Let me be reincarnated as a fortunate drop of rain--
hurled against rocks, spattered on the road exposed, heedless, cycling through earth's drama without hesitation or remorse, resurrected to the sky. Opaque as floating fog or coloring a distant cloud with a rainbow sheen, tumbling past Zeus flinging lightning bolts-- the thunder amplified by the rattle of hail-- I could be as fearsome as an ocean storm or as hoped for as desert rain: cold-blooded, warm-blooded, frozen, splashing, languid-- all my moods perfectly formed. And with my serpentine gene, I will bend rivers through the land, linger as a reflection on a lake, then hurtle over rapids and waterfalls as a dash of white foam, feel the frisson of belonging until a quiet shallow tempts me downward to the caress of mud below. A root will take me in, to send me coursing up a tree where I might swell a bud to flower or, better yet, slip into a leaf and edging past its walls, be breathed into the air, floating upward—arctic white-- to become a flake of snow. The benediction of falling snow transformed into a glacier's patient crawl, I will become ice carving furrows into rock before becoming a river running free: spring will carry me to the ocean to be the sparkle on cavorting waves or keeper of sullen depths-- guardian of all, from whales to manatees. Floating with the tides, I will again be a beat in the cadence of raindrops, the cannonade of an avalanche, the lamentation of a stream-- or perhaps be snared by a passing bird, softly netted by the bristles of its feathered breast, consumed by the fire of its tiny heart: I could be that marvelous drop of rain. Nancy Christiansen
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Lisel Mueller, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Loren Eiseley
While working on collages depicting different strata of earth, I became interested in patterns that the roots of different plants create—patterns we usually cannot appreciate from our vantage point above ground, but a realm that raindrops can penetrate and transform. In her poem "What a Dog Might Hear", Lisel Mueller conjectures that a dog might hear " the sound of spiders breathing and the roots mining the earth: it may be asparagus heaving, headfirst, into the light." William Carlos Williams was a doctor as well as a poet. His poem "Spring and All" describes the road to the hospital with the "broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds" alongside it and "all around them the cold, familiar wind." Today there is grass, but he promises "tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf." Change has arrived and "rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken." Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets. Although she was from New England, she lived in Petropolis, Brazil for many years. In her "Song for the Rainy Season", she writes that "Without water the great rock will stare unmagnetized, hard, no longer wearing rainbows or rain, the forgiving air and high fog gone; the owls will move on...." In another Bishop poem "At the Fishhouses", she says that if you taste seawater, it will be "dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world." Water and patterns associated with it are popular subjects for painters. As might be expected from an inhabitant of a dry land, especially on with a Moorish history, fountains were often featured in the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla's works. He seems to have emphasized the patterns of falling and swirling water as much as he celebrated the color of the garden flowers. The water's movement also contrasts with the solidity of the buildings serving as a backdrop for the gardens. Monet is famous for his very large paintings of the reflections on his ponds and the influence they had on subsequent painters. W. S. Merwin was prolific poet and conservationist. Clouds in his poem "Still Water" are the forebears of the "fine rain gathered in rills among the hidden crags." After "taking along flakes of starlight moonlight daylight down through the wild distances", the water finally "lies there at last by its green pasture and cradles the stillness of the empty sky." In The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley recounts a day when he floated on his back down the Platte River. He writes that turtles, fish, frogs, and humans are "concentrations...of that indescribable and liquid brew that is compounded in varying proportions of salt and sun and time. It has appearances, but at its heart lies water...." Eiseley grew up in Nebraska and later became head of the anthropology department at the University of Pennsylvania. "What the Dog Might Hear" and "Spring and All" are both included in the Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes which was first published by Harcourt Brace and a later paperback edition was published in 2001 by Harvest. "Song for the Rainy Season" and "At the Fishhouses" are in Poems / Elizabeth Bishop published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011. In 2016, Copper Canyon Press published Merton's poem in Garden Time and The Immense Journey was published by Random House in 1957. We have explained earth's runic language,
interpreted its layers of fossils and forms, recorded and transcribed its marbled notations—its colors, hierarchies, textures, and ancient but still changing ways-- established a chronology to chart its events, to give a history to earth and its days. We have hypothesized a molten center, grinding tectonic plates diving under others of their kind, a weathered skin scraped clean by glaciers-- swamps, then ice ages, swamps again, snow-- the catastrophic nature of comets and volcanoes, and the erosive effects of water and time. The atmosphere has been appointed earth's muse, its billowing clouds as the breath of life, cleaver of valleys, leveler of hills, and creator of seas: vapors, winds, and waves are under her decree with floods and droughts as their consequence, uniting the planet in an interwoven connectedness. The old maps had it right-- monsters are lurking in the depths and those medieval bestiaries were not strange enough to explain the fossils that we have dug up: a parade of characters from trilobites to dinosaurs sinking from rulers at the tops to momento mori down below. Then came humans and agriculture: crop circles, fret of fields, cities, mines, serious dams, airports and planes, skyscrapers, freeways, constant wars, dumps, industry (light and heavy), strip malls-- now a planet betrayed and debased by human flaws. In the end, a reckoning will come and the earth itself will record our tale. The speed of the planet as it sweeps through space is beyond our senses, its bulk, its turning beyond our control, the earth holds us close and here we will remain-- not dust and ashes or tattered grasses, but both bone and clay. Nancy Christiansen Katherine Swift and Loren Eiseley
The English writer Katherine Swift created a garden in Shropshire and wrote about the experience in The Morville Hours, using the Book of Hours as her inspiration. In her book, she recounted some of her area's earlier history. During the Pleistocene Ice Age, Morville was covered by an ice sheet which would sometimes surge, "the ground vibrating with a roar like that of a continuous volcanic eruption", but then would retreat, the glacier sporting a "dirty white snout" with its meltwater "accompanied by the trickling of gravels, the noise of stones falling from the hillside...." These quotes are excerpted from just one striking sentence encapsulating the geologic changes which occurred in a three-hundred-year period. In The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley wrote about the "Cretaceous explosion of a hundred million years ago" that altered the course of evolution. Instead of the limited world of spores and pinecones, seeds were "travelers" that were "skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys" or wielding the "clutching hooks of sandburs." The "world of giants" was being replaced by one of color, pollen, and nectar. The Morville Hours was published in Britain by Bloomsbury in 2008 and in the United States in 2009 by Walker and Company. The Immense Journey was published in 1957 by Random House. Frilled, branching, bushy,
Appaloosa spotted, bright green, copper red shredded seaweed ferried by the waves-- one lone white feather drifting and bobbing, and a lone pirate gull out to plunder but the fish are huddled safely far below. Alligator kelp—its head an untethered golden sphere—lurking, spying, waiting before a skirmish on the beach, its seaweed limbs wrestling with the waves, rolling to and fro; an opaque jellyfish floats by, slipping away on some mission of its own. Cormorants as champagne corks bursting upward from surging tides below, the red-stockinged legs of diving guillemots kicking out from their black-and-white feather petticoats, then the torpedo mushroom body of a harbor seal-- its careful dark eyes watching me before it disappears. Swarming yellowjackets presiding, an auklet laid out in the sand with an honor guard of coiled kelp and sentry sparrows; white butterflies listing above tributes of thistles and daisies, mustard and purple bouquets swaying, bleached and softened by wind and sun. Beyond the beach, waves of clouds catch on the spines of distant mountains while braying seagulls celebrate the return of sated fishing boats. Two passing terns circle overhead with a lone osprey sailing by and, on the way home, three sturdy red hens stride down a country road. Nancy Christiansen J.A. Baker, Mary Oliver, and Loren Eiseley
Seeing and hearing birds provide some of the highlights of my day. Lists of birds seen are less important than observing their lives. Today many bird populations are declining precipitously. During J.A. Baker's life, peregrine falcons appeared doomed to extinction because of DDT and an earlier British government policy of killing the birds to protect messenger pigeons during the second world war. In a quest to record their lives before that potential outcome, Baker spent many days during the years 1954 to 1964 in Britain following the peregrines left in his area and then condensing his observations into the powerful and beautiful language of The Peregrine. Robert MacFarlane praised Baker's accomplishment in both the introduction to the New York Times' edition of The Peregrine and in a later Guardian April 15th book column in 2017. Comparing Baker's descriptions of hawks and owls with those of the American poet Mary Oliver, I discovered some parallels. Baker described the peregrine hawk as a "tiny silver flake on the blue burnish of the sky." The bird was "a dark blade cutting slowly through the blue ice" and changing "color like an autumn leaf, passing from shining gold to pallid yellow, turning from tawny to brown...." In "Hawk", Oliver's bird "is heaven's fistful of death and destruction" that "seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it turned into a white blade, which fell." Finding a barn owl on a post, Baker observed that the "bland meditative mask of its face" was "looking at me from the grey of the field." In the poem "White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field", Mary Oliver wrote that her owl was " a buddha with wings" and that it "rose, gracefully, and flew back to the frozen marshes, to lurk there, like a little lighthouse, in the blue shadows." In The Immense Journey, the paleontologist Loren Eiseley mused that "Birds are intense, fast-moving creatures—reptiles, I suppose one might say, that have escaped out of the heavy sleep of time, transformed fairy creatures dancing over sunlit meadows." A wintering area for many seabirds, Deception Pass is a channel in the Salish Sea with strong currents and whirlpools. According to Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon by Ryan Kelly, Terrie Klinger, and John Meyer, the quality of the water differs markedly between the eastern and western sides of the pass. The water on the eastern side has a higher proportion of fresh water because of the rivers flowing into it while the western side is saltier and colder, and this accounts for the differences in the species living in the two areas. The Peregrine was first published by HarperCollins in 1967 and reissued in 2004 by New York Review Classics. "White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field" was published in Owls and Other Fantasies by Beacon Press in 2006. The Immense Journey was published by Random House in 1957. |
AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
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