When she walks her paths, piles of feathers mark battlefields.
Here are two feathers (mourning dove?) she picked up and brought inside yesterday.
A local poet, who lives next to an old forest slated for development, writes about her owls.
***************************
The owl came because he wants this scrap of woodland, wants the beeches and their hollow hearts, their cavities. He came because so long ago the farmer left his fields alone to grow their latent crop of trees that no one came to cut. The owl wants this wooded hilltop, its ancient oaks that stand among heaped quartz the farmer or his father or his father’s father cleared. The owl wants the hilltop’s crown of hollies, wants the deep-shade roost they’ve made; he wants this open branch that ends a wing-wide tunnel through the hollies’ shelter, wants this place to watch, to rest and cast his pellets, wadded clumps of fur and bone the rain dissolves to show he wanted squirrels, and voles, and frogs, and once a huge black beetle. If you knew a wood would call an owl back, if you knew the owl’s calls would fill the winter wood until another owl answered, wouldn’t you want to leave the land alone to grow its woodland, wouldn’t you want to grant the owls what they wanted?
Everyone struggles. The only real thing to be said about that is: compassion.
Why did David and Eve Kosofsky’s older sister abandon the family? UD puzzles over this one routinely, but especially at holiday gatherings. David had his theories; Eve wrote about it. The elder Kosofskys made various efforts at contact but were always rebuffed. Now that all those she abandoned are dead, it’s a different sort of story, sealed in permanence, but still a mystery. The best UD can do after all these years and all this thought is: See #1. Compassion dictates that you stop thinking about the cruelty of it and think rather of the fragility that would need to run that far away to achieve (what she seems to have achieved) a reasonably successful life.
Shortly after finishing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.
“Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.” “Which poems?” he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by, the most quoted lines of Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:
We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.
and Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters. A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes; Another, by the lake, the times of cruises. Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises, Is fading to a landscape deep with distance – And always the sad piano in the distance, Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling (O indecipherable blurred harmonies) Or some far horn repeating over water Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies. At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world, And this is the world we run to from the world. Or the two worlds come together and are one On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain, And stereopticons brought out and dusted, Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain, A mad wet dash to the local movie palace And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane’s white cockatoo. (Would this have been summer, 1942?) By June the city always seems neurotic. But lakes are good all summer for reflection, And ours is famed among painters for its blues, Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection. Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique – To anthropomorphize the inanimate With a love that masquerades as pure technique? O art and the child were innocent together! But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents. Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels, And we, when we come back, will come as parents. There are no lanterns now strung between pines – Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines. And after a time the lakefront disappears Into the stubborn verses of its exiles Or a few gifted sketches of old piers. It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart; Then we remember, whether we would or no. – Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.
Lake of Kari: After WordsworthLike a breeze,
Or sunbeam, over your archive I passed
To a sanctions motion without pause; for ye have left
Your screenshot with me, an insane accord
Of paranoias - massive, and endowed
In their mad viciousness with power as will allow
A gracious, almost might I dare to say,
Virtuous, and profitable, victory.