of our thoughts and creations.

Alma from the Kilham Bear Center in Lyme, New Hampshire

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I had the pleasure last year of judging the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize for Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center and chosing Terry Belew’s book The Deep Blue of Neptune. He’s from rural Missouri and his poetry is grounded in that place, as is Wendell Berry in rural Kentucky, Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia, and Frank O’Hara in Manhattan. How to keep empathy alive in the brutality of American life, how to be useful in such times, are central concerns of his poems. He gets our cultural moment, our shared complicity in our ruin. His formal artistry ranges from invented to received forms, the tone from elegiac to comic. Throughout the book the local is the lens through we see the universal struggles of our mortal condition. Central to the book are three powerful sestinas, one of which I’ll feature here.

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But first, a few updates:

I am happy to let you know that my essay “The Eye of Water,” published in Prairie Schooner is a Notable Essay in this year’s Best American Essays collection.

Another short essay “Kissing Trees” is up on the Plant-Human Quarterly, published by the Otherwise Collective in the Netherlands. It’s an excerpt from my recently “finished” nonfiction manuscript Mobius: A Meditation on Art & Science—currently out for review. I know the book will need more work, once we find a publisher, but I’m happy to have this little bit of it out in the world. The first chapter came out last winter in The Georgia Review.

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ON BINGE-WATCHING

If you spliced together all the footage of Ross Poldark galloping along the seaside cliffs of Cornwall, great coat flying over his stallion’s flanks, you could fill at least one of the forty-three hours that the series commands. There may have been only one or two such sequences shot, copy-and-paste as needed. As with the clip of the stagecoach wheel dipping into a rain-filled pothole, a telling close-up that makes the viewer feel the passengers inside the coach jostle. That’s a keeper. No need to reshoot for the next stagecoach ride. To see the technique is to break the spell of the story, to imagine the cinematographer, the editor, the gaff and best boy, to appreciate the gears and wheels and scaffolds of the made thing.

*

I don’t know why I binge watch. I grew up in the fifties. Television was new and most kids in my elementary school had TVs before our family did. I remember in third grade kids coming to class on Monday all excited about “the toast of the town.” I had no idea what kind of toast they were talking about. Certainly not raisin bread. How long was it before I learned that was the title of the Ed Sullivan show? When we finally got a TV, it was stuck in a corner of the dark basement, a cot and chair for the renegade who dared enter. The parental attitude was one of disdain. Like the Sumerians who hated the invention of writing because it would ruin human memory. I braved the dark on Saturday mornings to watch “Fury: The Story of a Horse and the Boy Who Loved Him.” The American West, an untamable black stallion, played by the horse who had starred in “Black Beauty.” An orphaned boy adopted by a widowed California rancher. Opening shot: Fury leads a herd of wild horses through rocky hills and passes of the open range. He is magnificent and haughty and aware of his beauty. No one can tame him. Except the boy, who calls him by name, asks him to kneel, climbs on his bare gleaming back and rides off into an adventure. The horse becomes a hero, saving visitors to the ranch who get in trouble. He’s a little bit like Lassie, but a lot sexier. I don’t remember the storylines, but I remember feeling taken away by beauty.

I always felt guilty watching television. That sense it is somehow a wrong thing got stuck in me at an early age. I think now that my parents’ antipathy came because television ruined my father’s career. He’d be a successful and beloved radio personality. He and my mother wrote scripts for radio dramas like “The Shadow” and sometimes played all the parts including sound effects in live performances. Hands slapping knees for hoofbeats, rattling sheet metal for thunder. But radio was the new thing, everyone everywhere listening to same program at the same time was over. Visual spectacle had won, and my father’s work on the fringes of TV never had the same luster. But to binge. Now that’s the new thing. Watch whatever you want whenever you want for a long as you want. It’s hard to stop.

*

When Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall from America where he has fought for three years against the revolutionaries, he finds that his father has died, his inheritance shot, the family’s tin mines failing, their servants now wastrels allowing rats and goats to take over the house, and the woman he loved marrying his cousin. He had left for war as a Redcoat to escape hanging for brawling and free trading and fraud. He had fought so bravely in Virginia, as to become promoted to Captain. But returns to England as a loser on all fronts. Nevertheless, he is magnificent and haughty and aware of his beauty. Given to brooding at the seaside, anchored by his tri-corn hat, gazing into the stormy distance.

The first episode sets up enough tensions—elastic bands stretched between characters-- so that you have to follow to see if the band snaps, breaks, or slingshots one or another character into oblivion. There’s the unmitigated desire, thick as tar, between Ross and Elizabeth, his porcelain beauty of a jilting sweetheart, who turns out to be something of an empty vessel. There’s the enmity between Ross and Francis, the insipid but moneyed cousin married to his beloved, making it impossible for him to walk away. There are the starving tenant laborers on Ross Poldark’s mortgaged land, bringing the tensions of class struggle to bear. There is George Warleggan, the arrogant greed-mongering profiteer, who is repulsed by Poldark as he grows into being a man of principle and labors beside his tenants, working to benefit the poor and enslaved. George marries Elizabeth after Francis dies in the tin mine, giving Poldark sufficient reason to uphold his side of their mutual enmity. Desire never dies ever after Ross realizes he is better off with a woman who can skin rabbits and chop wood than with a fine lady in silk.

And then there is Demelza, my favorite character in the series. The one who can skin rabbits and chop wood. She first appears as a street urchin in the market, her dog snatched and thrown into a dog fight, a circle of men lusting for blood. She’s dressed in burlap rags, hair bunched under a loose cap, face showing the bruises of her father’s daily beatings. She is a scrambling panicked mess, screaming to get back her dog. Ross saves them both. She grows to become Ross’s true love and mate, never shedding the fire and grit it took her to survive her childhood. It’s a scandalous marriage to the class-conscious Brits, Ross a gentleman of moneyed stock, if now struggling, and Demelza, daughter of a brutal miner with no stature other than her character and intelligence. They are both pleasantly complicated. Ross is principled but impulsive, a risk-taker, a man who moves easily among the working class and aristocracy, loyal but given to jealousy, eager and willing to name hypocrisy and fight for a moral truth, willing to lie to anyone and everyone for the sake of espionage on behalf on his nation. He becomes an eloquent spokesman for both free trade and the abolition of slavery. Demelza grows from illiterate urchin to a woman who can run household and a mine, in her husband’s absence. She is the one who hands out bread to the poor, who welcomes her brothers into their home when they too seek a better way than their father’s hard reign. And, yes, she chops the wood and skins the rabbits without complaint, when that is what’s called for. She is capable of heeding her passion, both in loyalty and folly, but finding her footing again and again in a sense of agency of which she was deprived as a child. And once her long red hair in unfurled, it too commands an audience as it blows in the wind when she stands gazing from the clifftop at the sea. The landscape here works to reinforce that it is a time of change and everyone is on the edge of that, no one is secure despite their sense of belonging in the place.

I should mention the color palette of the series, because after all this is a visual spectacle that reveals itself through image and color. The poor are dressed in the color of bare, dry dirt. Buff, burlap, and rough. Even market day is a buff-colored spectacle of the poor milling about the street where vendors hawk salted fish and sacks of grain. There is no color other than the gowns and top hats of the gentry who float above the crowd even when their feet touch it. The homes of the poor are beige, their clothes are beige, their meals are beige, their tools and weapons are beige. But the gentry… well, just imagine the visual pleasure and envy of seeing those gowns and the roasted goose at Christmas and the spread of fruits and meats and oysters and flowers on the banquet table at the ball. When a tenant laborer picks a bouquet of wildflowers, that is a statement.

*

I am unlikely to read any of the twelve Poldark novels upon which the BBC series is based. British novelist Winston Graham lived in Cornwall for over three decades. The character of Demelza is based on his wife, who was native to the region. The last of these novels was published in 2002 just a year before his death. He also wrote an additional thirty novels, plus books of short stories and nonfiction, and four plays. It’s the kind of career that is so effusive it’s daunting to take on any one book. The historical novels are well-researched and take the fictional liberties one would expect for sake for dramatic interests. And drama there is. Turns and swerves and twists of action and intrigue, both political and romantic. And I’ve only mentioned the primary characters. The secondary and tertiary ones are strung into the weave with a tension that is hard to relieve, except by clicking on to the next episode. I love history presented as visual spectacle and character study. I love seeing emotion play quietly over an actor’s face. So much is said without words--and juxtaposed to history’s panoramic context. How will these people meet the challenges of their time? It’s the question we are all asking of ourselves in the darkening of the American prospect. Yes, we are all standing on a perilous cliff.

*

My favorite moment in the forty-three episodes is in the last one. Ross’s espionage caper against the French has turned on him. In a stand-off with his adversaries, he is about to meet his end when two gunshots blast. Ross is stunned as he looks at his rescuer. More stunned is George Warleggan, his avowed adversary, who stands holding two dueling pistols with a look on his face that seems weirdly innocent, as if self-knowledge is utterly foreign to him. Throughout the series he has held his chin upward, a constant imagistic reinforcement of his arrogance. Here he is stunned at his own action in saving Ross. They drink a reluctant toast in the denouement. George, regaining the chin slant of his arrogance, tells Ross he did it not for him but for his nation. Ross, always ready with the right words and wry smile, says, “Well, then, shall we revert to our usual animosity?” George replies in the sneering tone of faux superiority we have come to know and detest in him, “With pleasure.” How crisp is the British enunciation. It’s an auditory image, wit and bite wrapped up in two perfect words.

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COMING UP NEXT: “On Creativity,” a short essay of mine that popped up as I was working on organizing the chaos of my personal archives.

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THE PLACE OF POETRY

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2 PM, NOVEMBER 1^st at Peregrine Books, Prescott, Arizona. A reading to celebrate my two new books: Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower and The Gift of Animals.

7 PM, NOVEMBER 5^th at Wick Poetry Center, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Reading: Featuring Alison Hawthorne Deming & Terry Belew celebrating the publication of Terry Belew’s award-winning collection The Deep Blue of Neptune. Kent Student Center Ballroom Balcony, 1075 Risman Dr, Kent, Ohio 44242

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Cold Hollow Mountains, East Enosburg, Vermont

VERMONT: A TWO-PART REFLECTION

1.

When I left Grand Manan this fall for my return trip to Arizona, I spent a few days in northern Vermont—a time of encounter with my former self and reflection about our shared future. I’d been invited by Neil Shepard to Sundog Poetry’s “Symposium on Environmental Poetry in the Time of Climate Crisis.” I was to join poets Jody Gladding and Jane Hirshfield, writer/scholar John Elder, and pioneer of the tree canopy/botanist Nalini Nadkarni to speak about poetry and science. An irresistible invitation, given the opportunity to read and think alongside these gifted minds.

I had a few hours before I needed to bed down in Burlington, so I drove up to Franklin County in the northwest corner of the state to visit my old haunts. I moved there in 1969 when I was twenty-three and my daughter was four. I had dropped out of Brown University (then the women’s branch called Pembroke College) and was dead broke. Shotgun teenage marriage was over. I was terrified of nuclear proliferation and had rehearsed the apocalypse too many times to not think it was a real possibility. I was shaken by the violence of the Vietnam War and the racial violence raging through the southern states, and political violence that had touched me when I lived in Cambridge for a few years and the anti-antiwar vigilantes were out patrolling the streets in their Army helmets. I’d dated an organizer for SNCC for a while. He’d helped register Blacks in the South for the vote. He had educated me into how racist the nation was and turned me on to James Baldwin. I was an innocent, despite the judgement and shunning I’d experienced as a teenage mother. I wanted out of a culture that was so cruel and corrupt. I looked on the map for the largest area of wild land, a place far from what I had seen to be targets for nukes, and I found this forlorn county where small dairy farms struggled to hang on and urban exiles bought up the farms that failed—kids ourselves trying to reinvent ourselves, strengthening ourselves on winters that offered weeks of weather stuck at forty below with snowbanks taller than our cars edging the dirt roads. I still remember how the hard-packed snow on those roads would squeak in the cold under foot.

Birthday 1972. Massive sugar maple with burl across the road from the red house. I think the drummer Skeeter Camera took this picture.

We made food co-ops and alternative schools, did whatever shit work we could find, grew organic gardens, made apple cider and maple syrup, raised a pig and some hens. It was a loose community, though I mostly felt like a solitary. I had a one-thousand-dollar U.S. Savings Bond my grandmother had bought for me when I was born. I bought a house, barn and three acres of land for $4500. It was a dump and so was I. Our house looked out on the forested bowl of the Cold Hollow Mountains and that land harbored and healed me, while I struggled to find my way through the thicket of my own ruin.

The red house, 2025

Half a century later, I drove by the old house, astonished to think who I had been and how beautiful this improvised life has turned out to be for both me and my daughter. Of course, she has had her own self-inventions to weather, and our hardships gave her burdens to carry. But here was our house all fixed up, tended and remodeled and radiating a sense of belonging and love, the Cold Hollow Mountains still pillowed with deciduous forest, a deep quiet to its contours. Seeing the house, I felt no envy or remorse, only gratitude that someone had made the place work, had loved it and given it the care it required to be a home. I drove off to be once again the public self I’ve become as a writer, carrying with me a renewed gratitude for the land that had mothered me while I was learning to be a mother.

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2.

A recording with readings and panel discussion of the Sundog Symposium will be available soon. I will post that when the time comes. For now, I’ll leave you with my opening remarks for the gathering.

ENVIRONMENTAL POETRY IN THE TIME OF CLIMATE CRISIS

We were in a very different place as a society a year ago when Neil Shepard and I began discussing our hopes for this gathering. What we felt then as an urgency has now become an emergency. Both art and science are being defunded, eroded, censored, silenced, betrayed. Medical research shutdown. Climate science denied. Environmental protections crushed. Laws shredded. Words banned from the federal lexicon: “climate change,” “emissions,” when these very words are a crash course in the advance of an ecocide being committed in the interests of the wealthy few for whom too much is never enough. The daily barrage of cruelties, injustices, and humiliations of our national identity on the world stage are enough to put a person in a state of perpetual outrage or numbness.

In times of profound change people turn to poetry for meaning and community, as former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith has written: “One of poetry’s great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image -- things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why--is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.” Poets have always known the ground truth of ecology: everything is connected. It’s a pointless act to ban words. They are our collective possession. We have a lot of other words, and we have our freedom of speech—though it’s coming at a higher cost for many of our neighbors and kin. We are here today to celebrate poetry and science—two of the very best instruments we have for knowing where we’re at and where we need to go—and to explore how we might go about that in alliance.

Science generates new knowledge, its method based upon verifiable evidence. It asks a question then tries to figure out how to answer that question in a manner that can be verified and repeated by others. We are living in the age of science. We need science to deal with the challenges and complexity of the world we have made. But how do we speak of the feelings and thought experiments that new findings in science induce in us, the wow factor of learning that a slime mold can create a map of the Tokyo subway system? How do we speak of the technological marvel of the James Webb Space Telescope, the work of twenty thousand people in fourteen countries collaborating for over twenty years. And this at a time when it seems impossible for people to work together for the common good. How do we speak of our empathy for those who suffer? How do we speak of the sublime beauty that abounds in nature? Is the perception of beauty a form of knowledge?

In the face of the challenge of climate change, an upwelling of poetry and science collaborations are emerging—not only poets finding the language of science a source of inspiration, but increasingly scientists seeking out poets. Longer standing experiments include Long Term Ecological Research sites such as the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, CERN (the large Hadron collider near Geneva), the National Science Foundation’s Antarctica residencies, and poetry installations in zoos and natural history museums. Call it a community of the curious, experimenting with new ways of scientific storytelling, of discovering the songs in science.

Many scientists understand that they can—and must--so a better job at communicating their findings to the public. In no matter is this more important than climate change that effects every living being on this gorgeous and wounded planet. “It’s all about global warming,” writes C.D. Wright in Casting Deep Shade. “We are the asteroid.” Poetry can help scientists communicate with broader audiences; poetry can explore ethical and aesthetic dimensions of scientific discoveries; poetry can dwell in uncertainty without grasping for facile truths or lies to cover up the truth; poetry can bring wonder back to minds fatigued with information overload; poetry can give voice to those without voice (“Ask me if I speak for snail,” writes Camille Dungy in her poem “Characteristics of Life,” “and I will tell you I speak for the snail. . . I speak for the damselfly. . . I speak for the moon jelly”); poetry can aestheticize data and weave it into a cultural context. Plus, it’s just fun and downright fascinating for poets to hang out with scientists who are passionate about their work—and who, because they are supposed to screen out their passion in their professional writing, take pleasure in our nonscientist astonishment.

And science contributes to aesthetic experience—to questions of beauty, “questions that science does not ask,” writes Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, “not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.” The universe becomes more beautiful after Galileo enhances our ability to see it with his telescope. The elephant is more beautiful after we understand that it experiences grief and communicates with low frequency vocalizations across long distances. Aesthetic experience explores new language for bringing together ways of knowing; questions what we know and how we know it; confesses our failures and ignorance and quest for healing; shares our anxiety and grief; educates our empathy; finds the songs in science. Kim Stanley Robinson, the great science fiction novelist, says that it is the role of the arts and humanities to aim science. How brazen for a poet to think about “aiming” science.

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REALITY VS. REALITY

Late July. A foggy morning on Grand Manan. Fog softens the air, bathes the grasses and sedges, closes off distances. All I can see is a small circle of misty bogland. Fog calms the landscape. It calms me. A summer of harsh sun and little rain. Fog gentles the spears of the wood fern and the sensitive fern. The needles of black spruce. The lupines are finished. The cow parsnip blossoms--crusty brown platters. The viper’s bugloss, going by. Goldenrod and pearly everlasting are having their moment.

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This summer the CBC show “Still Standing” is filming an episode on the island. The award-winning series hosted by Jonny Harris has been on air for ten years, one hundred and five episodes. I am not a fan of reality TV. It’s just so fake. Fake housewives, fake roommates, fake lost on a remote island (with a camera crew). The worst of it showcases suffering as something to ridicule. Think Jerry Springer’s let’s-make-fun-of-the-lowlifes branch of entertainment. The most popular is the dating reality show. But what could be more fake than attempting to date, that most tender inquiry into the possibility of intimacy, on national TV. Even the talent shows like American Idol creep me out—the way they fuel the lust for celebrity and wealth in a nation where so many of our people are having their health insurance and jobs ripped away or facing the risk of deportation to some hellhole in El Salvador or Sudan.

I did love the first reality TV show, Alan Funt’s Candid Camera. We’re all capable of looking ridiculous, so let’s at least have some fun with it. But in general this is a genre of entertainment that I distrust. It’s a training ground for destabilizing what’s real by calling it fake, a destabilization that has reached its apotheosis in the lying Trumpist cult where the fake is normalized by calling it real. And of course there was “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump’s preliminary job interview for his sadistic presidency. Let’s face it, I am an unreliable narrator when it comes to telling stories about reality TV. The subject brings out the crankiness in me. Which isn’t entirely a bad thing, I suppose. I remember when I met esteemed writer Jim Harrison, he said in his gravelly way, “Oh it’s so good the meet you. I love your essays. You’re so cranky.”

Being cranky is a basic ingredient for living in a democracy. We disagree. We’re skeptical. We argue. We’re outraged at a government that can’t solve our problems. We outraged at a government that curbs our freedom with regulations meant to solve our problems. We constantly want change. And all of this heat is part of the troubling process of trying to find a better way that serves the common good. But if we take the road too far into cynicism and distrust, we end up where the U.S. finds itself today, a minority rule that works with wildfire speed to destroy an imperfect government and take us into territory where no one gets a say except the ruling oligarchs whose vision of the future is repellant to the majority of its citizens.

But I am in Canada, a kinder and gentler nation. My neighbors all have public health insurance. Sure, it costs them in their taxes, but their government has not spent its treasure trying to be the military muscle of the world. It continues to more vigorously support the arts, education, and immigration than the U.S. Even this little island I visit, which has been predominantly White-Anglo for two hundred years, has welcomed refugees from Ukraine and immigrants from India, helping them find housing and jobs. There is plenty of dissatisfaction with their government, but Canadians have found their dignity (Elbows up!) in the face of Trump’s vile claim that their nation should become the 51st state. A movement to “Buy Canadian” spread like the flu through the island’s 2500 year-round residents. Maybe “flu” is a bad simile for such a healthy response to U.S. aggression. Let’s say Canada’s immune system mounted a vigorous defense.

“Still Standing” is a Canadian show. It has come to the island that is my beloved summer home. I had my reasons to distrust the enterprise. Are you coming here to make fun of us? My distrust mounted when I heard they planned to stage a repeat of our Canada Day greasy pole contest. This is a big holiday on the island every year. Each village mounts Canadian flags on the telephone poles lining the road. Some post two flags per pole. Even now, a month after the holiday, the Maple Leaf is flying high all over the island—including at my house. The celebrations include a free pancake breakfast, games and sand sculpture for the kids on the Seal Cove Beach, a big fireworks show, and the crowd-pleasing greasy pole contest over Seal Cove Creek. A wooden barrel is mounted on a pole hanging out from the wharf over the crik. The pole is greased up with dish soap—in the old days it was lard—and competitors climb aboard, shove off, try to ride the barrel to the end of the pole and grab a tiny Canadian flag before the barrel spins them off to fall into the frigid creek. It’s no easy feat. Little kids try it—with help from their dads. Some are scared. They step up and step back. Again and again, until a patient dad gently eases the kid’s fear and off she goes. The dads do it. Teens visiting at Whale Camp do it. College students from the Kent Island Scientific Research Station do it. A tall muscular guy nicknamed the Drifter does it, one year wearing a British flag Speedo and the next an RCMP uniform complete with red jacket and ranger hat. He makes a good splash, usually with flag in hand. Crowds cheer. Music plays. People gather on the wharf, the shoreline, the deck of the Tides restaurant, wherever they can get a perch on the spectacle. Whoops and hollers and handclapping and consoling awww’s ring out. Anyone who catches a flag gets twenty bucks. It’s a great excuse for the community to hang out together and laugh at itself, which we do with joy. But a staged non-holiday repeat? How fake can you get? This is going to be lame, I thought, keeping my skeptical bona fides at play.

But Jonny Harris won me over. True, the re-do of the greasy pole was thin compared to Canada Day. Small crowd, no music, no Drifter, the deck of the Tides reserved for crew to do interviews and tech stuff. Kids lined up to take their turn at the pole, then the adults, but no happy melee of families and costumes, who’s going next? No chickening out at the last minute to be coached again and again by dad. Though one dad on this day did jump into the creek to help his little daughter out as soon as she splashed down. That was a tender moment. And true to form, Jonny took his turn riding the pole—and made good fun of himself at the comedy show he hosted a few nights later at the hockey arena. I’m sure they got enough clips to make for good TV.

The shape of the show is this: Jonny arrives in a small community that’s “against the ropes,” as the show’s tag line puts it. Places where a mill or factory has shut down or a fishery crashed. Places where new enterprises are taking root. Once a mining town--now a ski resort. Once a textile mill--now the world’s biggest pumpkins. Once a chocolate factory--now a high tech cannabis operation. Places where history has left its wounds and erasures, like the Chippewa Rama First Nation community that beat twenty-five competitors to build the largest first nation casino in Canada. And a town made famous by two appliance dealers, who became a tiktok sensation for stunts like smashing refrigerators with an excavator then driving over them with a monster truck. Another—the birthplace of hockey! Though I’m sure there are other contenders for that distinction.

Jonny drives around and admires the place and looks for the people and activities that speak to its history and what makes it unique today. He interviews a few good storytellers, cracks jokes, and takes his turn trying to rope a steer or weave a dream-catcher or drive a go-kart or ride the greasy pole—some weird thing he’s never seen before, something locals are good at and he is not. Much of his humor is self-deprecating, a winning position for a comic. Start by making fun of yourself and it’s easier to take when he makes fun of others. He caps the visit with a comedy show for the locals in which he tells tales and jokes about his experience of the place. The TV show airs a few months later, after scenic videos and interviews have been spliced in. The comedy show provides the narrative through-line.

It’s all pretty innocent and respectful, with a few slightly racy jokes to spice things up. A woman who worked in a cotton mill making long-johns was chastised by the boss for making the front openings on men’s underwear four inches wide. They’re supposed to be three inches, the boss says. You haven’t seen my husband, she tells the boss. Good fodder for Jonny’s stand-up. As was the greasy pole and an interview with a woman who had worked in the Seal Cove smoke sheds before they closed down. She described how they first smoked the herring then boned them. Wait a minute, Jonny quipped. I thought it was boning first and then smoking. I had this one reported to me by my daughter Lucinda, who was on the island for a visit and went to the comedy show. She said there was a beat of silence while that joke settled in and then the huge crowd roared. I wasn’t there because I attended a talk that night at the Grand Manan Museum on an important new fossil find from the Carboniferous in New Brunswick. Our little crowd roared too when paleontologist Matt Stimson thanked us for choosing science over comedy.

Matt Stimson, New Brunswick Museum

Jonny is from Pouch Cove in Newfoundland, population about 2000. “Growing up in a small town in Newfoundland, you see people have a sense of humor about hard times. I turned that into a career and hit the road.” I’ve seen that kind of humor on Grand Manan. It’s a coping mechanism in a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and troubles. I asked a particularly skillful gardener how his garden was doing in this summer’s drought. A pensive silence, then, “Well, let’s just say I introduced a portion of it to my lawnmower.” One summer when I was down on my knees weeding a vexingly overgrown flower bed, my very Christian handyman said, “She’s down on her knees, but I don’t think she’s saying the right words.” It’s the harmless way we laugh at our selves and each other.

The intention of “Still Standing” is to help small communities feel seen and help people to get to know them. The jokes—well, some land and some are groaners, but that’s comedy. Watching a few episodes has helped me to feel for small communities and the change they are undergoing. It has raised questions for me about the sense of place, the sense of belonging—certainly one of our most basic human needs—in this time of rapid change. Grand Manan has been an island sustained by commercial fisheries for 200 years. We’re at the tail end of that story now—ground fish gone, herring going elsewhere seeking feed that’s no longer in the Bay of Fundy, lobster boom starting to wane. What will this place become? Already there are more and more digital jobs. A good thing, I guess, better than young people leaving to work in the Alberta tar sands. But the sense of belonging in a digital community feels antithetical to protecting the natural beauty or the dignity of hard work at sea that has made this place so beloved.

I don't know how our island will be portrayed in our episode of “Still Standing” when it airs later this fall. I hear there will be a bit on the smoked herring history, a bit on harvesting dulse in Dark Harbour, and a bit about a young couple from India who run a local convenience store and hosted a Holi (Festival or Colors) on the island to welcome the spring. Genius, I think to show some fishermen out there throwing powdered paint at each other. The times there are a-changing.

Meanwhile, I continue my walks and taking pictures of the succession of wild flowers that wave across the island summer. I’ll continue trying to learn the ferns: so far, hayscented fern, spinulose wood fern, sensitive fern, interrupted fern, cinnamon fern, and New York fern. No jokes there, I’m afraid, though I’d welcome Jonny to try for one. I suppose just being a poet walking around falling in love with ferns is pretty comical.

So I will close with a poem from Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower about some ancient yellow birch trees I’ve encountered on my island hikes along the western cliffs, a place too remote and rocky, so far, for the loggers’ reach.

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ENCOUNTERING TREES: Red Trail from South West Head to the Whistle

Old birches lead complicated lives.

One falls in a gale then lying on its side

feels sun on its bark and begins

a new branch that becomes a trunk

and rises. Another grows a knee

for support after wind has made

it kneel. One grows an elbow for reclining

as it leans from vertical to horizontal.

Another grows a looping branch

like the curve of a jump rope

turning an obstacle into a game.

But the grandmother tree is the marvel

sprawling like an obese queen

trunk split like a woman’s cleft

side branches snaking low

to reach beyond the canopy

skototropic as a tropical vine

that reaches into darkness

to find its way to light.

A tree that is a community of trees

a tree that refuses damage

turning storm and infestation

into a form that grows stronger

for all it has suffered. Grandmother,

I have walked through a dark forest,

red needled and lit with ghost flowers—

Indian pipes we used to call them

as if to see them were to hear

the land’s indigenous music.

At dawn I sat on a rotting log

and read The New York Times

on my smart phone, America

still going to the mean dogs.

Squirrels scolded, chickadees fed,

a noisy mob gathered in the spruce,

and the bald eagle remained

out of sight. What is it to endure

but to feel the cadence of uncertainty

accepted as the condition for growth

TWO POEMS AND SOME WORDS OF WISDOM FROM W.H. AUDEN.

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There is no denying the sea’s rise on a small island in the Bay of Fundy. Every year I lose several feet of hillside where my property slopes down to the shore, a new raw wound in the earth, spruce trees leaning on their way to the big fall. In places accessible to heavy equipment, a guy who works with rocks has been armoring the shores against the winter storms that tear away her coast. A friend who knows him says he is a genius, the way he can build a wall of stone up against an eroding cliff, making the slope just so, the pitch just right. Sure, planting a line of stones above the tide-line on a beach may not look impressive, but further along the shore the challenges are steep. Anticipating the effects of climate change and knowing how to armor ourselves against the dangers are survival skills for a rapidly changing planet.

The basaltic cobble comes from the western part of the island. It’s a gift of the rift volcano that happened 201 million years ago as the super-continent Pangaea was breaking up and a rift 30 kilometers wide by 70 kilometers long opened up. Basalt forms from basaltic lava flows that cool and crack, often into hexagonal columns. The towering cliffs on the island’s western shore are made of columnar basalt. When they crumble, they leave stones with flat surfaces that make them good for piling up into relatively stable armor. I’m surprised we don’t have any stone houses on the island. My woods, under the moss and ferns, are a mess of basaltic cobble. But timber has also been wildly abundant here, I suppose a bit easier to handle in the days when the houses and fish sheds were all homemade.

If you want to geek out on this geology, here’s a link to a fine poster by geologist Greg McHone, who like me spends summers on Grand Manan and winters in southern Arizona.

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Being in Canada gives me a degree of remove and comfort from the brutalities and sorrows of living in the United States during its crisis. But its crisis is a crisis for all because of decisions and policies that effect global health and climate. I’m happy to see Canada stand up for its dignity and become more of a leader on the world stage.

For the Fourth of July I posted this:

July 4th, 2025. A good day to declare independence from monstrous leaders working to destroy what's best about America: we are all in this together, we love our beautiful land and work to protect it, we believe in justice not cruelty, equality not power, sharing not grifting, truth not lying, family camping trips not concentration camps. I pledge allegiance to being an American of conscience and caring.

But some days I can’t take another news item—every day a new list of outrages and lies. So I take walks with Coco, enjoying some beach therapy in the music of lapping waves and plant therapy in the wild profusion of summer in the North. This morning we went to the Anchorage Provincial Park, walked the beach all the way to the outlet, where a stream flows out of the wetlands that surround Big Pond. Coco is a contemplative dog. She’ll stop along the way and stare into space, nostrils twitching. I think she is experiencing “the view” in the richness of her olfactory ability, the way I savor the view with my visual acuity.

Today we found what I’m pretty sure is an otter path leading from the wetland through the beach peas and grasses down to the beach.

We found cow parsnip and buttercup in bloom side by side.

We found natural beauty to armor the spirit, thankful for some moments of calm. Pass it on.

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Among all the poets I love, Gerald Stern is one whose work never dims as I reread him—his love, his fire, his learned reverence and irreverence. He chose my first book SCIENCE AND OTHER POEMS for the Walt Whitman Award. He wrote a citation that told me I had been seen in ways I had perhaps not even seen myself. I had not met him before that, but I knew his work. He wanted to talk to me, and that first phone call lifted me, trembling, from feeling anonymous to knowing I was in the company of poets I adored. We shared many phone calls after that. And meals. His daughter used to live in Tucson, so when he would visit, I would host him for dinner whenever possible. On one occasion, W.S. Merwin was in town to read from THE FOLDING CLIFFS, and the two greats were at my dinner table. I cannot begin to say how lovely a night that was—Stern in the glow of his dear friend, and Merwin admiring my fruit trees and the trowel I had left on the front porch, which led to my poem “The Trowel,” published by Kenyon Review in their online tribute after Merwin died and included in my new book of poems BLUE FLAX & YELLOW MUSTARD FLOWER. Both now have left us, but they gifted us work to last.

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A sprawling bounty of poppies is blooming in front of the barn at my place on Grand Manan. The building went up in 2004—a shoddy job but good enough for keeping some boats including the Embla, our Norwegian runabout, that came to the island around 1960 and drifted in and out of my family’s story for several decades. When it drifted out for good, I set my mind to turning the boat barn into a summer cottage and studio. My mother passed in 2011 and left enough money for the reno, accomplished with the handiwork of Larry Small. I didn’t know what I was doing, but Larry did. After working with him, I know he could build a house from a drawing on a napkin. And he’d be mighty good company in the process. He worked over the summers of 2012-13, working from my rough drawing and his long experience. Not one angle was square in the place, but he shored it up and made it as true as it was going to get. Tell me where you want the walls, and I’ll build them, he said. He didn’t mind, when one day I said, Oh dear, I should have planned on a dormer over my desk. How big do you want it? he asked. And out came the chain saw.

“The barn,” minke whale rib over the doorway, 2025.

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The barn had gone up on a leveled bit of land on our property that had been a forest of black spruce and white birch. When the reno was done, I was left with a patch of bare dirt and a remnant forest soon to be decimated by spruce bud worms. I’ve spent the past decade or so tending to the land. The lupines were easy. They grow wild everywhere on Grand Manan. I gathered a bagful of seeds in the fall, and the rest was up to their exuberance. The daisies volunteered. The lawn is full of clover—a feast for the bees. I enrich soil in the fall with seaweed for flower and vegetable gardens. Well established, after a few years of failure—foxglove, tansy, poppy, echinacea, salvia, verbena, marigold, cosmos. Just saying the names excites my appetite for their beauty. I grow lettuce, nasturtiums, and Swiss chard in tote tubs— big plastic bins the fishermen use carrying bait for lobster traps. The bins have a way of falling off trucks or boats, and I salvage them from road or beach whenever I can. In the fenced garden—lettuces, green beans, snap peas, kale, Brussel sprouts, red cabbage, tomatoes. Some annual herbs planted among the flowers: basil, Italian parsley, tarragon. Some perennials that have taken charge of their own thriving in an invasive expansion that I welcome: mint, oregano, and thyme. Half of my small lawn in front of the barn is a mat of English thyme. All spread from a few clods I dug up outside our original 1864 cottage. It’s quite possible that plant and its spawn have lived on this land for over 150 years, so this is thyme’s place not mine—though I have given it a little help.

I find great pleasure in having my hands in the dirt. Greater pleasure in watching the land respond to years of tending and taking pleasure in satisfying its ambitions in life. I may have borrowed that phrase from a beautiful book I read this spring, British naturalist Richard Mabey’s, The Accidental Gardener.

”Should I resist being distracted,” he writes, “by the tiny triumphs of the insect world, and stay focussed on the gathering calamity?” His eloquent book is the answer. He celebrates both the order and unruliness that lie in the forces of vegetative growth. What is the point of writing about gardens in a time of environmental emergency? What better time to practice the art of tending a patch of Earth? It’s “an act of generosity to reset the power balance between ourselves and the natural world.”

And this: “The default affective state of almost all living beings is an intense attentiveness not to the self but to the world beyond.”

He even waxes eloquent about sticks:

Sticks have always been connectors, fetchers and pokers, reducers of distance, arguably the natural world’s first tool. They’ve enabled all manner of beings to shape and interact with their environments. Twining plants seize on them for support, sometimes lifting them into the air. Woodpeckers and crows use them to winkle out grubs from crevices in trunks. Puffins have been witnessed picking them up in their beaks in order to scratch their backs. There’s a Norfolk folk myth that woodcocks migrating across the North Sea carry a stick in their claws as a lifebuoy in case they have to put down in the water.

Up here in the Bay of Fundy sticks—or at least birch saplings—are used for top poles on the herring weirs, and more humble sticks used to be used for stringing herring in the smoking sheds. Now they are mostly used for garden peas, offering a bit of support for their climbing aspirations.

As for the forest patch that fell to ruin, I’m now watching a forest grow. It has taken a few years, when it seemed only scrappy hardhack, alder, chokecherry, poplar, and blackberry would favor the newly opened land. One super tree survived the depredation. I wrote about her in my poem “Kinship with Trees and Crows.” Here’s an excerpt:

Then there’s

the black spruce, a lone survivor

of predation’s purge, a tree too broad

for my arms to encompass. During

the purge it lost its spire, standing

blunted and doomed for years

telegraphing crown decline which I

took to be a sign of its death.

But slow by slow the spruce trained

an upper limb to migrate from

horizontal to vertical. It seemed

as surprised as I was at this sign

of vitality. The makeshift spire

sprouted a mass of fresh cones

a gonadal extravagance or boast

that filled me with a strange erotic

joy.

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Read the poem BLUE FLAX & YELLOW MUSTARD FLOWER

AND BIG THANKS THIS WEEK TO POETS & WRITERS MAGAZINE FOR THE SHOUT-OUT FOR THE GIFT OF ANIMALS! (If blocked by paywall, you can register for free.)

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I learned that Alaska is a young landscape. Glacial ice covered it for much longer than the lower 48, so biodiversity is very low. Alaska has only six species of trees. I also learned that in 1993 the Kenai Peninsula forests suffered the biggest beetle kill in North America—99% of the trees succumbed. The few that survived were known as super trees. They had stronger pitch and more root fibers than the rest. A few years back a patch of my land on Grand Manan Island suffered predation from the spruce bud worm. All the spruce and tamarack were wiped out, except for one giant. A super tree. I celebrated that tree in my poem “Kinship with Trees and Crows,” included in my new poetry collection, Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower, out this spring from Red Hen Press.

But the Ripley’s “Believe or Not” moment came when I learned that sea urchins can see without eyes. I know, I know. You’re thinking I’ve fallen into the pseudoscience swamp. I too wanted corroboration of the claim, and I found it in this article from Discover magazine: Sea urchins see without eyes. But Conrad’s account was much better storytelling than a journalistic account. I’ll apologize in advance for details I’ve surely gotten wrong here, but this version is the gist.

Some sea urchins living in an aquarium were accustomed to being fed a morsel of fish wrapped up in kelp. They would move close to edge of their enclosure at feeding time. One day a staff member observed them moving over to their feeding spot when a woman walked by wearing a yellow jacket, a behavior not previously observed. What was up? Turns out the volunteer who feeds them always comes by before going to his soccer practice. He weara his yellow team jersey. How was this possible for a creature with no eyes to see? The sea urchin has “tube feet”—like tentacles—that contain light sensitive cells. The Discover article calls the sea urchin “one big spine-covered eyeball.” True to our human propensity to turn any marvel in nature to our own use, cardiac surgeons are interested in learning from the sea urchin to make an optical instrument small enough that heart surgery might be possible without opening the patient’s chest. That would be marvelous. But marvelous unto itself is this creature that sees with its feet.

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And here again is the discount code for 20% off, good until the end of June, for that marvel of animal connection, my anthology, THE GIFT OF ANIMALS.ar!” and blow your cover.