I am always watching
the single heron at its place
alone at water, its open eye…
without seeming to move…
The bird is more beautiful
than my hand, skin more graceful
than my foot, my own dark eye…
— Linda Hogan, from “The Heron” in “Rounding the Human Corners”
DK Photo: Great Blue Heron. 6:15 a.m. this morning. 50° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.
Notes:
4:50 a.m. Late jump. Scrambling to get out before sunrise. 816 consecutive (almost) days on my daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. 816 days, like in a row.
I walk.
Cloud cover is heavy, humidity is heavier. Twilight is patchy.
I was up late last night reading Seán Hewitt’s memoir All Down Darkness Wide. He shares an excerpt from a Keat’s Poem: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.’ And Hewitt continues…”And what of them.”
And what of them.
I didn’t find Keats, or poetry, until late in life. And like the toddler scrambling to catch his parent who lurches ahead, I’m still playing catch-up. I thought I understood the lines, but lacked confidence to say, yep, that’s right, you got it DK. So, I shut down my Kindle, and googled the lines for an interpretation by Meursault to validate my understanding:
This line from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is an example of Keats arguing that the power of thought, the imagination and anticipation is often greater than the act itself. Music and “melodies” that are imagined and anticipated are always in tune. They are played perfectly. A melody composed in the mind, cannot possibly be played badly or incorrectly. There is no possibility of error or an imperfect note. Therefore, Keats believes that imagining something brings more fulfillment and contentment than a “real” version ever could. He thinks that anticipation and expectation often outweighs the copy in the real world and that something real can only be disappointing compared to the imaginary.
I re-read the interpretation again, paused, shut down my Kindle, and fell asleep noodling the unheard.
So, back to this morning.
I walk.
…the imagination and anticipation is often greater than the act…they are played perfectly…therefore, Keats believes that imagining something brings more fulfillment and contentment that a “real” version ever could..
To my right, there’s a Great Blue Heron. His long legs, and webbed feet slide across the ever-so-green algae.
To my left, there’s an Egret, ever-so-white as fresh snow. Her feet in ankle-deep, cyan (?) tinted water, pausing from fishing for a moment. Go head DK, here’s my good side. I’ll wait for you to get your focus just right.
My imagination bringing more fulfillment and contentment than this?
Sorry.
That’s bullsh*t.
Notes:
The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound—
a small stone falling on a red leaf.
The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.
The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it, and now she thrives. …
Now is her time to thrive.
Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
— Jane Kenyon, “Things” in “The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon: Poems”
Notes:
Your mother’s favorite bird was the one in front of her.
— Richard Powers, Bewilderment: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company, September 21, 2021)
Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:23 am, September 24, 2021. 58° F. Heavy Rain. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one—
not knowing even
that was what he did—
in the blowing
sounds in the dark,
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.
— Jane Hirshfield, “Hope and Love” from “The Lives of the Heart: Poems“
Photo: DK @ Daybreak. Heron. 6:03 am, August 22, 2021. 75° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
DK. Daybreak. November 9, 2020. 6:35 to 6:50 am, 44° F. Wind: Light. 3 mph. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
Breakfast. Bird catches Fish. Crab holding on to the fish tail. Double Jeopardy! September 12, 2020. 5:35 & 5:45 am. 60° F. Winds: Gusty. The Cove, Stamford, CT
Daybreak. September 5, 2020. 5:57 to 6:49 am. 63° F. Humidity: 73%. Wind: 7 mph. Gusts: 13 mph. Cloud Cover: 13%. The Cove, Stamford, CT
Daybreak. August 30, 2020. 5:55 to 6:15 am. 66° F. Humidity 76%. Wind: 11 mph. Gusts: 28 mph. Cloud Cover: 3%. The Cove, Stamford, CT
The Good News.
There’s no morning drive to Work. No 40 minute commute home in traffic.
There’s no one hour Metro North ride into the city for Manhattan meetings. No one hour return trip on packed commuter trains jostling for an open seat. There’s no walk to/from the commuter trains in suffocating humidity. As Jeffrey Eugenides puts it: “It was one of those humid days…you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”
Today, the commute from Bed to Breakfast to Office is less than one minute. Air conditioning cools, a steady 71° degrees.
The Less Good News.
Work Hours: Up ~20% per day. Calls, emails, Zooms, conference calls. Add the pandemic anxiety to the tonic, and you have a giant Boa asphyxiating its prey, as I sit, sit, sit, and sit some more — from daybreak to late dinner, and again the next day, and the next and the next. And the body, and the mind Scream: You’re sliding Pal, things gotta change. These Home Office walls are closing in.
The Pivot. [Read more…]
The startled blue heron erupts out of its long-legged
inwardness and flies low to the pond over its
shadow. My eye flickers between its great sweep
of wing and its blurred mirror motion almost white
in the pond’s sky-shine. At the end of each wingbeat,
the long body dips toward its rising shadow. Now
the heron settles back down onto itself as far away
from me as the pond allows and I finish my walk half gangly,
half graceful thinking if I were a bird, this is how I’d fly.
~ Nils Peterson, “Blue Heron” from All the Marvelous Stuff (2019)
Notes: Poem via 3quarks Daily. Blue Heron photo: Pennington
Source: teatimestories (baby blue Heron lookin’ like a pterodactyl). MMWC* = Monday Morning Wake-Up Call.
Maybe love is the Lord’s trap.
Maybe He sees us as
the tree leaning over the stream.
Perhaps He can’t experience
the difference between
our pain,
our loneliness,
and the heron flying
through the special silence at evening.
— Linda Gregg, closing lines to “The Center of Intent,” from Things and Flesh
Linda Gregg, 71, is an American poet born in Suffern, NY. She grew up in Marin County, California. Her first book of poems, Too Bright to See, was published in 1981. Her published books include Things and Flesh, Chosen By The Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma, Too Bright to See, In the Middle Distance, and All of it Singing. Her poems have also appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Ploughshares, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. She taught poetry at various schools and universities across the U.S. She has been living in New York City since 2006.
Source: Poem – Thank you A Poet Reflects. Photograph: Thank you Amy Buxton
fairy-wren: grey heron hitching a ride
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