Another Memorial Day Weekend

“Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

                                 —    W. S. Merwin

Sundog

The Sanderlings are gone, north, with the marbled godwits whose feathers always make me think bark, grain, wood on the wing. I miss the Sanderlings, their wheeling feet, their foam-dodging and sand-pricking, their constant hunger. We’re halfway through a Memorial Day weekend, Sunday, and the sun is on its way home from morning worship, somber clouds giving way to that ringing blue. I smile, to miss, is to remember.

Clam Beach, photo: KPS

Walking with my husband, we’re beyond the teenagers tossing Frisbees to dogs and the women on horses now lost in the spray of distance. We have the shore all to ourselves. We’re surrounded by open and far, the horizon stretching west into some stranger’s sleep. Ni hao ma?, I whisper, my little bit of Mandarin, how are you today?  We thrive in our temporary solitude, my husband down by the water, and I, barefoot in the wrack. Vast is easy to be in, if someone you love is nearby.

We arrived at slack tide, and now the surf is slipping closer. The beach is a wet mirror. The Pacific curls soft and slow, a tongue sliding cool over a lip, again and again. Some days the world watches itself, pleased, and this is one of those days.

My gait is clumsy, feet unsteadied by sand and piles of driftwood. A halo of dirt arcs each toenail, a dark crescent beneath the pale keratin, ah, a reverse eclipse. 

Annular eclipse
via pin-hole on cardboard

My mind flashes back to last Sunday. I stood on my deck around dinnertime with a sheet of white paper bearing a single, pencil-sized hole in the center, focusing the crude image of a near-full eclipse onto the back of a cardboard, cat-food box. A fledgling physicist, I was trying to glimpse an annular eclipse. Through the doorway, I asked my tiger-tailed cat, is this how Einstein started? He rumbled and rubbed the screen. The faint scent of tuna spiced the air, my clothing static, alive, with cat hair. A Stellar’s jay landed on the box, squawking, before veering away, realizing cat! As the day lost its luster, and despite encroaching fog, for a few moments there it was: the black plate, the toenail of light.

Kicking away a knot of dried eel grass, I glance down at my feet, count the ten ridged nails. If I were another animal, they’d be hooves or claws. Then I lift my binoculars to scan for Sanderlings. The spring has sprung and the grass riz, oh lost Bronx poet, I wonder where them birdies is. Long gone. After months of scuttling this stretch of beach on their toes, a blur, now they’ve flown to the Arctic, to some avian memory of romance on the tundra. How like the moon they are, feathers of white light, migrating around the globe, then the darkening plumage, breeding, their own new phase. At the right angle, one wing could blot out the sun.

Common murre wings, photo: kps

My husband whistles, pointing at the ground. When I reach him, it is a pair of wings still holding to a breastbone—what’s left of a Common murre. He lifts the wings into the air, spreads them, and for a moment, I see the murre floating in the surf, then diving, those wings flying through liquid blue, pumping the bird 150 feet deep after fish. The bird was on the wing, the wing was on the bird, now absurd, only wings and no bird. We nestle the wings back in the sand, measure them, tag them, write about them on a data sheet for a seabird research project that we are a part of.

What are wings without a bird? What is a silver box of ash, shards of bone, without a voice—that box at home on my dresser? Sensory input to stimulate our synapses. This was a murre, that my mother-in-law. Moments pass, a lifetime, in increments of memory.

We head for the mouth of the Mad River, which has been eating its way North again, when I notice a patch of color shimmering in wet sand, reflecting what? I look up, find among random clouds something I’ve never seen. One ledge of sky is layered in a full spectrum of colors then brushed, smudged. Red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, purple. Not a rainbow, not an aurora borealis. What?

photo: Terry Schulz

Have you ever walked completely in wonder, eyes up, feet navigating brainlessly? I have to keep looking; surely this elegant mirage will suddenly drain away. The colors float, clouds slink by, and still the lovely abstraction above me. Mouth no doubt hanging open, I sit on the temporary bank of the Mad, and let all that light in. My cones, those color-seekers, must be ecstatic.

photo: Terry Schulz

“Let’s head back,” my husband says. We splash along in the tide, glancing down for dazzling stones to pilfer, then up until the colors finally fade, just the sea’s usual ceiling of cirrostratus and an incoming clot of fog.

Ahead of us are our friends, Gary and Lauren and their shiny, black dog, Enzo. They volunteer with the same seabird research program, and today Enzo is practicing his skill at finding dead birds. He trots along in a zig-zag—nose, eyes, ears all competing for his attention—until scent, a protrusion of feathers and bone in a hump of sand, send him in a new direction. When he finds the bird, he settles down beside it, and waits for Lauren with her pocket of treats.

 “A sundog,” Gary offers, “at least that’s what I call it.”  I look down at Enzo, who perpetually smiles, a drape of tongue dangling to one side. Enzo you are a sundog indeed. But it’s not Enzo that Gary means; it’s that wing of color that had spread over us. A quick Google on my iPhone, which I rarely do on the beach, and I read ‘sundog’ and its scientific equivalent, ‘parhelion,’ Greek for ‘beside the sun.’ The colors are the magic of ice, clouds, and photons all at a certain angle to the earth, appearing beside the sun. The color patch is a companion at the sun’s side, a sundog.

Clam Beach sunglow on sand, photo: kps

Enzo finds another bird, a murre again—wings, a foot, a head that has to be untwisted from inside its neck so we can stretch the caliper atop its bill. We examine it, photograph it, record it. My husband and Gary chat and walk. I tag along with Lauren, talking and tossing balls for Enzo. I keep peeking up for that sundog, still vivid in my mind, where did you go?

The Road to Carate

“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” 
                                                     – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-British Philosopher

Scarlet Macaw
Photo:  © Terry Schulz

I

t is two hours during dry season from Puerto Jimenez around the tip of Costa Rica’s Oso Peninsula to the village of Carate. There the road ends into a green wall, leaves and fronds pouring down a hidden steepness. Above, pairs of Scarlet Macaws are the only traffic.  To the left, just past a short, narrow airstrip, the Pacific is truly pacific, a blue plate offering chips of light. To the right, a wild, stony incline leads to Luna Lodge and our thatched hut deep in rainforest.

     But first, you must traverse this 43-kilometer road. The road is a chain of rocks and craters and free-flowing streams. Olman, our driver, knows it intimately. “Tres veces,” he says, holding up three fingers, his eyes talking to us in the rear-view mirror—many days he makes three round-trips, “a veces cuatro,” sometimes four. I imagine navigating this road in its utterly rural darkness, hoping for a near-full moon to cast shadows behind the outrcrops or let the holes be black enough to avoid, jolting through a maze of moonlight back to a sleeping family. As if reading my mind, Olman adds, “it’s okay,” followed by more Spanish, which I understand to mean, the night drives are a good time to look for pumas and pauraques (nightjars, road-loving birds). Yes, I think, but the long hours then the waking up to do it all again.

            I remember why I’m here.  It’s more than wanderlust. Tell me, every night don’t you hope, consciously or not, for another morning, only to find yourself by mid-day staring at dust on the windowsill? All again, all again. When you are a child, every day a new word swells in your mouth, ripening into an idea, a concept, a lens that sharpens some corner of awareness. By mid-life, there are long quiet days, a hollow behind your teeth, the eyes wander past computer and papers, looking for new, but the mouth fills only with dust, and you refuse to say it.  You need a new lens. That’s when you must go, somewhere.

Sharing our ride is a young, Chilean researcher involved in developing a fair trade cooperative for farmers and artisans in Central American. His clothes give him away as a non-native, with his button-up, collared shirt and brand-name hiking boots. “I was in your country once,” he tells my husband, “Nuevo Yersey.” I hate the thought that his entire impression of the United States is based on New Jersey.

My mind flashes back to the several winter months I spent as a kid living in a trailer in Moonachie, New Jersey. The trailer park was an ice pit edged in frost-stiff candy wrappers and bits of trash, and once a frozen muskrat. I spent hours alone at a nearby marsh, watching water and bubbles of air lurching arrhythmically under inches of ice, hoping to see a live muskrat pop out of her earthen bunker. I sensed a she, and whispered to her through the glassy slab. Come out, let me see you, it’s okay, are you cold, do you have babies, it’s okay, let me see you.

I try to explain the frozen muskrat to our Chilean friend, but my Spanish is poor and muddled.  He listens, nodding, “I only know the summertime in Yersey.” He talks fast, hands and face animated in his 20-something ebullience, Spanish and English swirling together. He believes he can help “the struggling people” with all the time he still has ahead of him. I manage to pick out artesanías, café, piscicultura—handicrafts, coffee, fish farming—and concepts such as getting products to the right markets, poor people don’t understand their worth, and obtaining a fair price, but I don’t fully understand what he’s telling me.

Hand-painted tiles by Mariela Zeledón 
       (her grandfather wrote the words for Costa Rica's National Anthem)

We end up talking about dialects, the sounds of language. He tells us that he has a hard time understanding Olman’s Spanish. “You notice people here drop their s’s.” Actually, I had noticed.  “Guatemala people talk the most slow,” he points out, “like the people of your American south, yes? They speak slow, yes? Chileans, we speak the most fast, like the people of your Nuevo Yersey.” We laugh.

Then he explains that not all words can be translated because not all cultures have the same ideas. “That is why to travel is good. Your eyes see new things. Your mind gets bigger, yes?” I was about his age when I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book, Philosophical Investigations, on language and meaning. “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,” I offer, “it’s from an Austrian philosopher.” “Yes, yes, it’s correct,” he beams, “I love this saying.” He repeats the quote to Olman in Spanish. Olman grins politely to us in the mirror, then brakes as he blurts, “Cara Blancas!” followed by “Monos!”

White-faced, or Capuchin, Monkey aka Cara Blanca
Photo:  © Terry Schulz

We roll our windows all the way down surprised to find not only a family of White-faced (Capuchin) monkeys, but the loud thrumming of the rainforest itself. For long minutes, we watch the Caras Blancas watching us, as they meticulously separate hairs, picking insects and other edibles from each other’s backs and bellies. 

Photo:  © Terry Schulz

Two young males approach each other on a wide tree limb. One opens his mouth while the other looks inside, then they both stick out their tongues, shake their pink and white faces, their black tails twined around a smaller branch for balance as they tip sideways and drop, suddenly upside down, pendulous, tongues still wagging. We spot a single spider monkey, bigger, with rufous fur and darker face, at the edge of the group. He prefers to hang sideways, stretched like a soft hammock full of dappled sun, swaying.

Blue Costa Rican Cicada photo: © Melissa Levan, "Mel"

http://www.flickr.com/photos/melissalevan/3051675878/ 

 

But it is the sound of thousands, perhaps millions, of cicadas cloaked in the lushness of leaves that captures me. We step out of Olman’s jeep-like ‘taxi,’ my husband clicking ‘mono’ photos, me listening with my whole body. Within, a rattling, ribs vibrating. I remember: males sing, females answer with their wings. The sound is physical, palpable as the humid air with its wet mouth, its damp longing. Then a realization: All my life I’ve understood myself as something solid, animal-vegetable-mineral, soft-stone-that-breathes. Wrong. In this sound I become porous, another opening in the leaves, a gap filled with light, a portal through which the buzzing, humming, thunder of insect song pours.

“It’s okay?” Olman asks. I don’t want to answer with words. I nod. We both smile, which requires no translation. Turning, we all climb back into our seats. We’re quiet, bumping along, chugging slowly through streams, warm wet air lurching through the windows into our faces.

Gold seekers of the Oso Peninsula
Photo:  © Terry Schulz

We begin to see an occasional tarp, stray cots with rumpled blankets, corrugated metal lean-tos, buckets, and crooked stools made of raw sticks. Our Chilean friend tells us that the region is home to many “gold seekers” who pan the streams. “No machines, only by hand is allowed. Most gold is gone, but when a guy gets enough in his palm, he goes to Puerto Jimenez for a good time, food, drink, maybe a girlfriend, until he is broke again, then he comes back here.” Just then we pass two men in rubber boots and soiled tee-shirts, bent over the edge of a stream. One of them stands up, stretches his back, and waves. Two dogs appear out of the forest, a shiny black lab and a matted mottled terrier, trotting around the panner, nosing his hands until he leans down to let them lick his cheeks. Olman catches our eyes in the mirror, “Its, okay. Son buena gente aquí,” they are good people here.

Just before Carate, an exchange in Spanish up front, and Olman stops. Our Chilean friend steps out of the car. “This is me. Tonight I will sleep under stars with some gold seekers.” We watch him disappear into an opening in banana leaves with his backpack and some mangoes. Gone, absorbed into the rainforest.

Let me tell you about this road: it takes your body, away. Your hips rock with each dip and roll of the wheels—your waist, a spring—while your shoulders level like water, a surface your face floats above.  The air smells of hot horses and bony-hipped cows (though you left them miles ago), mixed with sea thermals, the incense of strange trees simmering under a high sun, sweaty human skin pulsing on gusts of air. A few other four-wheel-drives wobble and scrape by, dust puffing into your eyes, nose, mouth, tangled hair. You can’t help drinking it all in, tasting the local dirt. It’s okay, yes, okay.

Photo:  © Terry Schulz

Back Around

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.” —  Milan Kundera 

Birthday Again

Rain’s back, redwood stumps sliding

further into duff.

Always this flow of getting older,

shirt clinging to skin, skin clinging as much

to the surface of wet air as chilled muscle.

All morning the rain vacillates

between downpour and a slow tapping.

Afternoon arrives, and the sun

is a bright bruising in the swell of clouds.

At dusk, limbs on a slope:

bare alders, bald cascaras, my arms

pulling in blueness, some starshine.

Outside, fallen water cutting ruts

awash in darkness.

A Story About Poems

“If I speak for the dead . . . I must write the same poem over and over . . . .” — Illya Kaminsky, poet

A Possibly True Story

Possibly one of the cats . . .

Once there was a woman speaking poems, whispering really, as she wrote them, only her cats in that bookish room. Two cats. They licked in her words, licked in her solitary voice, licked in the rhythmic rise and fall and pausing, licked in subtle quivers in her breathing, as they licked in soft slivers of their own fur. Soon each cat became a poem. They were good poems, quiet and clean, their meaning a pulse, a muffled rumbling at her touch, as if buried in such dazzling pelts, some animal motor churned, perpetually out of reach. For long moments, the woman held the cats, stroked them, sometimes their claws kneading into her belly, wounding and comforting. She loved the mystery of them, the drift and sway of their tails, sensuous, through air, or gone limp, curled into question marks asleep in her lap. No matter how many poems she spoke, whispered usually, there were only those two cats in the room, love she thought and death, oh they were beautiful, wild things, leaping about, oblivious to names.

2012: Humming Along

“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.” — Winnie the Pooh

January Morning, Her Quilt

She sleeps

in a row of stitches,

a prick of blood

dried to stain.

I wake

in this flash of magenta throats,

hummingbirds sipping

at the window.

Frost webs the feeder.

She is the quilt, I am

the body warmed.

We were one mind once,

not dust, more a soft oozing,

she and I, you too. Sometimes

the earth is so hot and  liquid

it comes alive. Don’t call it

a beginning, call it muddy palm,

little zephyr, invisible pulse

of light, call it nothing

but more than nothing.

Who knew there’d be wings,

tongues, shimmering skins,

fingers swimming cotton

with a needle? No, don’t call it

anything. She is before words,

under poems, she is this mouth

happy to be a cave of echoes.

Think humming.

Who knew the song

in her throat is the same, listen,

as this cord of feathers

blurred in flight?

I remember aw, then damn it,

the tiny puncture, her blood

wicked loose, spreading open

as a rose into the fabric. It wasn’t

the pain that made her mad,

it was the ruin.

New Year's Eve — Looking Back

“There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?” 

 – Mary Oliver, poet

December

Cold, but no snow—frost collapsing

the last brown stalks of goldenrod

and cosmos into the ground.

Some mammal has come scratching

at crusted leaves, marbles of black dirt

scattered in a clearing.

We let our faith dwell in small successes—

wood splitting cleanly, potatoes heaped in the cellar,

day breaking once more out of the mountain.

The first tree sparrow arrives in alders

near the river, then comes the snow

like feathers loosed from a white wing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Looking back over the last 10 years . . . . and here, this the poem written at year-end 2001 while living in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  I remember that day, those stalks of frosted goldenrod, the marbles of black dirt because the ground was mostly frozen and the earth wouldn’t give way to that secretive, nighttime scavenger.

This I believe: To see whatever is before us, around us, is to love this world–its strange and lonesome beauty–to care about a sparse, nameless moment that would otherwise be lost except for that conscious looking.

A Thanksgiving Story

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself . . . we are star stuff harvesting star light . . . Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for earth. Our obligation is to survive . . . .”

                                                                          — Carl Sagan, astrophysicist

One in Billions

A muffled sighing or singing caught my attention. A whispering. It was in the pauses, when my husband Terry stopped speaking, staving off a sob with a deep swallow. There, a high-pitched chattering.

            Rubbing a tear into his grey beard, Terry grappled with scraps of paper, the draft eulogy for his mother Rose. I knew what he was thinking: Why this much emotion, this depth of loss? It was time, she was ready, we saw it coming, she was 94 . . . and a half, she would have added (bits of time matter when you’re very young or very old). I stroked the hair at his temple, hugged his arm.

He begin reading the eulogy again, practicing, until a swell of grief forced another pause. There, again, the high-pitched chattering. Our big male cat inched his way into the kitchen, crouching to stare at a baseboard.

            Even in the midst of grief, neither of us could ignore the curious call of something living in our kitchen. On hands and knees, we crawled along the baseboard, listening. Naturally, silence. We watched cat ears navigate like separate satellite dishes, honing in on any sound. Then, above the range of my husband’s hearing, but audible to mine, a squeaking. Striped tail whipping, the cat pawed at a low drawer, and Terry pulled it out, sitting it on the floor. While the cat rattled through the serving dishes and pie tins looking for a good chase, we peered into the cabinet to find a deer mouse, surprised against the back wall, her soft white belly almost luminous, the liquid specks of her eyes shining out of the darkness.

            Terry coaxed her into a handkerchief, hello peromyscus, admiring the length of her tail. He saw the crease of worry across my brow, and nodded, heading for the door, that tail dangling from his cupped hands.  Into the brisk air, he released her to the dense shelter of salal below a redwood out back. After cleaning the drawer, its contents, the cabinet, we returned to the eulogy, the scent of bleach lingering in each breath. Terry began again, his voice deep and comforting, an occasional tremble when it was time to say, my mother. 

On the counter, above the mouse drawer, a headline on the cover of The Economist announced, “Now we are seven billion.” Seven billion minus one, it occurred to me. The year Rose was born human beings numbered less than two billion, and in the years immediately following her arrival on earth, about 3% of the human population was killed by the first H1N1 (swine) flu pandemic. But human beings don’t give up easily. “Now we are seven billion” and growing. Now, against such a massive collection of people, each death, it seems, is that much less noticeable, more inconsequential. “We float like a moat of dust in the morning sky,” scientist Carl Sagan said before he dissolved into his cosmos. Sadly, it’s true, our smallness—there are so many people we’ll never even know exist. Who are they? Happily, it’s also true: we’re large in at least a few lives. One in 7 billion matters. Yesterday I felt that fact, picking up the phone, out of habit, then setting it down quietly to stare out of a window.

Terry reached nearly the end of his tribute before he had to pause, swallow, glance up from his handwriting. Then, surprise, that high-pitched chattering again. The cat sat in front of the drawer, green eyes pleading up at us, and moaned.

            Out came the drawer, but no one there. Then I noticed a faint trail of iridescence inside the cabinet—a residue, perhaps the subtle oils of the mouse’s fur—leading to the upper drawer. We slowly opened it, stuffed with summer table cloths, embroidered napkins, velour tea towels, other gifts we rarely use, and a suddenly more urgent squealing that sent the cat leaping, tongue rattling, onto my husband’s back, ready to lunge.

            Terry pulled back the tea towels, and a basket of grey fur came to life, whiskered noses probing into the fresh air, black-pearl eyes catching their first glimpses of human faces. Miss mouse was a mother. We both felt a surge of joy, strange and welcomed, that sent us laughing and crying, and hugging the cat close out of gratitude . . . and to keep him from pouncing on the moving mass of fully fledged mice.

Each mouse was perhaps a half ounce or less. We both thought: they want their mother. Then wondered if we were being anthropomorphic. “Well at least they have each other,” I whispered as my husband, an only child, counted the siblings. I once read that there are 36 rats for each person in new York City. Does that ratio apply to deer mice and non-New Yorkers? I multiplied 36 times 7 billion. We were admiring 7 of the 252 billion possible deer mice nesting around the globe. If human beings are anonymous, deer mice live in oblivion.

“Namaste,” I said seven times, looking into each nearly identical simmering face, trying hard to see them as individuals. “Well, some hungry screech owl is going to get lucky tonight,” Terry quipped to the cat, now squirming in his arms. Grief at bay, Terry shifted into to his owl biologist self.

I frowned and offered a box. Terry herded the mice in, and I held the box while he searched for possible escapees. I listened to 28 delicately clawed feet in confused motion, scrambling and scratching the cardboard. The room filled with their downy will to make sense of their suddenly changed circumstances.

Through the window, I watched Terry step into the night with his box of brand-new mice. Only a few stars were strong enough to pulse against the glare of a gibbous moon. Salal leaves shimmered, already dewy, when he bent and tilted the box into the understory. The seven soft forms slipped into the shadows, quick as an exhalation. Terry spoke something, rose and looked into the sky for the next several minutes, then turned back to the house.

           “Were you talking to the mice?” I asked. Terry smiled, “I just said ‘you’re on your own, guys’.” We remained at the window, watching below the redwood for movement, but there was only a light breeze low to the ground stirring leaves. “So what were you looking at?” I continued.  Both of our cats crowded into the box at our feet, sniffing every corner, side and flap. “I was thinking about calling in an owl,” Terry answered, “but decided not to.”