Friday, July 15, 2005

Ruins Under the Stars by Galway Kinnell 1 All day under acrobat Swallows I have sat, beside ruins Of a plank house sunk up to its windows In burdock and raspberry cane, The roof dropped, the foundation broken in, Nothing left perfect but the axe-marks on the beams. 2 Overhead the skull-hill rises Crossed on top by the stunted apple, Infinitely beyond it, older than love or guilt, The stars lie ready to jump and sprinkle out of space. Every night under those thousand lights An owl dies, a snake sloughs its skin, A man in a dark pasture Feels a homesickness he does not understand. 3 Sometimes I see them, The south-going Canada geese, At evening, coming down In pink light, over the pond, in great, loose, always-dissolving V's-- I go out into the field to hear The cold, lonely yelping Of their tranced bodies in the sky. 4 This morning I watched Milton Norway's sky-blue Ford Dragging its ass down the dirt road On the other side of the valley. Later, off in the woods, A chainsaw was agonizing across the top of some stump. A while ago the tracks of a little, snowy, SAC bomber crawled across heaven. What of the hairstreak That was flopping and batting about Deep in the goldenrod-- Did she not know, either, where she was going? 5 The bats come spelling the swallows. In the smoking heap of old antiques The porcupine-crackle starts up again, The bone-saw, the ur-music of our sphere. Up there the stars rustling and whispering. 9:15:41 AM    comment []

5 a.m. Dog barking somewhere near. Then a cow yelling, and then another. Through the morning a gathering chorus of bawls, brays, moo-hooing. It's 7:30 now and their vocalizations, seeming distress, only get louder. Is it That Time? This is the last free-range county left in the State of California. This means, among other things, that homeowners are responsible for fencing cattle out; cow owners--er, ranchers--are not obligated to fence them in--although they usually do; it's the cows grazing on adjacent BLM land that roam where they like. So, like the reverse of the Yellowstone bison, they wander from their range and into our faces. And when it's time to mooove them on, they sound so pitiful. There's quite a racket going on out there. It must be round-up day. Those sad sad "cows of nothingness"* singing to our early morning dreams. *** Instead of hauling Gunter in and out of the greenhouse, we compromised. An old wooden table sits over his chosen sleeping spot in a corner of the courtyard. Once he conked out there last night I fastened a clip-on lamp to the table's underside, pointing away from anything flammable. Then I leaned plywood against the exposed sides for walls, and an old blanket over all. When I pulled everything back this morning, he was toasty indeed, and didn't want to come out. Another success. *** Haircut day for Brian--his favorite thing; I think it beats out birthday parties, even, because he can see and feel the results for so long afterward, and talk about it while running his hand over his head. "I got haircut." >laughs< I don't know why I always put it off so long. It gives him so much pleasure. I should cut it every week. * I was going to link these words to the Galway Kinnell poem they come from, but I can't find it, and the blog post where I used it before was pre-April 2004, and so has been deleted. Oh well. I'll post another poem I like next, instead. (Googled and altered cow image) 9:15:03 AM    comment []