4 a.m., May 3…….
Looking up from reading Wolf Willow
…the clock quietly ticking…
suddenly I’m not alone in the cool
lamplit room:
Stegner is sitting there in the squeaking rocker,
rocking slowly, by the cold wood stove.
He says nothing, just a wry smile,
a knowing look, deeper
than his starry Manitoba sky.
Facing each other in old worn chairs,
Beston and Borland muse about New England,
blue blizzards and lilacs, blowing
endless seasons across the ancient glacial hills;
how gold sunlight shimmers the steep sand,
the white sea birds, cold blue waters
sparkling, forever breaking, shaping
the outermost Cape.
At the black window, holding a red and silver
balalaika, Pasternak stands vigilant
in an embroidered peasant shirt, looking out
into tall bare birches, cold spring stars.
He turns to me with that perennial question
on his raw-boned Russian face, revealing
the deep pathos of shattered ideals,
of war, and loss.
Suddenly Akhmatova blows in from the night,
chilled, scented with passion and dried perfume,
broken loves like tender blossoms,
drops of blood on late spring snow ….
And over in the shadows sits
dark-eyed Jane Kenyon: her fingers resting
from gardening, from making luminescent words.
She puts down her half-empty glass of red wine
and crumbles old newspapers with split kindling.
Her voice is rich with flowers, and the sorrow
of killing frost, saying to the rest of us
“someone needs to build a fire”.
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–Quilla
Arrow Heads ……..10.13.15
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Arrow Heads
This is written in memory of my mother’s father, William Cleveland Parker, a good part Cherokee. And for those of us who have Native blood trickling through our veins (or wish we did)…
From my nature journal: A cool golden day, October rain steadily falling, wet yellow leaves flickering down. Earlier this week, in a neglected farm shed I found an old, dusty collection of Native American spear heads and bird points. The shed was overgrown with brush and wild raspberry briers. Strong red stalks of sumac stood like ghosts of painted warriors, beside a thin mountain creek. These wrinkled fingertips, this wondering mind keeps feeling the scalloped cut-quartz edges, the sharp black hand-worked chert. Such pieces of pre-American history are several hundred to several thousand years old.
Unknown centuries of crossing moons, each stone point had slept alone, with silent streams of tribal blood, lost in the tidal depths of time and lowland loam. I found these ancient shards of human-stone dumped in a rusted white porcelain bed-pan used by white men and women many years of haunted nights—too cold, too dark, too far to the outhouse—long after the “savages” had been removed, no longer a threat. Night-howling wolves and Indians had been reduced to ghosts and fireside myths.
Over decades, Anglo farmers broke open the hallowed ground with bull-tongue plows. Steel harrow blades cut and turned up the broken relics of hunt and war. One at a time, white quartz and rose-quartz weapons, rose. Into the plowing light each spring, like blood-stained shades of spirits, they speak with silent words, these long-fallen killing stones. How strange, imagining a time when a “warhead” was just a pointed rock, strapped with sinew to a stick.
Buried for millennia, primeval shapes finally showed themselves to the white man, sweating in his store-bought denim “coverhalls”. His steep mountain years were given (like the natives before him) to making food from the rocky soil to quiet his family’s hunger groans.
Now an old, dull-edged guilt, with unnamed sorrow, walks the fields and forest shadows, knowing the Ancient Ones are gone. Still, the farmer picks up each crafted piece of arrow-stone, holding a daylight moment of wonder in his rough hand. He drops it into his pocket, knowing he’s found a powerful, timeless thing that once sliced through the shadow-line defining life from death. Arrow points still cut across the centuries. Piercing the limits of our mind, each arrowhead speaks to the primordial heart desire for land we can take by force and burn, break and fence, buy and sell, but never truly own.
–Quilla
Tuesday, February 17.15
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A Morning of Bitter Cold
(with homage to Boris Pasternak)
At the upstairs morning window, black coffee steams in a large white cup. The midwinter sun rises with pale frozen light. I read the rich, impoverished poems of old Russia—the ancient mothering land. She weeps for unknown millions of deaths from the Revolution and decades of totalitarian regimes. Her sorrow is that of a young peasant woman, a widow left with fatherless children, a weedy garden, a bottle of vodka and a balalaika. Hers are true songs from the hinterlands of the heart, the plucked strings of human joy, and pain.
The laughing aspens are always there, ever windblown. How their roots thirst down into the Slavic soil, fertile with blood and bones. The aspens release their windy yellow leaves spinning with wet snow like the veils of widows, wailing Orthodox funerals draped with purple and lace. Each night, the vast upturned bowl of Russian sky, deep with stars and black with grief, glitters down to the steppe’s black rim.
But I look up, and out into the present morning, these brittle frosted flowers of light. And again I am torn, looking back behind the mirror, and out into the world: a man born with one life, two thirsting souls. One endears the small pathetic words, the buried passions of humankind ravaged with personal wars. He knows they all secretly hunger— a few sweet crumbs of the broken, “the true and living Bread”. How the ancient holy writings rise in us with a nourishing mystery—the yeast of living Words— wanton to lift us into human love, to break our pride with the grist of divine truth.
Down below, scattered among the seeds I’ve thrown like words to the frozen ground, peck the pitiful and hungry birds. They steal out of the dark forest to feed. Each morning, I cherish the honest brotherhood of their warm and fragile blood. Summer and winter they eat and fight and love, weave nests and tend their eggs and fledglings with devotion, survive the hawks and the killing cold. They cast no votes.
But this other soul wants something more than words. He is forever looking out, a lean golden hawk. He is like the winter morning sun, finding far and close the wild and radiant communion of life, and death—-a complex community of warm lives, kindled with the one fire of all Being. He is vigilant, perched with talons fiercely clutched. Yet thrilled, watching storms and rising stars. He yearns the sleeping folded flowers to wake, and break open again, soft petals of fragrant pastel light. Listening, he hears the unwritten scriptures of morning wind, of hard blue frost, the lost flutter of wings. His spirit deeply feeds on the meager, hungering songs of a few winter birds releasing crumbs of praise.
How seemingly unlike, these two disparate souls! Yet they live in the one man, so variously in love—with the one wild and tender God.
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–Quilla
After Cooking for the Homeless Men
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After cooking for the homeless men….
……..I sit down alone beside the cooling grill to rest. Just above me on the bare limbs of a gnarled old Dogwood, a few robins are gobbling the last withered red berries still sweet with last year’s suns. And towering far above them the spire of a tall pine, glowing soft gold in the day’s last fires of cold, smoldering light.
The flowers in the winter flower-beds are long-dead, brittle stems. On criss-crossed walkways of the compound, sad-eyed men walk past wearing heavy faces, mumbling, or silent—perhaps even to themselves. A few of them look up and nod, say thanks to me. But I do not need their gratitude. My heart feels deep compassion for the pathos of their past and present ways. I am glad to cook the sweet smoked meat for them.
The robins cluck and giggle, getting full on last year’s wild fruit. The tall pine glows like a natural steeple, a golden spire as the fire of winter sun goes down.
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—Quilla
A Great Horned Owl and “The Long-Night Moon”
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From my nature journal, December 4: Before going to bed I close down the house and walk outside for a few minutes to stand and listen, to hear the evening hush of the dark December hills. I breathe deep and smell the night. The air is mild for this time of year, cool and moist with the musk of fallen leaves and loamy earth—thawed again, after hard November frosts.
The vast bowl of sky is full of slow clouds, curdled milky opalescent blue. Wisps of smoky rust stain the tall moon. From the west drift shadowy vapors, not thick enough for rain, nor dense enough to completely darken the ancient stone face of light. In winter months, when the sun rolls low across the sky, the moon rides high.
From deep past beyond all remembering, native peoples called this the Long-Night Moon. The time in the earth year we’ve squared into a grid of numbered boxes and named “December” has always known the shortest days, the longest nights. Can we imagine living by a “calendar” closely tuned with the moments and silences of natural cycles? —a “clock” that ticks with spring’s first exuberant fluting of the Wood Thrush; the raspy summer night-music of Katydids; silky ears of corn sweetened in the husk; moonlit wolves crying across the milk-blue crust of snow. So the indigenous tribes named the thirteen moons of the turning year. The round rock satellite rolling above us always reflects the light from the buried sun. The moon’s soft or sharpened radiance, whether the color of ripe melons or of icicles, sketches the shadows of plants, of animals and the transitory movements of man wandering, warring and loving in his brief seasons upon the earth.
This particular night is quiet, and still. Only one sound haunts the deep woods, the night meadows and the grey-faced moon: a Great Horned Owl hoots somewhere on the black wooded hill. The large owl’s booming notes drum muffled echoes across the deep hollows. I stand still several minutes, listening to his throbbing song, over and over, every twenty seconds. (And I wonder how he knows when twenty seconds is up?) The fearful imaginations of native peoples conjured forebodings from such ominous night-words. The dark sound stirs something in us primal and wild, living beneath the level of language.
Tonight I do not hear the female owl answering with her higher-pitched staccato tones. Suddenly the male stops calling. All is quiet but the faint river sighing in the distance. I wait and listen, but the great owl has gone silent. From somewhere in the pastures of night, a horse snuffles.
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–Quilla
Mars
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Mars
Tonight on tv we watched those few hideous monsters
of the twentieth century, who slaughtered millions
of humans, wanton for world dominion.
The demonic images troubled my dreams.
Later, I sit in the cool spring night
letting God’s darkness heal my wounded mind—
—images of bomb-shattered cities, thousands
of mangled bodies frozen in Russian snow,
never to return to supper in their homes.
Imperceptibly, the slow and timeless stars
turn like wheels of clocks, clicking silent words
over the enduring, bloody earth.
Mars, the planet-god of war, glimmers
over the land like a broken prism,
reflecting only the crimson shades of light.
Fireflies twinkle yellow over the meadows
like field nurses bringing little healing lamps.
The horses are snuffling, whinnying peacefully
across the silent pastures of night.
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January 17.14…..Winter Sunset
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Winter Sunset
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Late in winter day, red fingers
of cloud rise from earth and reach across
the sky: like stained bandages
the healing rose-lights wash over
the darkening hollows,
all the night hurts, the hiding-places.
As if God himself were reaching to us
before the dark, wanting to heal
the day’s fresh wounds
each of us inflicted, and those we felt
inside the hollows of our soul.
And all those days long-buried too—
unspoken faults and shame,
proud warriors and victims both, fallen,
the un-won battles, unresolved blames
—all covered at last with crumbs of frozen earth
and a cloth of frozen sky, thrown carelessly
over our ancient days.
Now the winter leaves blow over them
like smoke, like ashes.
No holy words of release finally spoken
to let them go in peace.
Healing rose-lights wash over
the darkening hollows.
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–Quilla
April 25.13: Homage to an old White Oak/Reflections on the ‘Civil’ War
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In spring snowfall, the great old White Oak, now in its third century
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Homage to an old White Oak/Reflections on the ‘Civil’ War
This evening, the year’s first thunderstorm comes gnashing through the great old oak full of new spring leaves. Pear trees in the garden are glowing pale with blooms, flickering ghosts as the storm approaches. Again and again twilight winds bend the long black feathers of the short-lived pines. We know that just under the surface, intricate filaments of white roots, many-forked like lightning, run long shallow threads thirsting into the black and timeless earth.
Releasing trillions of volts, sky keeps repeating flashes of violet neon, like cannon fire booming the greening, naked land. Thunderbolts rumble like hundreds of horses pulling loaded gun-wagons over a wooden plank-bridge, jolting the sleepy hollows and shadowy forests. A child hiding in us watches at the windows, squinting and listening with terror and wild joy. Even the dog cringes and whimpers in her bed.
The great White Oak stands lone on the far hillside meadow like a silent woman-oracle, mystical but visible, her skeleton of limbs glimmering in the electric dusk. The old tree’s presence recalls two centuries of sun and storm, just standing there, whispering wordless truths down through the decades of man… With no dead limbs or scarred trunk, the oak appears never to have taken a lightning bolt.
These very fields were a camping ground during the Civil War. Long-closed musty diaries and frail yellow letters open and unfold, lamenting with lamplit scribble our bloodstained history: of record, 1200 Union soldiers camped here on a large farm. The oak was a sapling then. Old sepia photos would show her wistful and thin, standing above the gaunt visages and grimy uniforms. The forgiving land keeps cleansing itself of man’s blood, centuries of rain and snow. . .
One hundred fifty springs ago the young oak stood there. Yes, right there–quietly listening to firelit faces of anger, fear, and cursing. With the profane utterings, homesick tearful prayers also drifted up through her supple limbs into the air like the smoke of those night fires, in the dark spring winds of 1863. The cursing and the prayers, the smoke and the wind—all of it lifted into the agony of black sky, passing away like time, the way we wish in vain the years would take our human pain away.
But we keep seeing how passing storms and suns, even time itself has no power to heal the deeper wounds. The bitter blood-grieved land still silently weeps with horrific loss: countless thousands of natives murdered for this land they had called home for numberless centuries. And much later, the so-called ‘civil war’, contesting man’s right to enslave other men for financial gain. Oh, the sum of all our buried thoughts, the wounds of our long generations of private wars!
Lying close to the bone, the stubborn shrapnel of prejudice and pride, self-righteousness and hate still festers. Metal detectors keep finding nineteenth century musket balls buried in black cold mud along the creeks, like lost bullets hiding deep in the low ground of our secret hearts.
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“I will redeem the years that the locust has eaten”
–Joel, chapter 2, verse 25
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–Quilla
May Twenty-seventh
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Spring Moon
Late, the man-lights are all switched off.
The only luminescence this dark hour :
the cool Spring moon
a sickle gleaming, no handle
no obvious purpose, save to shine
a distant star’s brilliance
and to hang there, a round rock
turning endless space, spinning
on the spindle of the ages
a broken shadowy lantern
slanting softly red, smoky radiance
through the windows of our loves, our wars.
That ancient glowing falls to us tonight
thru ragged clouds and mist—torn
night storms on lofty crags
—its light is lost in jagged
opalescent shadow, even as it sets.
At best, we’re thankful what we get.
Oh, what a thin curved arc
of glimmering it takes
to waken our blind night-hunger
this human craving
all our turning years of nights
some thin shred of living Light.
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April Fourteenth, ‘Already the Apple Blooms’
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A cloudy April Morning, reading Pasternak. Warm spring wind, just a few days and already, apple petals are fluttering down. The exquisite fragrance of the orchard blows away, like soft balalaika tunes. Another year’s display of blossoming fruit trees, is done. Hard late frost last night killed many blooms —all the apples not to be.
Open windows, wind-chimes jangle: raucous music fills the winter rooms with spring. A soft breeze tumbles the white petals across our shadowed paths almost un-noticed—like pieces of our private griefs the petals hurry, only to fade into the dark thawed ground. Water lifts, blows softly from the fountain, dries quickly on the garden stones.
This morning early I opened an old book of Russian poems—gift from a dear friend eighteen years ago. The pages smell like libraries in winter. Long-dead words come back to life, across the snowy steppes of imagination, calling to us on the wide tundra of time, in this pungent steam of black, morning tea.
Passioned words of love—like fallen lace dropped shameless to our ankles, to the floor. And words of war—our righteous partisan blood flows out like dreams, on muddy boots and ice. Meanwhile commanders in warm rooms excuse the waste of countless lives.
And for what worthy prize?–incomprehensible pain, and loss. Century after century justifying, we deny our deeper wounds, and needs. Still thinking that winning on our terms is always the most important thing.
But we sometimes wonder: what those millions (and we, as nations, as individuals) might have become, had they lived?
I look outside: a few grey deer walk out of the winter woods like hungry phantoms. Eyes watching, ears twitching furtively for the enemy, they chew the tender orchard leaves. They live one day at a time, eating only what they need.
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–Quilla
Friday, March Twenty-third
The stormy evening sky swallows everything.
Turbulent clouds open wide grey arms
welcoming the night, its strong black rings.
I look out on the ragged garden, the sad fields
resurrecting green again, hope rising out of winter.
Wild geese flying north to nest, roost on the swollen river.
Cold spring twilight, rings the jubilant frog music.
The small Pear twig my daughter planted with me
ten years ago when she was only eight, now glows
A tall spire of snowy blossoms—a ghost, lifting limbs
of praise, the warm dusk. I did not know then
ten years later, she’d have so little love.
I’ve apologized, again, again
my selfishness, a far from perfect father.
But she still binds me there.
Beyond this pain, I grieve much more:
the hostile ships she lets harbor in her heart,
cannons standing ready for war.
The stormy evening sky swelling over Spring
wants to have its way, to swallow everything–
even our ravaged, vanquished hearts.
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–Quilla
January Thirteenth
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A Gift
The rare January thunderstorm
blusters in—raw wind, cold shadows
darken the thawed fields.
Naked limbs of trees
toss and clatter, grieving
as if wishing they had leaves.
My eyes are mesmerized,
the scudding turbulent skies, a sea
of clouds churning great black ships.
Suddenly, the very nimbus I am watching
right there–a jagged wire of light
strips the darkness, tears it open—
pure electric fire, electrocuting faster
more fierce than any word, its sight
shuts my eyes, a primal fear
and disappears. Silence. . . .then the crash
that cracks the fragile dome of air
to bits, and hits the hollowed ground:
horrific boom, the hallowed bomb
of war. A mush of rain and gusty hailstones
strafes the soft surrendered land.
Like all storms, it’s quickly done.
Now the low sun peeps out to look, and flings
a gleaming fire of colors to the east.
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–Quilla
Ruach 333, by Quilla 