The Autumn Equinox

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Tomorrow — at 12:21 p.m., in my area at least — autumn begins. It seems an excellent time to write a fall poem. Here’s one that I’ve cribbed from the collection at https://www.poetryfoundation.org.

For the Chipmunk in My Yard

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

I am still reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter — an essay each week or so — and I just came across “The Beast in the Book.” She got me thinking about animals and how we share the world with them, not very politely, and how rich children’s literature is with animals. As Le Guin puts it:

The general purpose of a myth is to tell us who we are — who we are as a people. Mythic narrative affirms our community and our responsibilities, and is told in the form of teaching-stories both to children and adults.

–Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin doesn’t find it at all curious that children learn to read by sounding out the words in “Peter Rabbit,” or that they weep over Black Beauty. She finds it a shame that as we grow older we lose our facility to identify with animals. I loved this paragraph, about T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone:

Merlyn undertakes Arthur’s education, which consists mostly of being turned into animals. Here we meet the great mythic theme of Transformation, which is a central act of shamanism, though Merlyn doesn’t make any fuss about it. The boy becomes a fish, a hawk, a snake, an owl, and a badger. He participates, at thirty years per minute, in the sentience of trees, and then, at two million years per second, in the sentience of stones. All these scenes of participation in nonhuman being are funny, vivid, startling, and wise.

–Ursula K. Le Guin

I think it’s that “sentience of trees” that really made that paragraph stick for me, as I’ve also been reading Peter  Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. 

My challenge for you this week is to write an autumn poem about some living being in your backyard or near environs. Like Robert Gibb’s chipmunk, how does this creature, with its small flame of wildness, teach you to be alive?

https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/species/tamiasciurus-douglasii

I don’t have chipmunks in my backyard, but we do have the small brown Douglas squirrels and the invasive, bigger gray squirrels. We sometimes have possums and raccoons; more rarely we’ve sighted deer and coyotes. Always, there are the birds: flickers, juncos, towhees, Stellar’s jays, flocks of crows each dusk. Last week, on a late walk with my dog, Pabu, I watched a flock of geese pass over, honking. The other day, my husband saw what he swears was a merlin, which is as good a sign of the changing season as any.

What I’m Reading

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These past few months I have been on a reading binge — dozens of mystery novels, of course, and tons of poetry. But I just finished reading a novel, White Dog Fell from the Sky, by Eleanor Morse, that is so jaw-droppingly well-written and gripping that I want to buy a sackful of copies and give them to all of my friends. Barring that, telling you about it will have to suffice.

Set in Botswana in 1977, White Dog tells the intertwined stories of a South African medical student, Isaac Muthethe, who has had to flee his homeland; and Alice Mendelssohn, an American who followed her husband to Botswana, and, despite the end of her marriage, stays on. I don’t want to share much more of the plot than that. I think part of my pleasure in this book came from the unexpected and yet

Sunset, Casco Bay, Maine, 2019
Photo by Rhonda Berg

perfectly wrought twists of the track. Yes, at times it felt like watching a train wreck. At times, I wanted to set the novel aside and not read another word. I couldn’t help but plunge on.

Morse has a talent for letting ordinary descriptions shift into reverie:

The lilac-breasted roller flew again. [Alice] thought it must be the most beautiful bird ever created, with its shining wings, aqua tipped with deeper blue, its lilac throat and breast, white feathered forehead, and perfect dark eye. She thought of God speaking out of the whirlwind, how He reminded Job (as though he needed reminding by then) who had caused the morning stars to sing, who shut up the sea with doors and commanded the proud waves to come only this far, no farther. If He could harness the stars and the ocean, why could He not harness cruelty? Was it more powerful than all the stars and oceans? (289)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWiWl21F28c

I’m tempted to share one of the sweeping philosophical passages from late in the novel, but that, too, may give too much away. What I do want to convey is the lushness of Morse’s prose. It is never so ornate that it intrudes on the story, but enhances it, and becomes part of the trippiness of the whole experience. Sometimes beautiful, often brutal, it felt absolutely true. In this novel, there are no easy answers — no magical realism, no superpowers to help Isaac and Alice get out of their troubles. It doesn’t settle into that familiar track of the romance. All they have to work with are the truths of their time and place and their humanity.

Here are two paragraphs from the first chapter, just to give you a taste. Isaac, who has been transported in the bottom of a hearse from South Africa to Botswana, wakes to this scene:

A thin white dog sat next to him, like a ghost. It frightened him when he turned his head and saw her. He was not expecting a dog, especially not a dog of that sort. Normally he would have chased a strange dog away. But there was no strength in his body. He could only lie on the ground. I am already dead, he thought, and this is my companion. When you die, you are given a brother or a sister for your journey, and this creature is white so it can be seen in the land of the dead. The white dog’s nose pointed away from him. From time to time, her eyes looked sideways in his direction and looked away. Her ears were back, her paws folded one over the other. She was a stately dog, a proper-acting dog.

A cigarette wrapper tumbled across the ground, stopped a moment, and blew on. A cream soda can lay under a stunted acacia, its orange label faded almost to white. Seeing those things, he thought, I am not dead. You would not be finding trash in the realm of the dead. (1-2)

In another book I just began reading this morning, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books, I came across a passage that does a fine job explaining why we read fiction. Le Guin also goes into how people often read: only for the operating instructions. But this is how Le Guin concludes her essay, “The Operating Instructions”:

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life. (6)

 

 

Where to find me

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The #SealeyChallenge

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Here it is, the last day of August, and already it feels like fall. Leaves are changing color, the air is cool, and this morning a light mist accompanied me on my walk. It’s a perfect day for curling up with a book of poems.

Lucky me, I’m a long-time follower of Kathleen Kirk’s blog: Wait! I have a Blog?! and all through August she’s been doing the #sealeychallenge and reading a book of poetry a day, then sharing her thoughts with us. (See this link for a LitHub introduction to The Sealey Challenge.) So I enjoyed glimpses of lots of poets and books of poetry, ordered a few new ones, and sighed with pleasure to see some old favorites.

You can catch Kathleen’s final post here: https://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/2021/08/and-there-is-many-good-thing.html and scroll back through to read all the reviews.

But (Wait!), what’s our assignment for the week? Maybe take a quick squint at Kathleen’s August 14 review of Priscilla Long’s Holy Magic. I’m noticing this excerpt from “Indigo & Violet”:

Indigo’s deep, black before dawn.
Violet’s an evening song.
Indigo’s ex is silver,
Violet’s–obsidian.

–and it makes me think of my great-aunts whose names were Rose and Violet and Opal. Come to think of it, there was also a Pearl and a March, the latter being not a color but provocative in its own way. (And a provocative woman, too.) What if you introduced us to a color as if it were a person? Who would that person be? How would they behave?