Winter’s Tyrant Spell

~ shoreacres ~ 81 Comments
ImageThe winter road ~ Eliza Waters

Human behavior can be easier to predict than the weather. When storms of any sort begin to brew, the air becomes charged with both anticipation and anxiety.  Conversations grow a little louder; chatter becomes more insistent. Increasingly frequent weather bulletins result in increased scrolling on the socials, not to mention increased impulse buying at the grocery stores.

Some hope the storm turns and dissipates before wandering off to die; others eagerly wait to see what nature has up her sleeve this time. Like children convinced goblins are living in the closet, consumed as much by curiosity as terror, we’re willing to risk just one glimpse of the hidden horror before darkness descends again.

Common enough in hurricanes, this strange combination of fear and fascination accompanies winter storms as well. Nor’easters, blizzards, white-outs, ice: we hate the interruptions they bring; the complications and the immobility. Still, compulsion can overtake us: an insistent need to feel nature’s effects: to walk; to measure; to experience the wind’s howl and the hush of falling snow. Spellbound as much as snowbound, we find ourselves in thrall to the swirling storm.

Emily Brontë captured the feeling well in her poem titled “Spellbound.”

The night is darkening ’round me,
the wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
and I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending,
their bare boughs weighed with snow,
And the storm is fast descending,
and yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
wastes beyond wastes below;
but nothing dear can move me.
I cannot, will not go.

Brontë had it right. As much as any storm of summer, winter storms can be compelling and beautiful. Unfortunately, winter is more than storms. Vita brevis, ars longa, as the saying has it. But in this season of solstice, vita brevis, ars longa, et hiems longior seems more appropriate: life is short, art long, and winter even longer.

December passes quickly enough with its celebrations and holiday distractions. January provides the hopes of a new year, along with a sense of renewed purpose and optimism. But winter is winter: a season of sighing, waiting, and longing for an end to darkness and cold.

Above all else, winter is a time of endurance. At times, it seems even the natural world is enduring the season: waiting in quiet resignation for the turn toward lengthening days and increasing light.

ImageWinter, waiting ~ Steve Gingold

In the bleakness of mid-winter, wraith-like creatures leave only tracks to mark their snowy passage; fading light glides and fades into drifts of darkness.

For the watchers from the windows, for walkers beneath the moon, for every harsh and glittering star reflected in the sparkle of the snow, time seems to stop. Like Brontë, I find myself enthralled: leaving accustomed roads of daily life for a more poetic path. Come along, and enjoy my winter’s walk.

 

The Grammarian In Winter

Winter speaks in passive voice,
conjugates brief slants of light,
parsing out cold stars along a tracery of oak.
Beneath the rising moon, fine participles gleam.
Dangling remnant leaves pull free
to tumble down the winds,
evocative declensions of a season now unbound.
Split by ice, the pond breathes smoke.
Split by cold, the blackened ferns release their shattered fronds.
Split by hoarfrost, fences bend and crack across the cold-boned land.
Infinitives abound.
Silent, shrouded by the pond’s slight breath,
clear-eyed herons sweep the snow
as if to scry its source;
their spellbound cries declaim the day,
punctuating dim and drifting hills.
   Linda Leinen

 

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Comments always are welcome.
Eliza and Steve are  near-neighbors in Massachusetts. You can find Eliza’s blog here,
and Steve’s here.

The Poets’ Birds ~ An Escherian Flock

~ shoreacres ~ 76 Comments
ImageWhite-faced ibis on the move

Small groups of white-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi) can be found in our wildlife refuges throughout the year, but from time to time large flocks of the birds migrate into Texas to breed and winter along the Gulf Coast. Moving around from day to day in search of water that’s the right depth for feeding, they frequent agricultural fields and freshwater marshes like those at the Brazoria Wildlife Refuge, where they forage through the mud in search of insects, snails, crawfish, frogs, and fish.

A reddish-brown bird often described as ‘chestnut colored,’ white-faced ibis sport varying amounts of green and purple iridescence on their heads and bodies, while reddish legs and a red eye help to distinguish them from the similar glossy ibis. In flight, their iridscence can be quite striking; enlarging the photo at the top makes that feature more visible. (The smaller birds flying with them may be grackles, or brown-headed cowbirds. They were quite numerous; I counted fourteen or fifteen in this photo.)

ImageA closer view of that splendid iridescence

Seeing the flock of ibis rising up from a Brazoria marsh, I remembered a favorite from among Wendell Berry’s poems. Like the birds in his poem titled “The Wild,” they seemed as wild as leaves, and a reminder of the value of what is.

In the empty lot,
A place not natural but wild,
Among the trash of human absence,
The slough and shamble of the city’s seasons,
A few old locusts bloom.
A few woods birds fly and sing in the new foliage.
Warblers and tanagers. Birds wild as leaves.
In a million each one would be rare, new to the eyes.
A man couldn’t make a habit of such color, such flight and singing.
But they are the habit of this wasted place.
In them, the ground is wise.
They are its remembrance of what it is.

That said, the sight of the flock evoked more than poetry. Visually, it reminded me of a work by M.C. Escher: a 1938 woodcut titled “Day and Night.”

Image“Day and Night” woodcut in black and grey ~ M. C. Escher

Printed from two blocks, “Day and Night” employs a technique called tessellation: an intricate pattern of interlocking, repeated shapes that fit together without gaps or overlaps. A hallmark of Escher’s work, his tessellations often featured intricate patterns from the natural world such as birds, fish, and reptiles; the optical illusions he created transformed quite real creatures into something wholly unexpected. 

In Day and Night, Escher’s black birds morph into white, and white birds into black, as they move between daylight and night. The landscape itself accentuates the symmetry; land on one side of the river is sunlit, while the other side is shown in the falling darkness of evening.

Escher called tessellation his “richest source of inspiration,” and Day and Night eventually became one of his most popular prints. Reflecting on his technique, Escher wrote in a 1940 letter to G.H.s-Gravesande:

My little birds, little fish and frogs cannot be described: all they ask for is to be thought through, they ask for a mode of thought that I have found to be present in only very few people. It is a kind of small philosophy that has nothing to do with literature, a pleasure in arranging forms and in giving meaning to each part of the plane. It has much more to do with music than with literature.”

Despite Escher’s convictions about his own work, his prints have given rise to a number of poetic reflections on his use of space. In “Bird Perfect,” Andrew Spacey offers one view of what I once experienced as an Escherian flock.

These birds emerging into night
are mirrored by the birds of day,
echo backwards into light,
come forward out of darkest grey.
The land jigsaws into the birds
and shapes their flight away from mind
as sound is captured by the words
to pattern sense for humankind.
Order out of chaos seems
an impossibility, yet these birds
emerge out of their own dreams,
achieving perfection with ease.

 

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Comments always are welcome.

Tumbling Toward The New Year

~ shoreacres ~ 71 Comments
ImageThings roll differently in the desert

Captivating. Humorous. In the end, unexpectedly inspirational. Is the story true? That’s for you to decide, but the words of William Faulkner come to mind:

In my opinion, truth don’t have very much relation to facts. Some thing you imagine or you hear, you know is true. Maybe it ain’t so, but it should be so. That to me is truth.”

This story of a unique tumbleweed may not be entirely factual, but in various ways it seems true: at least, in the Faulknerian way. I found the seven-minute film online years ago; it was available for a time, and then disappeared. While discussing tumbleweeds with commenters on my previous post, I remembered the tale and went looking. To my surprise, I found it had been uploaded again, and I’ve already watched it multiple times, with great delight.

The story seems somehow suited to the coming of a new year. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it as well.

 

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Comments always are welcome.
For better viewing, click the “Watch on YouTube” link in the video

O, Texasbaum

~ shoreacres ~ 69 Comments
ImageAn oilfield tree

If you don’t find words like toolpusher, roughneck, monkeyboard, or mud man familiar, it’s likely you’d never identify this aging bit of oilfield equipment as a Christmas tree. Obviously, it has little to do with the fragrant pines and firs some still bring into their homes for the holidays, but the array of valves, spools, and fittings designed to control the flow of fluids from an oil well reminded workers in the fields of old-fashioned, decorated Christmas trees, so the name took hold.

Whether Charles Follen would have seen a connection between the improbable oilfield ‘tree’ and the more traditional tannenbaum he introduced to New England is impossible to say. Raised in Germany, Follen immigrated to America and became Harvard’s first German instructor in 1825. By 1832, living in Cambridge with his wife and two-year-old son, he decided to recreate the German Christmas customs of his childhood and youth. In the woods near his home, he cut a small fir, decorated its branches with dolls and candy-filled cornucopias, and illuminated it with candles.

Harriet Martineau, an English journalist visiting Boston at the time, described the unveiling of the tree at the Follens’ Christmas party:

It really looked beautiful; the room seemed in a blaze, and the ornaments were so well hung on that no accident happened, except that one doll’s petticoat caught fire. There was a sponge tied to the end of a stick to put out any supernumerary blaze, and no harm ensued.
I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in, but in a moment every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested.

Over time, trees like the one introduced by Follen changed. Candles gave way to electric lights, imported glass baubles replaced paper chains, and peppermint canes supplanted candy-filled cornucopias. Nonetheless, pine, fir, and spruce remained the Christmas trees of choice, primarily because of their conical shapes, even branches, and straight trunks.

Finding such perfect trees was possible in New England. In Texas it was more difficult, particularly in the days before Christmas tree farms and modern transportation.

For early settlers, the native Ashe juniper, sometimes called Texas cedar or mountain cedar, became a more-than-adequate substitute. Even today, hill country families harvest nicely-shaped cedars from their land for Christmas, keeping with long Texas tradition.

ImageO Christmas Bush ~ a decorated cedar at Lyndon B. Johnson’s boyhood home, 2014

Farther west and south, where even cedar grows sparse, ever-inventive Texans harvest stalks of the agave, or century plant, for drying and decoration. An impressive plant, its stalk can grow to a height of thirty feet, making it especially appropriate for large spaces.

ImageA decorated agave at Mission Espíritu Santo,
Goliad, Texas

If cedars are in short supply and there’s no agave handy, residents in places like the Panhandle always can turn to the tumbleweed. Sometimes tumbleweeds are lighted and hung from trees as yard ornaments, or used to build ‘snowmen,’  but tumbleweed Christmas trees aren’t exactly rare.

Red Steagall, well-known story-teller and cowboy poet, tells one of the best tumbleweed Christmas tree stories, and he tells it in song. There are Christmas trees in Notrees, Texas, and not all of them are in the oil patch.

It was a rough year for roughnecks’ children,
hard times and harder livin’,
we moved when the rent come due
and it come due once a week.
That year in late December
found us in an old house trailer,
west of Odessa, near a town they call Notrees.
ImageYes, Virginia, there is a Notrees, Texas
Too poor to pay attention,
Daddy lived on good intentions;
he intended Christmas to be just what we believed.
Drove to town in the company pickup;
when he didn’t have a sawbuck
for the price of a Christmas tree —
he brought back a tumbleweed.
ImageMy Kansas tumbleweed
Christmas eve in Notrees, Texas,
wind blowin’ through the cactus,
Santy Claus was a rich kid’s saint
and a poor kid’s dream.
I’d trade every fancy present
I ever had, or ever will get,
for the night of the tumbleweed Christmas tree.
Daddy set it on the dinette table,
Mama made a newsprint angel,
ornaments of tinfoil scraps and buttons on a string.
Took us all night to decorate it,
When we got done I’ll have to say that
it was the prettiest tumbleweed that I’d ever seen.
ImageO Tumbleweed
Wind rocked the trailer like a cradle,
While we sang our Christmas carols,
settin’ on the sofa on the duct-taped Naugahyde.
Daddy looked proud as a big city banker,
Mama tried hard to be thankful —
Lookin’ at that tumbleweed,
she laughed until she cried.
Christmas eve in Notrees, Texas,
Wind blowin’ through the cactus,
Santy Claus was a rich kid’s saint
and a poor kid’s dream.
I’d trade every fancy present
I ever had or ever will get
for the night of the tumbleweed Christmas tree.
I was just six, goin’ on seven,
being poor is an education;
That night I learned a lot
about just what Christmas means.
It means love and it means lovin’,
It means money don’t mean nothin’,
and it means a tumbleweed can make a Christmas tree.
Christmas eve in Notrees, Texas,
Wind blowin’ through the cactus,
Santy Claus was a rich kid’s saint
and a poor kid’s dream.
I’d trade every fancy present
I ever had or ever will get
for the night of the tumbleweed Christmas tree.

And so it is. “Making do” isn’t the worst thing in the world, and sometimes it’s the best. Merry Christmas from Texas, and a happy New Year to y’all.

 

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Comments always are welcome.

The Advent Tree, Revisited

~ shoreacres ~ 104 Comments
ImageCimarron National Grassland ~ Morton County, Kansas

 

Stripped
as bare
as late-shorn
fields, twisted
branches beckon birds
to decorate their lines.
  Emptied of all pretension
  they await the birds with patience ~
 bending low before frost-sharpened winds,
shimmering against falling silver light.

 

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Comments always are welcome.
I’ve enjoyed writing Etherees for several years.  For more information on the syllabic poems that, in their basic form, contain ten lines and a total of fifty-five syllables, please click here.