Mow Carefully

I have a good friend who once told me if I found an eagle feather not to pick it up or touch it because in his Native American spiritual beliefs it has sacred qualities. I understood that it would be disrespectful to alter it, sort of like desecrating a church, I suppose. So later, as I mowed the trail near the giant, old red pine in our yard,  I looked up at the eagle’s nest which has been there for as long as I can remember and again admired its massive size and position atop the last thick limbs of the tree before it begins to taper off.  This time, however, there was a feather on the ground in the path ahead of me. Heeding my friend’s request, I stopped the mower, got off, and gently pushed the feather into the tall grass at the edge of the trail and continued on with my mowing.

Later I looked up the significance of the eagle feather and read that it symbolized great strength, courage, leadership and prestige and that the bald and golden eagles are considered sacred birds. They only have two eggs and this is a reminder of both the dichotymous and binary relationships in our world.

I turned off the computer and thought, it is a story, no different than those told to me during Sunday school and in church when I was younger. But that was not the point. This story, like all of them, is only meaningful because of what the hearer or reader brings to it. To the story of the eagle feather, I bring the love I have for my friend and so when I moved that feather from my path, I respectfully acknowledged his path and was glad. 

Crossbay Lake

From here the north knows no boundaries. It does not recognize state or province, village, hamlet or city, but the north is there in all of the sublime mystery that drives people to go, that pulls people toward it out of a need to discover for themselves that which they cannot find in themselves. While it may not even exist and we fool and deceive ourselves in myth, it is no more or less valid than all of the myths by which we live. 

First Day

Here is where I end up with my students, contemplating this line, parsing its language and the meanings it suggests. Fitzgerald transformed Gatsby's tragic quest for a return to an innocent past into an observation of what it meant to be part of this vast country--suggesting Gatsby's delusion may be ours as well.   

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

It may be a while before I see that line again, as today, my first day unmoored from my world as an Aitkin High School teacher, I begin living it.

Between the World and [Him]...

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in brutal prose of his experience as a black man in America where he uses his body as a motif for the realities of existing in a place that is built on the destruction of bodies. It is a letter to his son that tells of growing up in Baltimore, the school system, his family, his college education at Howard and his time overseas--of the recent spate of well publicized deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and of a man named Prince Jones whose story comes to us in part from Prince's mother's perspective, a woman born of soul crushing poverty who had risen through hard work, determination and persistence to be a successful medical professional and had built a home and life based on all of the rewards she has earned, but her son, too, was killed. Those rewards could not save her son. Coates is the sum of his experiences which have led him to fear for the safety of his son, and, while his son grows up in a different world than he did, it is still too familiar to allow complacency to undermine one's ability to forget the road traveled. To forget that road is to forget the lessons and warnings that portent the ever-present possibility of the destruction of one's body.

Checking Traps

The sun had set but it was still light and I had to get over and check the traps before I lost the ability to see. Snow clung to my boots and it was deeper than I had expected. There was no sign in the snow ahead of me and the small aspen tree cut down by a beaver, all of its branches removed, had a small pile of snow on every part of it. Feeling had returned to my right hand as I slapped it against my side to get the blood moving again. I wondered what I would find, and I wondered what I would do once I found it.

The meadow gave way to an opening in the brush that led to the trail that ran behind and below the pond, past the rusted old Franklin stove and along a deer trail to the edge of the beaver dam. I used the ice pick I carried with me to test the dam in front of me, covered with snow, concealing the holes and uneven footing. A soft gray slush covered the pond and I could hear the trickle of water running over the top of the dam creating a small pool behind it with a stream that ran into the rushes and disappeared. Snow blanketed everything except the running water and in the failing light the scene took on a magical aspect. The stakes used to hold the trap in place in the deeper water before the outflow over the dam were still in place and so was the stake that held the chain of the trap. Nothing had set it off yet. With a feeling of relief, I turned around and headed for the second trap, this one in a small channel between the rushes off to the side of the main body of the pond. Darker still, I knelt in the slush, and delicately felt down into the water with my bare hand probing slowly for the top of the metal frame of my trap for any sign that it had been tripped. My fingertips felt two bars of cold steel still in place beneath the surface. I replaced the sticks and limbs used to conceal the top of the trap and made my way in the dark back to the truck. There would be no work to do tonight.

Dragonfly Dream

crushing sadness a monarch floats over the meadow

a mouse steals through blades of grass

a dragonfly dips through milkweed jungles

transcendently curling

rolling, darting, falling - full

from his insect world to mine

I ride upon its thorax

feeling its wings fuel

movement defying gravity

musculature beneath this thin exterior

defying belief

the ground comes close and then disappears

into a perfectly blue sky

contrail bisected as others

ride a metal thorax to

another world too

Window Moon

Window Moon

In the windy moonshine womb,

through lilac latticework,

shadow mice race

over a patch of earth;

menstruated other--

together we slough

the tongues of ego,

bounded sinew night.

Smoke curls

flex and float from the chimney

tonight.