Don's Bog In Autumn 1-1-22

Happy New Year

In Autumn

I know there are those who ask: Why does he not
sing with the same wild harmonies as before?
But they have not seen the labors of an hour
the work of a minute, the prodigies of a year.

I am an aged tree that, when I was growing.
uttered a vague, sweet sound when the breeze caressed me.
The time for youthful smiles has now passed by:
now, let the hurricane swirl my heart to song!

Ruben Dario

Don's Blog Memory

In August of 1969 while on leave from active duty in the Air Force in Anchorage I went on a sheep hunt with a friend in the Wrangle Mountains of southeast Alaska.  Each day we went out of our camp on Blue Lake climbing the surrounding mountains in search of the elusive Dall Sheep - a northern relative of the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep of Colorado. Each day the sheep outwitted us and when we were on the steep side of one mountain the sheep were always across the valley on another. As our time was running out we changed our goal and each took a caribou. The Barren Ground Caribou were from the White River Herd. Each of our caribou had just shed the velvet covering their rack. The velvet has an exceptional blood supply from the bone beneath so after the velvet is shed  the rack becomes blood red.

We were several miles from camp. We dressed both caribou and cut off their racks. This was made more exciting because we had just seen a blond grizzly bear in the distance and were concerned that he would come over for a taste of  fresh meat. Luckily the bear left us alone. It took multiple trips  to pack the meat back to camp and then another trip for the racks. Back in Anchorage our family ate delicious  caribou meat all winter. (Going into winter the caribou has the most fat it will have. We also had the butcher make us some sausage (regular and summer) with added fat.

I had my rack mounted - it was so large that it almost engulfed our small Anchorage living room. We had the hide tanned. Later the hide ended up on the wall upstairs in our A-Frame chalet at Innsbrook. The hairs on the hide are hollow which is great for keeping the caribou warm but not so great for tanning and after some years the caribou rug began to shed. The rack has been on the wall of our family room in Kirkwood. I have used it each year to uniquely add to our Christmas decorations. Here is the rack 52 years later. It's part of the family.

Don's Blog Our Parents 12-29-21

Our parents though long gone are not forgotten.

Our Parents
Stephen Dunn

Our parents died at least twice,
the second time when we forgot their stories,
or couldn't imagine how often they craved love,
or felt useless, or yearned for some justice
in this world. In their graves, our parents' need
for us is pure, they're lost without us.
Their honeymoon in Havana does or does not
exist. That late August in the Catskills—
we can decide to make them happy.

What is the past if not unfinished work,
swampy, fecund, seductively revisable?
One of us has spent his life developing respect
for the weakness of words, the other for what
must be held on to; there may be a chance for us.

We try to say what happened in that first house
where we were, like most children, the only
needy people on earth. We remember
what we were forbidden, who got the biggest slice.
Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something
back from us. We know what it is, don't we?
We've been alive long enough. 

Prairie schooner 

Volume 73, Number 2

Summer 1999

Don's Blog Sam Mc Gee 12-27-21

I memorized this poem when I was 14 years old. Later I used to recite it during beer parties in college. Sam McGee

and an endless list of limericks assured me a brief reign of banal  popularity. I can still do the limericks but 

only a few stanzas of the Robert Service poem remain available in my receding memory.

                     The Cremation of Sam McGee

By Robert W. Service

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

      By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

      That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

      But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

      I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.

Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.

If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;

It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,

And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,

He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;

And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:

"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.

Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;

So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;

And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.

He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;

And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,

With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;

It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,

But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.

In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,

Howled out their woes to the homeless snows— O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;

And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;

The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;

And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;

It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."

And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;

Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;

Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;

The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—such a blaze you seldom see;

And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;

And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.

It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;

And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;

But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;

I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.

I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;

And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.

It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm—

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

      By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

      That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

      But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

      I cremated Sam McGee.

Don's Blog Further In 12-25-21

Merry Christmas. Here is another poem by Tomas Transtromer.

FURTHER IN

It's the main highway leading in,
the sun soon down.
Traffic backs up, creeps along,
it's a torpid glittering dragon.
I am a scale on that dragon.
The red sun all at once
blazes in my windshield,
pouring in,
and makes me transparent.
Some writing shows
up inside me--words
written with invisible ink
appearing when the paper
is held over a fire.
I know that I have to go far away,
straight through the city, out
the other side, then step out
and walk a long time in the woods.
Walk in the tracks of the badger.
Growing hard to see, nearly dark.
Stones lie about on the moss.
One of these stones is precious.
It can change everything.
It can make the darkness shine.
It's the light switch for the whole country.
Everything depends on it.
Look at it . . . touch it . . .

Tomas Transformer

Translated by Robert Bly

I have an urge to pick up stones that "can make the darkness shine". They grace my

gnome garden. For instance - a magical reddish stone with light stripes from the banks of the  

Thelon River - and many more.

Don's Blog The Tree and the Sky

This poem by Tomas Transtromer, Swedish Nobel laureate, was sent to me years ago by my brother.

The Tree and the Sky 

There's a tree walking around in the rain

it rushes past us in the pouring grey.

It has an errand. It gathers life 

out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear
nights waiting as we do for the moment
when the snowflakes blossom in space. 

Tomas Transtromer

Translated by Robin Fulton

Don's Blog Sunset 12-21-21

As the days start to lengthen again the sunsets will occur later also. We all are amazed by the image of sunsets.

Here are some sunset quotes from various poets collected by my teacher Chris Fahrenthold.

And the sun, as it always does,

   dropping into its slot without a click [The Other Side of the River]

Sunset. The sky, over Arkansas, inflames

Like the new flesh in a scar [The Bolivar Letters]

The weightless, unclarified light from the setting sun

Lies like despair on the ginger root [Depression Before the Solstice]

The flash from the setting sun

Is more than a trick of light, where half-life

Is more than just a watery glow

   and everything's fire… [Going Home]

Sun like an orange mousse through

A snowfall of trumpet bells on the oleander [Dog day Vespers]

Already sundown has passed you and follows me up the road,

Color of dragonfly wings [Three Poems of Departure]

Sunset like a girl's robe falling away long ago…[T'ang Notebook]

Sunset like carrot juice down the left pane of the sky

Into the determinacy of somewhere else  [Arkansas Traveler]

Down below Prato, the sun was lowering its burned body

Into the shadows [A Journal of True Confession]

Sunset again: the color of rose leaf and rose water

 [Journal of the Year of the Ox]

The sun set like a coffin

Into the grey Pacific [Tennessee Line]

Sky white as silk

  opening mirror cod-sprung in the west,

Sunset like dead grass [Poem Half in the Manner of Li ho]

High-Fifing in charlottesville,

Sunset heaped up, as close to us as a barrel fire [ The

Appalachian Book of the Dead]

Orange Crush sunset over the Blue Ridge [A Short History of the Shadow]

the Indian paintbrush sundown [Buffalo Yoga Coda III]

Sunset soaks down to the last leaves of autumn trees [The

Gospel according to St. Someone]

Lagoon light, sunset and cloud blaze,

  red of the cardinal entourage [Rosso Venexiano]

Cloud-gondolasfloating in with the east-moving wind-waters,

Black-hulled and gilt-edged,

   white on white up above, smooth pole.

Later, the sunset, flamingo, great bird of passage [Nostalgia  III]

Sunset sheen like old wax on the steps into the sky [La Dolcemara Vita]

The slit wrists of a sundown

   tincture the western sky wall [Scar Tissue]

Sunset, line like a long tongue-lick above the Blue Ridge,

Mock orange, then tangerine,   then blush [Littlefoot, part7]

As the sun goes down.

What small light there is drains off into its spikiness.

And glows like a severed head against the darkness [Littlefoot, part30]

Don's Blog -Poetry

Several years ago I was invited into a Poetry group at the Green Center in University City. Despite its pretentious name,

The Green Center Tea Society,   I went and was hooked. The teacher was Chris Farenthold, who taught poetry at a local college. 

He awakened my interest in an area of literature of which I was unaware. We read his selected poems and discussed them.

We also learned about poetry itself. Here is one of his contributions.

from "The Poem as Journey"

by Charles Wright

"Poems are not just about journeys, of course, they are journeys. Like any organism, the good poem is a self-contained adventure, 

both physically and metaphysically … without the interior journey the exterior one is impossible. (32)

At the heart of every poem is a journey of discovery. Something is being found out. Often the discovery is merely technical. …

From time to time the discovery is spiritual, a way of looking at the world that affects the way we lead our lives, or how we think of them.

Poems that cause us to say, after having read them, "Oh, that's nice," or "Ummm, not bad," do not participate in this voyage of discovery. 

No matter how new their paint job is, no matter how sharp and crisp their sails, they never get out of the harbor. The journey belongs to others.

(32-3)

There is a kind of spatial negation, a visual power in absence that painters understand and employ, and which I'm interested in poetically.

Its a sort of white hole that has a kinetic draw to it that the lines of the poem float on and resist. Part of my interest in the dropped line for

me is that it sets up for me a bit of this power field within the line itself; a rhythmic jolt sometimes might appear, small as it is, that kicks the line and the poem along , keeping it alive over the top of a force that would founder and sink it at any time. But everybody knows this. You

keep the composition apart just a little to let this energy in and to, and to let the poem in and out of the energy generated by this emptiness.It's all about the same thing, the power  and domination of what's not there, the energy of absence. (173)"

Here is an example of "dropped lines":

  A dropped line is a line which is broken into two lines, but where the second part is indented to remain sequential visually. For example, in the poem "The Other Side of the River" by Charles Wright, the first and second lines form a dropped line, as do the fourth and fifth lines:

  It's linkage I'm talking about,

  and harmonies and structures,

  and all the various structures that lock our wrists to the past.

  Something infinite after everything appears,

      and then disappears.

  — Charles Wright, The Other Side of the River

So,  those dropped lines and indentations are part of the purposeful structure of the poem - very interesting for a neophyte.

  

Don's Blog Bob Dylan 12-18-21

Bob Dylan's lyrics won him a Nobel Prize several years ago. Here is one of his songs that you may not know.
I have never been a fan of Bob Dylan's voice so here is an exceptional rendition of the song by Miley Cyrus.
My favorite stanza goes

"But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass, in the ones I love,
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go."

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwje6cXZnoPvAhUBVN8KHdidDQUQ3ywwAHoECAIQAg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DI2wvaWTTmz8&usg=AOvVaw1-EfBbCdnnJCljked9rBl9

Don's Blog - Casualty by Seamus Heaney 12-17-21

For some time I have been looking at the issue of violence .This poem is out of season but then violence is never in season.

In the poem "Casualty", Seamus Heaney elegizes a 'drinking  friend' who has been lost in the vicious cycle of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970's.

For background, on January 30, 1972, later called Bloody Sunday, British troops killed13 unarmed Catholic civil rights marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland. That week the Catholic Provisional IRA declared a curfew to honor the dead. On Wednesday of that week Heaney's friend,Louis O'Neill, broke his own group's curfew to go out drinking and was killed by a bomb in a crosstown bar. He was a casualty to the violence of his own people. The issue of what to do about violence is unanswerable but its need to be addressed is unquestionable.

"Casualty" by Seamus Heaney

I

He would drink by himself

And raise a weathered thumb

Towards the high shelf,

Calling another rum

And blackcurrant, without

Having to raise his voice,

Or order a quick stout

By a lifting of the eyes

And a discreet dumb-show

Of pulling off the top;

At closing time would go

In waders and peaked cap

Into the showery dark,

A dole-kept breadwinner

But a natural for work.

I loved his whole manner,

Sure-footed but too sly,

His deadpan sidling tact,

His fisherman's quick eye

And turned observant back.

Incomprehensible

To him, my other life.

Sometimes, on the high stool,

Too busy with his knife

At a tobacco plug

And not meeting my eye,

In the pause after a slug

He mentioned poetry.

We would be on our own

And, always politic

And shy of condescension,

I would manage by some trick

To switch the talk to eels

Or lore of the horse and cart

Or the Provisionals.

But my tentative art

His turned back watches too:

He was blown to bits

Out drinking in a curfew

Others obeyed, three nights

After they shot dead

The thirteen men in Derry.

PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,

BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday

Everyone held

His breath and trembled.

II

It was a day of cold

Raw silence, wind-blown

surplice and soutane:

Rained-on, flower-laden

Coffin after coffin

Seemed to float from the door

Of the packed cathedral

Like blossoms on slow water.

The common funeral

Unrolled its swaddling band,

Lapping, tightening

Till we were braced and bound

Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held

At home by his own crowd

Whatever threats were phoned,

Whatever black flags waved.

I see him as he turned

In that bombed offending place,

Remorse fused with terror

In his still knowable face,

His cornered outfaced stare

Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away

For he drank like a fish

Nightly, naturally

Swimming towards the lure

Of warm lit-up places,

The blurred mesh and murmur

Drifting among glasses

In the gregarious smoke.

How culpable was he

That last night when he broke

Our tribe's complicity?

'Now, you're supposed to be

An educated man,'

I hear him say. 'Puzzle me

The right answer to that one.'

III

I missed his funeral,

Those quiet walkers

And sideways talkers

Shoaling out of his lane

To the respectable

Purring of the hearse…

They move in equal pace

With the habitual

Slow consolation

Of a dawdling engine,

The line lifted, hand

Over fist, cold sunshine

On the water, the land

Banked under fog: that morning

I was taken in his boat,

The Screw purling, turning

Indolent fathoms white,

I tasted freedom with him.

To get out early, haul

Steadily off the bottom,

Dispraise the catch, and smile

As you find a rhythm

Working you, slow mile by mile,

Into your proper haunt

Somewhere, well out, beyond…

Dawn-sniffing revenant,

Plodder through midnight rain,

Question me again.

Candids at Christmas Time 12-15-21

Here is our new tablecloth with a small Jan-decorated Christmas tree, vase, wine bottle, and gourd with dried celosia.

A lit-up Mabel is dressed in my mom's opera gown - festive.

Early this morning noticed that the kids are growing up.

They are still quite inquisitive.

Don's Blog The Thinker as Poet

Todays offering requires time and thought but can be rewarding. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger approached 'thinking'
something as a 'being with' or a 'dwelling in' the subject. He searched not for answers but rather a deeper path to the next question.

Dons Blog - Only a little bird knows and she's not talkin' 12-13-21

In the days when garden's are dreaming I will be providing fare in another form.
The first one is a poem, Unter der Linden, written by Walther von der Vogelweide,
a medieval German poet and singer of love songs (Minnesinger).

Under the lime tree

Under the lime tree
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.
Beside the forest in the vale,
Tandaradei,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.

I came to meet him
At the green:
There was my truelove come before.
Such was I greeted —
Heaven's Queen! —
That I am glad for evermore.
Had he kisses? A thousand some:
Tandaradei,
See how red my mouth's become.

There he had fashioned
For luxury
A bed from every kind of flower.
It sets to laughing
Delightedly
Whoever comes upon that bower;
By the roses well one may,
Tandaradei,
Mark the spot my head once lay.

If any knew
He lay with me
(May God forbid!), for shame I'd die.
What did he do?
May none but he
Ever be sure of that — and I,
And one extremely tiny bird,
Tandaradei,
Who will, I think, not say a word.

Don's Blog - Neighborhood Drama 12-7-21

Jan and I were having a chili dinner last night when we could no longer hear each other talk. There was a
loud rumbling sound like a locomotive over our head. And then it didn't stop and it went on for more than 10 or more minutes.
We knew what it was from the last time - a helicopter was circling right over us with the noise getting
louder and then slightly less loud and then louder again and it just kept on. The last time it happened was several years ago
and the police were searching for some perpetrators.

About this time we got a call from our friends on the other side of the County Park next door. They said they weren't sure what
was going on but there was the helicopter and multiple lights flashing in the park around the Frank Lloyd Wright House and the surrounding woods. They wanted to make sure we were all right and suggested we lock our doors. Jan called next door to let them know.
Our next door neighbor had been out in the freezing cold on his back patio smoking and having a glass of wine. A young girl came running by and disappeared into the park. He called the Kirkwood Police who responded immediately. He talked to them and found out that the girl was a 12 year old runaway. The helicopter continued to circle using its very bright searchlight as those on the ground combed the woods behind our house (using my paths) using bright flashlights.

Using searcher dogs the police were able to find the girl unharmed in a rest room of the nearby St. Gerard Church. Everyone was relieved. That's all we found out so far. Its interesting how quickly the situation in our heads changed from possible danger to us to concern for a young runway girl whose name we did not recognize. What a drama on Pearl Harbor Day.

Then we finished dinner as the neighborhood.

Don's Blog Calvatia gigantea 11-6-21

Calvatea gigantea is commonly known as a giant puffball. It is found in meadows, fields, and deciduous woods. I found this one near the creek bed and was amazed.

• 

It was so large that I brought a ruler with me to measure - it was a 6"  ball. As you can see someone "has been

eating my porridge" - I will bet it was a white tail deer.

 The inside of mature giant puffballs is greenish brown, whereas the interior of immature puffballs is white. Though large white mushrooms are edible when they are young you will not see me dead eating one. The fruiting body of a puffball mushroom will develop within the period of a few weeks and soon begin to decompose and rot, at which point it is dangerous to eat. Unlike most mushrooms, all the spores of the giant puffball are created inside the fruiting body. Large specimens can easily contain several trillion spores which are yellowish, smooth, and very small in size.

Visitors-Halloween 10-31-21

For Sunday morning brunch we had Kristi and Gus Joseph who are both in residency at different hospitals 

in Chicago. We were unable to go to their wedding in Florida this spring so it was great to catch up with them.

They are a delightful and energetic pair.

They were introduced to our Halloween Princess - Mabel but did not see her at night. You may

recognize that Mabel is wearing my mother's ball gown.

Rockwoods Reservation 11-1-21

Jan and I drove out to Rockwoods Reservation on a cool fall day. It is off of Highway 109 north of Eureka.

We took the quarry trail where we had all learned to rappel years ago with Lee's Explorer Post. The sign told us that today

we are not allowed to do anything in the reservation and expressly mentions bouldering, climbing and rappelling as strictly forbidden.

I hate places with signs where what you can't do far outnumbers what you can do.

Despite orders from  the Conservation Rangers we loved the Quarry trail.

The colors were spectacular as we approached the rock

outcroppings.

The leaves were falling. Here is a leaf from a red mulberry tree.

And our rappelling rock was still there.

The moss was extraordinary.

What a great day!

Final Flower for the Day Cosmos 11-2-21

We will end our twelfth year of Flower for the Day with the graceful and delicate Cosmos. In the sunflower family

cosmos has what it takes for success - amazing color, ease of growth, deer resistance, longevity, and an ontological 

feel. 

Swaying in the breeze

A bright and cheery — Ohayo!

Cosmos makes my day

  Lucy King

Flower for the Day Cockscomb 10-28-21

Cockscomb (Celosia christata) is an annual in the amaranth family. It returns yearly by production of huge amounts of seed. The name is from 

the Greek for "burning".

Before the Garden

Cockscombs…
Must be 14,
Or 15

—Masoka Shiki,
(trans. By Janine Beichman)

Comment by Clark Strand

I loved this haiku from the very first time I read it. Although I had never seen cockscombs, I had some vague notion of what they looked like merely from the name: bright red flowers resembling a rooster's comb. …

One day that first autumn my wife came home from the Korean market with a large bunch of very unusual flowers—if you want to call them that. They looked more like bunches of stiff red velvet folded over many times and affixed to the tops of greenish-purple rods. When I tried to arrange them, the stalks were difficult to separate. I had to bear down hard with the knife, using both hands on the blade, to cut through them.

"What are these?" I asked.                                                                          

 "Cockscombs," she replied.

I was astonished. In that moment I realized that I had missed everything about the poem. I hadn't understood Shiki's flowers at all. Not their weight or texture. Not their color, or the firmness of their stalks. Nor the way they clustered together, making a precise count of them difficult from whatever angle, and impossible from any distance at all. I think it was then that I began to realize that Shiki's counting had been entirely without design. In his mind there had been no impulse to acquire or to assign any value over what was there before the eye. 

What I had missed about the cockscombs all those years was the feeling of their reality, of their being fully present in the world. And connected, to every other life, by the season and the feeling of a single moment happening now.

I knew then for the first time that the true significance of Shiki's cockscombs lay in the flowers themselves, and not in the some other, metaphorical meaning, however apt or true. It may take a lifetime to come to an understanding which is clear, direct, and very simple. But the primary work of haiku is always a restoration of the world.

The famous modern critic Kenkichi Yamamoto once wrote:

Every masterpiece is a flower on a precipice… It is a tremendous assertion for the poet to have said, 'There must be fourteen or fifteen stalks of cockscomb.' After we read this poem we cannot imagine the possibility that there could have been more or fewer cockscombs than fourteen or fifteen.

For some time I was very impressed with this statement, but it now seems to me that the American scholar Donald Keene may have come closer to the truth of Shiki's poem when he wrote, "Probably Shiki composed the haiku easily, even artlessly, as he looked at the garden, unaware that he had created a masterpiece of haiku…"

All that was required of the moment spent looking at cockscombs was a simple, artless exclamation on their number. The failure to assign one value over another gives the haiku a spiritual clarity and justice that transcends a mere accounting of the world. Moreover, the statement of a second number does not indicate indecision, but an extension and intensification of simple wonder by the interval of one stalk.

The real power of the poem, then, lies not in the fact that it is a "tremendous assertion," as Yamamoto has said, but that it is a very small one. In it there is no violence to the spirit or to the world. Ultimately, the number of flowers cannot be precisely reckoned. And it is this slight element of uncertainty—of humility, or simply play—which brings the moment to its peak and, with the smallest adjustment, aligns the human heart in friendship with autumn flowers and all the many beings of this world.

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Clark Strand

Flower for the Day Oriental Lady's Thumb 10-27-21

If you have walked in a field lately you will have seen this small flower called Oriental Lady's Thumb (Persicaria longiseta) which is in the knotweed family. It has a myriad number of names: bristly lady's thumb, Asiatic smartweed, long-bristled smartweed, low smartweed, Asiatic waterpepper, bristled knotweed, bunchy knotweed, and tufted knotweed. Their growth is relentless so they are probably better in a field than in your yard. Someone's weed is always someone else's wildflower.

Do you need Me?

I am there.

You cannot see Me, yet I am the light you see by.

You cannot hear Me, yet I speak through your voice.

You cannot feel Me, yet I am the power at work in your hands. ...

I am not strange visions. I am not mysteries.

Only in absolute stillness, beyond self, can you know Me

as I am, and then but as a feeling and a faith.

Yet I am there. Yet I hear. Yet I answer.

When you need Me, I am there.

Even if you deny Me, I am there.

Even when you feel most alone, I am there.

Even in your fears, I am there.

Even in your pain, I am there. ...

I am in you, and you are in Me.

Yet I am there. Yet I hear. Yet I answer.

When you need Me, I am there.

Even if you deny Me, I am there.

Even when you feel most alone, I am there.

Even in your fears, I am there.

Even in your pain, I am there.

Empty your heart of empty fears.

When you get yourself out of the way, I am there.

You can of yourself do nothing, but I can do all.

And I am in all.

Though you may not see the good, good is there, for

I am there. I am there because I have to be, because I am.

Only in Me does the world have meaning;

only out of Me does the world take form;

only because of Me does the world go forward.

I am the law on which the movement of the stars

and the growth of living cells are founded. ...

Though you fail to find Me, I do not fail you.

Though your faith in Me is unsure,

My faith in you never wavers,

because I know you, because I love you.

Beloved, I AM there.

i am there - james dillet freeman - 1947