A Dream Garden

Winter Places

All very open and secret
A place people come to only with dogs
I feed on the aura
The dim, hidden, melancholy, root-tugging silence
I walk the dog in myself


There were snowless January afternoons like this on Long Island, too, in which one imagined a story. The theme of the day’s story is every day’s story, that the days are gone. Those bare January hours back then are just like this one, then, because this one goes as well. The one fact of living is ever-passing, all other facts in abeyance.
I walk along the edge of a long green field, the mayor’s park, the city’s pride because it is an open, grassy space with a view of the water. It would be welcome, even spectacular perhaps, by the standards of a flat Long Island housing development where there are no perspectives, no looking down on water, but this place does little for the hunger for wild, secret moments, once that hunger has been wakened, fed, and acknowledged. I avoid people, three loud teen boys (though only one is talking, two are standing), pursuing their own liberation by the empty boat rack. You have to stand just so, grouped; someone must talk. The one who talks is short and as wide as a billboard advertising the secrets of adolescence. They have earned their separation…. I walk up the green slope of the favored park and circle around the other side of the grassy horseshoe lip, knowing there’s another path along a marsh this side if I can get to it. I find a gully that cuts downhill, find it clogged with dead snow-crunch, bushwhack around it.
On the flat path beside the salt marsh, I discover (as suspected) I have been here too. Old places, neglected places, at the edges of things. Not beautiful, not far enough away, just stocked with stored-up people-less space and time. I look for birds, seeing one, tall and white eventually. But it’s a watery reflection that elongates and confuses his shape: only a gull.
The kind of places, I think, where I would go if I were homeless. So I suppose the homeless come here, but I see no signs of them. No real litter either, though the snow has only recently passed. Larger groups of birds, duck mostly, scatter their calls from further out into the creek, as it is called here, which flows toward the open water of the harbor. I hear crows overhead as I walk a cutback up through the woods, just a thin screen of trees, unfortunately, and find myself back in the “park,” the grass field with occasional human structures. A place for winter separations.

Day Dream

Nature is dreaming
It is an old feeling
always lived, always known
speaking of old days lived young
with black holes, leaking time

Snow-free January afternoons
cocking an ear for Long Island winters
old times: then or now?

On the edge of a long, green field,
the mayor’s park,
I long for wild, secret places,
barbarians bursting from the tree line
Only crows, however, signifying nothing

In the winter-dim marsh water
a single white-winged gull
stands tall in the stream’s reflection
It grows in the mind,
where all things are seen
Everything passes in the corner of an eye
The gull does not sing or fly
We come here for magnification

A garden of reflections

The snow blinds me. I cannot look at it when the sun shines. As it does, very brightly, in a cold January sky.
So I am now like one of Plato’s cave dwellers who cannot look at the sun (truth, reality, the idea behind the shadow) because their eyes are accustomed only to shadows, to darkness. The cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory of the unexamined life can’t see the truth of their existence; they see only shadowy approximations.
It’s a painful subject. I crave the light, the sun. It is necessary, good for me, provides the vitamins we miss in the winter, does something to the body chemistry, kicks in the endorphins or stirs up the enzymes. But I can’t look at it when the snow is this pervasive and the sun is high and unclouded.
I can’t have what I need.
Is this a parable? Does truth hurt? I need the truth, but I cannot take it?
Snow blindness aside, frigid temperatures or not, we need to live in nature, as much as possible. It is good for us, because our own nature grew from, developed out of, and remains part of Nature. We are natural beings. People say “mortal,” but that’s what mortal means. All living things in the natural world – and, folks, there isn’t any other for creatures with bodies – die. Perhaps our words or deeds or creations, a building, say, or a book, live on; and our memories live on in the lives of those who know us; but only for a short time, until nature takes them back as well. Nature is death, as much as birth. We conquer the world and the history books remember us for a comparatively long time; but in the end, obviously, clearly, unquestionably, all memory of our existence passes away. Everything passes, a nice calming sort of way to putting our condition. All is vanity, sayeth the preacher – not so nice. But it really amounts to the same thing.
Consider the lilies – not simply of the field – but of the garden, where we call them ‘ornamental’ or, tellingly, ‘day lilies’ (or 'toad lilies,' which bloom in October and win a place in our calendar). Consider how beautiful they are – or were. Do they endure? Do we remember them? I’m afraid I don’t see any lilies out there now and have not for some months. Granted they did not toil or spin (or weep), and I must say they seemed pretty cheerful about the state of things and uncomplaining about their inevitable decline, loss of their beautiful, youthful parts, and eventual – passing? Their natural decay back into the soil. I keep some of their petals in a bowl. They have a second life as dried versions of their former vitality. It’s a nice reminder, though a mere shadow of the real thing, not that much like the living flower. In reality, indisputably, the flowers are gone. Forever.
But, wait! They’re coming back! With any luck. I hope.
I can’t speak for the lily’s point of view, but I don’t worry about a flower’s mortality though poets from time immemorial have offered them as symbols of the inevitable passing of all beauty and all life.
January is the death of the year, the apparent death of nature in New England and most places in the northern hemisphere. Those dark pink buds on my rose bushes are not in fact going to bloom any time this season. “This season” is so over. We contemplate a graveyard in winter snow. And we inevitably think of our own endings. We go; new people come.
For as the song says, the graveyards go to flowers, every one.
We need nature, as much nature in our lives as we can get, to remember who we are. But then we have to make peace with that knowledge.

Things as they are

Scatters of snow fluff fall nonchalantly through the hours. I look away. By late afternoon the soft stuff falls again through the second by second intensification of cast iron slow-darkening sky, looking as if ocean deeps were turned upward to the clouds.
Atmosphere both heavy and light, filled with meaning and meaning nothing. A seeming saying-something moment, a pregnant pause in a story.
But the story is merely the ineffable suchness of real time, present, real, existing: things as they are. Poets die in this moment (or seek a new dispensation). Hope dies; or rises anew. But the sky goes on composing in the gray, gloomily triumphant shades of its own abnegation, its self-emptying of all memory of light like a vacuum that swallows an upside falling earth; the snow falls ever more soundlessly; the gossamer gray gloom speaks ever more clearly of nothing but itself; nothing goes on happening, hearts continue to beat, voices sing as they always do heard or unheard, the cat sleeps in my lap. It is still now.
Words cannot say.
Time passes.
In California, or is it Florida, farmers coat vulnerable fruit plants with water to create a protective coating of ice around them. The theory, I believe, is the ice keeps the temperature from going below thirty-two degrees on the fruits and their stems, sheltering them from some deeper intensity of cold than ice itself.
But it is well below thirty-two in our part of the world and has been for days. Should we not aim our hoses in the air and cover the sky with freezing water? Should we not live beneath domes of ice?

Snow Garden

The world is growing snow.
We wait for the snow all day. It’s the event of the season. Sure it’s been nasty cold for most of a week, but a big game-changing storm is something else. We walk to the windows again and again on Saturday, peeking to see if it’s started. We buy and decorate a Christmas tree, molding our schedule around the anticipated arrival. With the car gone through the most of the day, Anne and I walk to the store for the final holiday ritual item, the cranberries we use for garlands, interleaved with popcorn. Immediately there is the feel of snow in the air. Would we say this if we didn’t know a snowstorm has been forecast? It starts just as we are getting ready to go to bed. Indoors, the tree is decorated with the trophies of youth, kid crafted items, along with handmade ornaments from my cousin’s wife given each year the children were still children, pickings from the old cardboard boxes of ornaments inherited from my parents, the few we bought along the way, the mysterious visitors we find in the boxes that no one can account for – and, of course, this year’s version of our annual popcorn and cranberry string-art.
Outdoors, wind swirling, the storm quickly blankets the streets. Small, serious, dense flakes. In the morning it drifts and piles up on the porch, a difficult wind angle. We have a concert to go to, The Revels, but no one is in a hurry to put the first shovel-blade into the natural installation of the finely drifted snow.
Birds clutter around the feeder and perch on the nearby lattice of branches. We have our cardinal moment: the persistence of nature red in crest and feather framed by a mineral white world.
The garden, a clutter of greenish, brownish, grayish surfaces disappears, swallowed by a new occupation. An invasion, a top-down regime, the cold hand of martial law. The plants must think we’ve abandoned them to the alien invaders from the sky. They’re right. I can’t spare a thought for anything alive out there, because I’m not ready for the smack in the face that greets each day. It’s not the snow, it’s the days of wind chill that follow it. Too much snow to walk in the woods. Too much wind to walk by the shore. I tromp disconsolately around the neighborhood, inspecting the sidewalks — a noticeably improved performance in clearance, even at the corners, over last year. Did everyone get the memo? (Even though we never sent it.)
I lose the outdoors. But less than a week later I get it back, when warmer temperatures bring rain and turn the snow to melt water.
We come back from the annual holiday stay in New York to a changed vista. I can look out the windows again. Snow has its beauty, but snow glare kills my eyes. I am astonished to find the world still alive, at least to appearances. Even plants that were green and deciduous when the snow struck are right where we left them. They may be dead (what plant doctor/lawyer decides when plants are legally dead?), but the color of the blown leaves is still green. My ground-level collection of low ground covers mixed with a large helping of dried brown leaves appears unchanged. A few late perennials look like they’ve spent a week in the refrigerator, but hold up at a distance.
Death, where is thy sting?
Of course it’s wicked cold again, and I’ve avoided freezing my fingers and toes even at simple jobs like taking the garbage out.
And in the matter of those still unopened buds on the rose bush, I’m not sure we’ll ever see them do their stuff. But the green world has survived.

The Case of the Disappearing Radio Station

It was a cold December morning, so cold the radio dial was stuck in place like a CEO’s fingers on his annual bonus. In the quiet bedroom community of Fuzzydale, a woman woke to the sound of voices babbling about market prices and faraway places, using words that sounded like varieties of pasta spelled backwards. She clapped her hands over her ears and looked for help.
In a fifth floor office of the Acme Building in a city that keeps its secrets, a world weary private eye answered the telephone: “Nuit here.”
“Sy Nuit?”
The voice of a troubled woman, the lonely detective thought. He had been hearing voices like this for more years than he cared to remember, but something told him this one was different.
“Yeah, Miss, that’s me. What can I do for you?”
“You gotta help me, Mr. Nuit!”
“Sure, sure, I’ll help you, Miss. What’s the matter?”
“Somebody stole my radio station!”
“Your radio station?”
“It’s the only station I listen to. This is terrible, Mr. Nuit! I don’t know what to do! I’m lost without it! I can’t eat a spoonful of my cereal. It just lies in the bowl accusing me! It asks me where the music is!”
“All right, all right, now just calm down, Miss. Start from the beginning. When did you hear this radio station last?”
“Last night! I’m sure it was right there on the dial where it always is when I went to bed.”
“Uh-huh. I see. What were you listening to?”
“Music, of course! What else would I listen to? I listen to classical music all day. I listen to jazz every evening. Folk and blues on the weekends. It’s wonderful! You’ve gotta try it, Mr. Nuit. It’s different from all those other stations, you know, with nothing but talk-talk-talk all day, yada-yada-yada! If it’s talk I want, I can listen to my husband!”
“All right, now, take it easy, Miss – what did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. It’s Misty. Misty Signals.”
“All right, Miss Signals. I got an idea. I think I know what happened.”
“You do?”
“You must have turned your radio to another station.”
“I never touch my dial! I wouldn’t think of it. Never!”
“I see… Well, if you’re sure your dial is in the right place, maybe there’s something wrong with your radio. Give me the frequency number of this station of yours –“
“Eighty-nine point seven!”
“— and I’ll try to tune it in on my radio. So that was—?”
“Eighty-nine point seven!”
“Aw right, aw right, I hear you… Wait a second there.”
Sounds of static; stations whizzing by; a radio dial tuned to a frequency. “There it is,” the aging detective says. “I’ll turn it up and put the phone up close to the radio and you can listen.”
“… Meanwhile in Greater Phillupistan negotiators for People Out Of Patience Yikes!, known as POOPY, met in marathon sessions with representatives of the Consortium of Irreconcilable Moderates over the issue of chronic currency manipulations and the inexplicable multiplication of health care proposals…”
“AHHHH! My ears! Turn it down!”
Silence. “I take it that wasn’t your station, Miss Signals. All right now, get a hold of yourself, Miss. That frequency was definitely eight-nine point seven. I have very up to date technically sophisticated equipment in this office. The latest stuff – very high-priced equipment. I got it cheap as surplus goods from some people who were opening up a new studio at – let me see – it was One Guest Street. A swell place, Miss – a real palace, everything top of the line.”
“I see… Well, my radio may be a bit old-fashioned, Mr. Nuit, but it’s brought in my station fine for years. And there’s nothing wrong with it!”
“Okay, okay. Let’s see. If there’s nothing wrong with your radio, then the only other explanation is – they must have moved the station to somewhere else on the dial.”
“Moved the station? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of! This is a famous station, Mr. Nuit. It has a very strong signal. It has loyal listeners. This station’s listeners are so loyal they even send in their own money just to keep the station on the air doing exactly what it’s always been doing! –“
“They send in money? No kidding. How do you get into a racket like that?”
“We do it because we like our favorite station just the way it is!”
“Yeah, yeah, hard to believe anyone would mess with a sweet deal like that. So maybe it’s one of those astronomical things, you know, solar acne or something.” He fingers the dial on his radio. “Maybe something from outer space, some alien power or something, has messed up the frequencies. I’ll just go down the dial a little bit here and you tell me if something sounds familiar…”
“"Freu-de, schö-ner Götter-funk-en“—
“That’s it!”
“That’s it? That’s your station? Okay, good, good. It must be some freak interruption of the natural order of the universe and I’m sure everything will be back to normal tomorrow...“
“Ahhhh….” She sighs.
“Lemme see the number here. Okay, if you want to find your station it’s on ninety-nine point five.”
“That’s wonderful. How can I ever thank you?”
“Well…”
“I’m just tuning in that frequency on my own radio now. I can’t wait for things to get back to normal around here....”
The sounds of a radio dial being adjusted. Static. More static. “You said ninety-nine point five?”
“Yeah – what’s the matter, Miss? What’s happening over there? What do you hear?“
“Static. Just static. I hear nothing, Mr. Nuit. No music.”
Silence. “Gee, Miss Signals, I’m awfully sorry. There’s really nothing more I can do.”
“Yes, there is. I’ll be right over, Mr. Sy eighty-nine-point-seven Nuit. You’re going to loan me that fancy radio of yours.”

A bird garden

The earth wore its winter whites for the first time last week. Wet snow began falling Saturday night. It never covered the streets and was gone by Tuesday, except for occasional rectangles of shady lawns. Monday, a gray day, had the full been-through-winter expression. It smelled, looked, felt, and sounded like winter. It felt like it was raining, or spitting thin slivers of icy moisture (does that qualify as rain?), even when it wasn’t. The air smelled as if it were about to snow.
Life, these days, is for the birds. Anne filled the bird feeder with a bag of black-jacketed sunflower seeds about a month ago. But the seed level didn’t go down. No early birds livened up dark morning breakfast scenes. Fat gray squirrels gathered hopefully underneath the feeder, waiting for the birds to shake down the seed.
We had birds all last winter, but somehow the word had not gotten out this year. Weren’t the sunflower seeds dressing in black this year? It took the season’s first snow to trigger their arrival.
How does that work, exactly? Oh, thinks Starling Robin, when the green earth turns white we find our way to the berry path on North Central Avenue. Seed will cover the snow there surely. Starling Robin proves correct. Birds small, medium and very small found their way to the feeder, and the seed line dropped precipitously.
Actually, we had spied a few birds there for the first time this fall a day or two before the snowfall, as if scouting the location. Never know when we might need it; better make sure the thing’s still working.
Small creatures first, including sparrows with tiny, but dashing red patches around the head or shoulder. The next day blue jays appear on the feeder ring above, and pigeons glean below. I’m not sure where pigeons live around here, but this is a city.
Birds play a big part in the life of the calendar in this climate. In addition to entertaining us in the winter by bringing color and life to our window watching, they eat our berries in the spring, getting to the ripe blueberries a day before I do, and spreading mulberries all over the walk. They also succeed in depositing enough of those sunflower seeds in various precincts of the garden that we always have a few unplanned sunflower plants maturing the following high summer.
Bird life in the garden makes me happy all through the growing season, and I want to grow plants that encourage them to come back every year and stay though the fall and winter. The bee balm attracts humming birds, and the purple fruit of the mulberry tree draws all comers in June. I look forward to growing enough blueberries and raspberries to keep both the birds and us satisfied next year. (Fat chance.)
For the time being we grow cold days and snow fields and look forward to counting the cardinals at the feeder. The shock of red visitors against the snow is a winter gift each year.

Roses under snow

Roses under snow/
Headlights steam through a white night/
Storm has come and gone

Snow floods the windows at rising time Wednesday morning. Filling the backyard, turning the green world white in all directions. Even covering the streets a little, though you can tell it’s a fluffy, almost sponge-like consistency. The snow falls like small handfuls of some sudsy material, flakes clumped together, the kind of snowfall that looks impressive when it’s falling because “flakes” are so big, but you know won’t last. Eating breakfast, I hear a voice on the radio tell me five inches are expected in Boston area, but turning to rain at 2 p.m. But the voice is reading from a script not written by shoreline skies. The snow, never more than that soft sudsy rolling inch, is over about twenty minutes later, and the precipitation turns to rain. Not much white left by later in the day.
These are the make-believe snows. Warning shots of things to come or just passing fancies; it remains to be seen.
However, when the snow hung on the plants yesterday morning, the light red December roses still blooming on the all-weather plants out front gave the odd, almost unearthly effect that reminded me of the hushed glow of Christmas lights wrapped up in wet or wind-driven snow. As sometimes happens. Under snow, the red of the roses looked more filtered light than color.