Marie Antoinette's Sky

December sun’s waning, sky
Anachronistically lit up like a spilt Easter basket
Cerulean to cyan satin smeared with platinum and pink
Dusky rose rays melting mirrored branches
The decadence of Marie Antoinette
cast to the eyes by a faerie queen

December 15, 2008

Selective Amnesia

Spring in New Hampshire brings with it a bout of selective amnesia, like a mother’s inability to conjure the pain of birth after she gazes into the eyes of her child. So joyed are we that we simply survived the trial once again, we forget the threats of southern migration, never spending another winter in this godforsaken place, of quitting. Period. Once the exquisite torture of 30 below gives way to blue skies and warm breezes, we seem to forget that we couldn’t go outside for a month without fear of freezing to death in the walk between the house and car. As soon as we see the ice break from the river, we can no longer remember the long hours spent under the house thawing frozen pipes, swearing that we will remember to buy new heat tape every fall, even if the old one still seems to be working. Budding trees, chartreuse leaves poking up through brown grass, and fresh mud wipe from our eyes the desaturation of fall, that bleak black and white season that reminds us why the ancient Irish marked October 31st as New Year’s eve, the barren period, a night for ghosts.

Faces that haven’t seen sun in six months turn flush and ruddy, arms itch with the need to work. With the first warm weekend, we harken back to the hive mentality, venturing out en masse, scrubbing and clearing the rubble, eliminating the evidence of snow banks, ice storms, and winter malaise, yelling to the neighbor across the road, “Great weather, we having, huh? Nah, winter wasn’t so bad.”

Red Season Returns

Ice water sluices off sheer granite faces
Carving fissures in winter’s blue palaces.
Frozen crust dissolves to reveal the footprints
Of early man, footprints and tracks in relief.
Red branches shoot forth from yellowed ground
Drawing weary eyes from sky to earth and back again.

almost there

balancing precariously on the slick knife edge of Spring
hurricane winds rip limbs from trees
bash and skitter them about
ice rain snow sleet rain snow ice
repeat

January Thaw (appropriately rediscovered in March)

January Thaw
Fictitious purity washed away with winter rain
Layer of insulation against reality dissolved,
Falsely,
Reveals the detritus beneath, left over and forgotten from fall chores and wishes
Reacquaint us with a different reality,
Reintroduce us briefly to our senses
Smiles free from the frozen warming of scarves and upturned jacket collars
Smell the earth, inhale the air
Decomposing mouse in the barn
The suck of salted mud against woolen clad feet inside rubber boots
70 degree change in a matter of days, -20 to +50
Jackets thrown off and lost in the playground slush
Fevers and the flu
All for a taste of the heady optimism of spring
Only to be forced back inside by pelting sleet and another three feet
False

Cruelest Month

Whoever believes T.S. Eliot that April is the cruelest month has apparently never spent any substantial time in New Hampshire’s North Country. With April comes the first blast of spring, forcing green through wet corn snow, bringing animals and natives alike out of winter’s hibernation. No, April may bring late heavy storms, winds glossing branches icy over, false starts and stops to spring’s forthcoming, but it is not cruel, just impetuous.

Cruel is November, the season of undoubtable reality. Gone is the temperance of summer, short and heady through the longest days of June and July, trickling into August, when the land is green and lush, dark with vegetation, alive with the sound of fast running water and the smell of lilacs, strawberries, and fresh earth. The rocks heat metallic and shimmer off the shallows of the Connecticut and Ammonoosuc Rivers. Summer yields to the goldening of early fall, when the mountainsides patina in reverse, blending green to gold. The difficult fertility of gardening on granite yields a bounty smaller than that of our southern and western neighbors, but what we produce is sweet, ripe, and vibrant. Days start and end crisp, but warm to intoxicating highs. The air hangs heavy with the smell of apples and second cut hay, fields being tilled and readied for the next season’s life. Time lingers as the trees complete their metamorphosis, and we all hold our breath in wonder of the potency of color and light. The sun sets amber over the hills, sooner than we might light, but with a spectacular quality we imbibe.

But then, as the last leaves fall to the turn of November, darkness comes too early and stays too late like a house guest with poor etiquette. The last vestiges of warmth leave the air, the soil, the rocks, and we’re left with grey- grey skies, grey rock, grey trees. The flushed, ruddy cheeks of apple picking and wood stacking turn goose-fleshed and sallow against the bitter wind. The stores are in, feed and wood, and heavy blankets taken from their closets. Affable summer smiles and leisurely chats give ‘way to hurried snippets beneath upturned collars. Necks shrink and eyes turn to slits. Spring is too far off to remember clearly. It hangs in the consciousness like a benign ghost. The hardscrap that is the North Country begins to show beneath the pretense that we are just like any other place. And now, with November, begins the questioning: Do we have enough? Are we really ready for the coming snow and cold? The ground hardens into dormant muddy ruts, awaiting the baptism of snow that is later and later in coming to ease the apprehension and cover the starkness of doubt.

Waning Autumnal

I sit beside the cellar of a farm long since gone
Granite turning from hole back to rock and earth
Property donated, farmers’ names forgotten
Orchards left to grow over and run wild,
Apples lying fallow on the ground for deer that don’t know they are invited
How many such places exist, forgotten, waiting to be fallen in to?

My grandpa taught me how to “tell the weather”
Watch the poplars as the leaves turn over-silver
Cast iron clouds move in and the air smells sweet
Electric and alive
Sit on the porch and wait for the rain to come

Have you ever seen it rain color?
Or gust wishes?
The day lends itself to optimism.

As the lake reflects the sunlight, bringing colors down to earth
The trees pick up the colors dear and hoist them to the sky
Maples scarlet and orange- raspberries, pumpkins, squash
Birches yellow- corn
Golden leaves are black eyed susans
The pine and spruce hold the green for us so we can start again next year



The trees gather up all of their most vibrant colors
holding them up in hope and offering for next year
Orange of pumpkins and squash
Red strawberries and roses
Yellow corn and black-eyed susans
Await rebirth in our mind's eye and rich earth




Birches stretch out
their branches like long bony fingers,
announcing their new nakedness
to autumn's gun-metal
grey skies





Fall rushes in like a
death rally
hot, red, and flush
a moment of brilliant
clarity
false hope fleeting

before you blink and
it's gone
stark and grey





I began my day grousing that I was up before the dawn.
Slate blue sky, dark and clouded, greets my start.
But as I round the corner, ripe peach bursts over
the mountains, filling the sky from horizon to infinity.
Sun unseen but omnipresent through charcoal yields
a rainbow at dawn.




The barn stood for 200 years on the same site, only to be torn down because of taxes, and shipped to a place called Sun Valley, where the sun is entirely different from the rays that had weathered that barn over its time. “But we’re preserving a bit of New England!” they say. No, actually, you’re simply now moving a whole bunch of wood.