Diminutive, unassuming flitting along branches looking for insects Drab in its gray only a small jaunty triangular crown to distinguish it Its loud call nonetheless draws attention Returning from the woods this morning It stops me with a Ts-e-e Ts-e-e twt twt Repetitive, insistent, rapidly sung and more percussive than melodic Three short higher notes followed by one lower This ‘TSEET’ song as birders call it looks something like this in my recordingPerhaps similar to a recording of much greater fidelity in Cornell’s Macaulay Library
In both spectrograms a kind of sideways T shape initial repeated notes followed by a raspier single note of multiple pitch that comes to the ear more in the downward register. As a symbol spectogram, something like this:
So it sings, this tiny bird of mighty voice Calling out to the world In alarm, in joy, in camaraderie Perched in its tree, claiming its existence As clear as the sunlight of morning 14 XI 21 Coffee-berry Hill Clear morning, days after storm
Tag: Northern Sierra
Wandering up Yuba Canyon
Mid September rain Dark fetid cups now In hollows of blue-black rock shelves Angular metamorphics smoothed by old river surges Holding perched granite cobbles White on sand-strewn balconies above stream Flat as table cloths The forest Oak, ponderosa, maple, alder It leans in from both sides Ready to hear river’s long rap and rant Catching moisture Standing back just enough from its floods And we, much like kingfisher and ousel That chatter up and back We wander into the living narrow of earth Its rock gods Wood and water goddesses Showing mute faces that choose not to reveal Unless we linger Linger then Footsteps Rest long your glances Restless eyes Thoughts thrown up each moment with worries, plans and cares They too can be washed down by river voice Until naked Of thought, armorless Downstream wind becomes new fabric River It likes that humility That stillness well learned in the matter of turning rock Into cobble, cobble into skein of sand And I less smoothed, rounded and perfect than river rock None the less am more round for lingering here Student to the flow of things That turns and carries us all 21 IX 21 South Fork Yuba River Clear morning 1,980’
This Once
Sun turning day
This once
In the year
Unpicked persimmons
High in the tree
Ripening to translucence
Each its own miniature sun
Against cold sky
Robins chattering
In the canopy, pecking away
At the tight-skinned succulent globes
Even as we gather from below
With our long pole.
With sun dying
Forest, that swung its
Photon-catchers
Through the blue all day
Stands still, black figures
Chanting the silence
That frames
Low Jupiter and Saturn
In conjunction
One solstice star
This once
In some 800 years
As precious in its rarity
As each breath
I take.
21
XII
20
Cedar Wings Cottage
Moon waxing
Sky clear and hazy
Between storms
Since the Halloween Full Moon of October we have been watching bright Jupiter & Saturn appear in the western sky after sunset, day after day becoming closer to each other and closer to the sun, as the moon cycled twice through its phases and chased its tail two times along the ecliptic — all messengers of the great cycling. Persimmon trees are also messengers, its fruits each autumn ripening as large orange-red globes clustered in the tree tops bare of leaves, an ornamented ‘Christmas tree’ striking for its abundant harvest offered in the gathering cold and darkness of the year. This once, there was the conjunction of tree and planet, as we gathered the last fruits from a neighbor’s tree and with darkness walked from the house to a place where low Jupiter and Saturn appearing as one, sparkling between the forest silhouette of tree branches.
Of Poppies and People
Poppy Day
Years back
In Flander’s fields
I saw them growing still
edging rows of wheat
Along dirt tracks the tourists
And the tractors travel
Toward the heroes’ monument at Waterloo
Red poppies, Papaver rhoeas
French – Coclicot
In Ypres
One hundred years ago
They grew in fields disturbed
By trench and bomb
By muddy feet and shattered corpse
Blood red their petals
In an angry wind
A stubborn resurrection
Against all senseless
Death
Today, across the world
we wear facsimiles
Upon our chests
Walk solemnly to the grave
Of soldiers whose names
We will never know
So many did they die and so fast
In that almost forgotten global war
In America
We speak of veterans
And raise the flag
Ponder war and peace
And armistice
An end to wars
All good
To bow our hearts before the dead
And give all honor to those alive
My mother’s father
He was there
In France, while still a youth
Who somehow joined
America’s Expeditionary Force
And then returned, no poppies
Waving over his grave
Here
On California’s shores
Old European arguments fall short
We look to check our facebook feed
And armistice is a neglected word
We claim our holiday
And proudly stand with America’s might
Yet as I walk in fields
And canyons
Of this west-leading
Continent edge
I see our poppy
Gold-orange not red
catching the wind, coloring the land
What war or peace does it
Proclaim?
It whispers of a
genocide
In every hill
How love of gold
As strong and heedless
As each poppies’ painted petals
Like a battle wind
Came here and pushed
The native people out, enslaved
Or killed them
Glorying, Even to this day
In smiling forgetfulness
Knowing only the industrious heritage
Of crouching miners
Pick-axed adventurers
Nimble entrepreneurs
All of us, grateful inhabitants
Of a place we call
The Gold Country
So better on this
Armistice day
Remember all our wars
Our place within them
Our poppy gold
Not with greed or death
But with renewal
For people long forgotten
Still among us, speak:
We are Nisenan
Nisek humkawi
Wada’ di musek –
This is our homeland
We all survive here
11
XI
20
Sky clear, waning crescent moon
On Ancestral Homelands
Of the Nisenan
*Veterans Day, November 11th, began as Armistice Day, remembering the moment on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 when an armistice ended World War I. In part due to the poem ‘In Flanders Fields,’ written by the Canadian soldier John McCrea in 1915 after the 2nd Battle of Ypres, the red field poppy became a symbol of Armistice Day and a way to memorialize the dead and the living who went through that war. For that reason, in the UK, Armistice Day is often informally called ‘Poppy Day.’ The California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica, the official flower and a common symbol of the state, is not closely related to Europe’s red field poppy, though it is in the same family, Papaveraceae. The Nisenan Ancestral Homelands stretch from the ‘Sutter Buttes’ of the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada crest, including the Yuba and Bear River watersheds. It is in this region that some of the most intensive gold mining in the state occurred.
Stevens Trail
Here’s to you, brave boys
Let me say it loudly
Outside Colfax
On the Old Highway Road
Near the start of our trail
The bronze plaque
Says you took the mountain
Stormed the citadel
Cape Horn
Blasting flat the railroad grade
Across a continent
You broke down the door
Let in the future
And here’s to you, laughing women
Of the canyon
Hundreds of feet below
We have hiked into
At the end of trail
Long way from road and town
You leave only your
Bedrock mortars
Shallow, easily missed, covered in ice
On this cold December.
The acorn way
Sunlit tree to stone
Meal to mouth
Belly to laughter
Back to sunlight
Let me whisper it quietly
In the cathedral bottom
Of this slate Sierra canyon
How you left markers
Of gratitude
No continent to cross
Everything already
Here
27 December 2019
North Fork of the
American River, 1300’
New moon & blue sky
* Stevens Trail drops 1400 feet from the outskirts of the town Colfax, originally Stop 20 in the long process that built the transcontinental railway in the 1860s. Like many trails in the Sierra foothills it began as a mining track, in this case turned into a toll road, named after a Truman A. Stevens. When built it traversed its way down into the North Fork American River Canyon crossing over to the mining town of Iowa Hill on the far side. Today, the neglected road has become a trail once more, a popular 8 miles or so (the BLM sign suggests 9 miles) round trip to the river and back.
* Cape Horn, location of the first double turn steep mountain obstacle in the building of the railroad over the Sierra coming from west to east, quickly became dramatized in the tourist guides of the day with tales of ‘celestials’ (Chinese) swarming like ants over the slopes in order to ‘storm the mountain citadel,’ some imagined to be dangling in wicker baskets held by ropes from above as they drilled into rock and set charges on dangerous sections of vertical cliff, sometimes falling to their deaths. All this was part of the aggrandizement of the railway both as an engineering marvel, an emblem of the age, and as a tourist wonder. The name Cape Horn recalls the crux crossing point in the sea journey to California, Cape Horn at the tip of South America, claiming here that this difficult rail crossing of the steep slate shoulder of the American River Canyon was its own crux enabling a new, futuristic crossing of the continent. In early years passenger trains would regularly stop at Cape Horn to let travelers admire the view down the American River Canyon.
* Bedrock mortars or grinding holes are places where indigenous people, here likely the Nisenan, prepared food gathered nearby, grinding acorns, seeds, roots or berries. These hemispheric depressions carved into hard, flat rock over a period of decades or perhaps centuries speak of the cultural continuity, so different from the ‘hot,’ disruptive culture of our modern experience, of a people deeply integrated into a landscape that is their grocery store and kitchen, gathering ground and sacred place.
When Morning
I.
When morning
Comes
Eating all its
Storm clouds
Unfurling photosensitive
Sky
I lie in bed
Surprised
Brother to the light
Striding through
My window.
II.
In little things
The magic
In little things
The power
Snowflake
On the tongue
Tranformer
Acorn
In the hand
Renewer
Pileated Woodpecker
Far in the forest
Laughing now
In my ear.
III.
Then
with the early birds
At the feeder
I say:
Earth
My catechism
Nature
My bible
Footsteps
My altar
Offering
Myself
15 December 2019
Cedar Wings Cottage
Clearing after Storm
Wishing you a Merry Everyone and a Holy Everything
This
Gift-wrapping the air
Swirling, light-footed crowd fall
Making me smile —
First Snow.
•
Fire to Ice
Just yesterday, red flag wildfire warning
Lingring late into November
Unseasonably warm, low humidity, high winds
Power blackouts, evacuations
Spot fires no more than a mile away
Attacked with truck, dozer and airplane
Mega fires further out
Darkened sky smoke plumes.
Then in a day
Temperature drops a full 20
Snow falls
Five days of it now, five more to come
Seasons askew, weather extreme
New normal in mountain foothills
Schools close, stores sell out of ice
Then batteries, then generators
Cars troll the darkened streets
An apocalypse not of
Wrath but denial.
•
Gift-wrapping the air…
However we reform
And remake you
You are still the mystery
And surprise —
This falling of cold white specks
From an empty sky
This transformation unbroken
From far ocean to mountain storm
To snowpack to spring melt
This float of crystal sculptures
Suspended in air
Enclouding us
I bow
before the mystery
…First snow
30 November 2019
Cedar Wings Cottage, 2680'
Storm-covered sky
Monday, the 25th was a high wind weather warning day, with the possibility of power shutoffs to guard against wildlife caused by electrical wires. The weeks previous saw no less than 7 power shutoff events, lasting 1 to 4 days, along with numerous small fires and a few catastrophic mega fires that burned homes in both northern and southern California. An unusually persistent high-pressure ridge had sat over Northern California, pushing aside any of the usual rain that typically arrives in the Sierra Nevada foothills after October 31st.
Tuesday, the 26, storms finally broke through, bringing a sudden, dramatic drop in temperatures and by afternoon, snow, first as white specks easily mistaken for ash from a fire, then full flakes ‘enclouding’ us in their free-fall. Day five of this arrival of winter finds us with snow still covering the ground except where the snow plows have cleared streets, with two storms around behind us, a third forecast for tomorrow, and generally cold rain or snow forecast for a full week. On the first day after storm we saw the juncos foraging for last morsels on newly fallen snow and out of sympathy put out bird seed, which they finally found – four days later – a troop of 20 dark-eyed juncos gathering in great activity of hopping, pecking, and wheeling flight as they feasted in the cold.
Pleocoma
Are we not
Like the rain beetles
Males flying about urgently
After rain first soaks
The forest floor in fall
For a few hours
Then no more
Each searching
For that one
Female
Soaked in pheromones
Waiting
At the entrance
Of her egg burrow
There to mate
And both
Soon to die?
Are we not?
And why then
Do we judge our path
Through this universe
More noble and right
More fitted with the purposes
Of heaven?
When these ancient ones
Still sell their
Hairy-legged, hard-bodied
Aerial dances
As if there were no other way
To be with God.
23 November 2018
Cedar Ridge, Sierra Foothills
* Pleocoma, from the Greek, ‘abundantly hairy,’ the genus name for the 25 or so species of rain beetle found from California to Washington that wait sometimes for years for a first heavy rain of fall before emerging to complete their life cycle.
Summit Bread
I wandered lonely
trackless
Having left trail
out of forest
broken and decayed underfoot
following hummocks
of granite spine
into cloud-driven sky
On cold summits
With their solitary jeffrey pines
earth lay down
Its argument
Wide, fulsome, all things
woven into the other
the very vastness of vision
A kind of bread
To eat
So that I need not even
Spill blood
To be brother
With the cliff-edge rocks
We who ride together
this wheeling, spherical
earth turtle
into starlight.
25 November 2019
Fisher Overlook Ridge, 7011'
A day before first winter storm
Glacier Ghosts
They lay heavy
over the earth here once
hundreds of feet thick
Riding the eroded volcanic ridge
Itself the ruin of millions year older
Pyroclastic flows
Down from mountain crest
Leaving
Rounded granite boulders
Larger than tables
Carried from
Donner Peak, miles away
Crumbs
To this ancient white monster
Scattered just below
Ridge's edge
Now it is pillar saint
Jeffrey Pine
flat-topped, limbs sculpted
Into grand upward gestures
Recumbent manzanita and huckleberry oak
Massive old Junipers
Berries ready for harvest
Volcanic gargoyle pillars
Carved into ridge's lee side
Conglomerate torsos, arches, fists
...And I, who am
Dancer on this parapet line
Between watersheds
Yuba - American
Their long-lost ice streams
flowing still
as ghosts filling the open spaces
of wide canyon.
17 November 2019
Razorback Ridge-Crows Nest, 7,500-7,900'
High cirrus and blue sky
Mountaineity 