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January Wind
"The January wind has a hundred voices. It can scream, it can bellow, it can whisper, and it can sing a lullaby. It can roar through the leafless oaks and shout down the hillside, and it can murmur in the white pines rooted among the granite ledges where lichen makes strange hieroglyphics. It can whistle down a chimney and set the hearth to dancing. On a sunny day it can rattle the sash and stay there muttering of ice and snowbanks and deep-frozen ponds. Sometimes the January wind seems to come from the farthest star in the outer darkness, so remote and so impersonal is its voice. That is the wind of a January dawn, in the half-light that trembles between day and night. It is a wind that quivers the trees, its force sensed but not seen, a force that might almost hold back the day if it were so directed. Then the east brightens, and the wind relaxes -- the stars, it source, grown dim." -- Hal Borland
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 This beautiful turkey mamma is nesting outside my office window.  She has nine eggs!  Yesterday was a Four Great Blue Day. Populations are said to be increasing!
 Jack-in-the-Pulpit
after William Carlos Williams’s “Queen-Anne’s-Lace” Kimiko Hahn, 1955 Remote purple lays claim to stem, beside routine stripes of green and brown. Dark as a patch of shade in the marsh across the path that the neighborhood kids and I, were forbidden to pass. It is that hue that overtakes, the marsh that sucks in boots and offers up skunk cabbage and cattails. Nests here and overhead. Who named this plant-- also called bog onion, brown dragon, Indian turnip, wake robin, Arisaema triphyllum-- and who told me I cannot name. But his purple—all shadow, all remote and not-remote, all question marks, craving. Yes? This herbaceous perennial, growing from corm vertical and swollen as it is underground. Even in late summer, it is not nothing, William (or Jack), turning from purple to red before his scattering. Copyright © 2016 by Kimiko Hahn. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 28, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets. "Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens?" Thomas Carlyle
"The 'natural' world is the world, and the productions of man extensions of it--always--even when obscene or tortuously remote. It helps to remember." David Leveson "Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the solemnity nay better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on condition of being obscure." Jean-Henri Fabre |
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