"Before Quiet" by Hazel Hall

"Water Lilies" Claude Monet 1906

I will think of water-lilies

Growing in a darkened pool,

And my breath shall move like water,

And my hands be limp and cool.

It shall be as though I waited

In a wooden place alone;

I will learn the peace of lilies

And will take it for my own.

If a twinge of thought, if yearning

Come like wind into this place,

I will bear it like the shadow

Of a leaf across my face.

"The Maldive Shark" by Herman Melville

"The Gulf Stream" -- Winslow Homer -- 1899

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,

Pale sot of the Maldive sea,

The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,

How alert in attendance be.

From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw

They have nothing of harm to dread,

But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank

Or before his Gorgonian head:

Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth

In white triple tiers of glittering gates,

And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,

An asylum in jaws of the Fates!

They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,

Yet never partake of the treat—

Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,

Pale ravener of horrible meat.

"Fishmonger" by Marsden Hartley

"Rainbow Fish" -- African-Amber

I have taken scales from off

The cheeks of the moon.

I have made fins from bluejays’ wings,

I have made eyes from damsons in the shadow.

I have taken flushes from the peachlips in the sun.

From all these I have made a fish of heaven for you,

Set it swimming on a young October sky.

I sit on the bank of the stream and watch

The grasses in amazement

As they turn to ashy gold.

Are the fishes from the rainbow

Still beautiful to you,

For whom they are made,

For whom I have set them,

Swimming?

"At a Window" by Carl Sandburg

"The Starry Night" Vincent Van Gogh 1889

Give me hunger,

O you gods that sit and give

The world its orders.

Give me hunger, pain and want,

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame,

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,

A voice to speak to me in the day end,

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness.

In the dusk of day-shapes

Blurring the sunset,

One little wandering, western star

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window,

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk

And wait and know the coming

Of a little love.

"Song for the Woolly Mammoth" by Lauren Moseley

Beth Zaiken, New York State Museum

                    When glaciers trapped a third of Earth’s water and drained the Bering

                         Strait, humans
                     journeyed to this land where wind swept the steppes of snow, exposing

                         grass

                    that would be plucked by mammoth trunks and ground by washboard

                         teeth.
                    Up to thirteen feet, their tusks curved helically and would intertwine

                         if they went on

                    a little longer. The beasts’ dense hair—brown, blonde, or ginger—

                         swung like a skirt
                    about their flanks. I want to rest my head against that shaggy coat, to

                         crane

                    my ears, to be protected from the giant short-faced bear. I want to be
                    their baby, wrap my trunk around my mother’s, watch the wild horses of 

                         Beringia

                    canter across the steppes in tawny, fine-boned movements. The thick

                         fat
                    under my hair keeps me warm when the sun goes low, and I grow into

                    an eight-ton bull, pierce the ice with my tusks and drink from glacial

                         pools.
                    The wind is bitter, but my strongest features have grown bigger than

                         my father’s.

                    When summer comes I must find a mate, and it only takes a few tusk

                         locks to show
                    my strength. After our calf is born, I see upright creatures eyeing him

                         from the mesa.

                    I will fling them against the icy mountains. They wear our hair as if it

                         were
                    their skin. Still, I will live through many winters, through each warm

                         season’s

                    hardheaded matches. I know the range that slopes like the hump on

                         my back, sunsets
                    redder than the long-toothed cat’s gorging mouth, how musk oxen

                         form a wall of horns

                    and still fall prey to the blade thrown. I know how many herds have

                         fled, and the curves
                    of carcasses stripped to bone by men, wind, and time. I do not know

                         that I am gone.

"Shirt" by Carl Sandburg

"Study for the Bachelor" Andrew Wyeth 1964

I remember once I ran after you and tagged the fluttering

      shirt of you in the wind.

Once many days ago I drank a glassful of something and

      the picture of you shivered and slid on top of the stuff.

And again it was nobody else but you I heard in the

      singing voice of a careless humming woman.

One night when I sat with chums telling stories at a

      bonfire flickering red embers, in a language its own

      talking to a spread of white stars:

                          It was you that slunk laughing

                          in the clumsy staggering shadows.

Broken answers of remembrance let me know you are

      alive with a peering phantom face behind a doorway

      somewhere in the city’s push and fury.

Or under a pack of moss and leaves waiting in silence

      under a twist of oaken arms ready as ever to run

      away again when I tag the fluttering shirt of you.

"Wakeful Things" by Michael Prior

"The Stag At Bay" Richard Ansdell (1815 - 1885)

You should never put the new antlers of a deer

to your nose and smell them. They have little

insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain.

—Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Consider that the insects might be metaphor.

That the antlers’ wet velvet scent

might be Proust’s madeleine dipped into a cup of tea

adorned with centrifugal patterns of azalea

and willow—those fleshing the hill behind this room,

walls wreathed in smoke and iron, musk

of the deer head above the mantle. He was nailed in place

before I was me. Through the floorboards,

a caterpillar, stripped from its chrysalis by red ants,

wakes, as if to a house aflame. Silk

frays like silver horns, like thoughts branching from a brain.

After the MRI, my father’s chosen father squinted

at the wormholes raveling the screen

and said, Be good to one another. Love, how inelegantly

we leave. How insistent we are to return in one form

or another. I wish all of this and none of it

for us: more sun, more tempest, more

fear and fearlessness—more of that which is tempered, carved,

and worn, creased into overlapping planes. The way

I feel the world’s aperture enlarge in each morning’s

patchwork blur of light and colour while I fumble

for my glasses beside the bed—lenses smudged

by both our hands. When they were alive,

those antlers held up the sky. Now what do they hold?

"The Wings of Daylight" by W. S. Merwin

Alexey Terenin

Brightness appears showing us everything
it reveals the splendors it calls everything
but shows it to each of us alone
and only once and only to look at
not to touch or hold in our shadows
what we see is never what we touch
what we take turns out to be something else
what we see that one time departs untouched
while other shadows gather around us
the world’s shadows mingle with our own
we had forgotten them but they know us
they remember us as we always were
they were at home here before the first came
everything will leave us except the shadows
but the shadows carry the whole story
at first daybreak they open their long wings

"I Don't Know What You're Called, I'll Call You By Your Sounds" by Susan Landers

"Bird With Red Ivy," Koson Ohara

dew grass a fire shine

mountain a lung

pine cone the bone

tsunami rock hawk jaw

gravity a fall all consuming

a song chirp for sunlight

spine daggers cracking

the sky an ocean paused in its crashing

creature shake trip whistle

rustle nut squirrel swish

stump thunder or thump

thump a swallowing

you beautiful urchin

you rot mound of moss.

"A Landscape" by Carl Dennis

"Vermont Barns at Sunset" by Hamilton Hayes

This painting of a barn and barnyard near sundown

May be enough to suggest we don’t have to turn

From the visible world to the invisible

In order to grasp the truth of things.

We don’t always have to distrust appearances.

Not if we’re patient. Not if we’re willing

To wait for the sun to reach the angle

When whatever it touches, however retiring,

Feels invited to step forward

Into a moment that might seem to us

Familiar if we gave ourselves more often

To the task of witnessing. Now to witness

A barn and barnyard on a day of rest

When the usual veil of dust and smoke

Is lifted a moment and things appear

To resemble closely what in fact they are.

"The Giver of Stars" by Amy Lowell

"The Sleeping Heart of Winter" Catherine Hyde

Hold your soul open for my welcoming.

Let the quiet of your spirit bathe me

With its clear and rippled coolness,

That, loose-limbed and weary, I find rest,

Outstretched upon your peace, as on a bed of ivory.

Let the flickering flame of your soul play all about me,

That into my limbs may come the keenness of fire,

The life and joy of tongues of flame,

And, going out from you, tightly strung and in tune,

I may rouse the blear-eyed world,

And pour into it the beauty which you have begotten.

"An Old Man's Winter Night" by Robert Frost

Deb Garlick

All out of doors looked darkly in at him

Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,

That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. 

What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze 

Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. 

What kept him from remembering what it was 

That brought him to that creaking room was age. 

He stood with barrels round him—at a loss. 

And having scared the cellar under him 

In clomping there, he scared it once again 

In clomping off;—and scared the outer night, 

Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar 

Of trees and crack of branches, common things, 

But nothing so like beating on a box. 

A light he was to no one but himself 

Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, 

A quiet light, and then not even that. 

He consigned to the moon,—such as she was, 

So late-arising,—to the broken moon 

As better than the sun in any case 

For such a charge, his snow upon the roof, 

His icicles along the wall to keep; 

And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt 

Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted, 

And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept. 

One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house, 

A farm, a countryside, or if he can, 

It’s thus he does it of a winter night. 

Ushering In Winter With The Wood Between

We're in the deep freeze right now. It came fast with daytime temperatures in the 60's one day and then dropping into the 30's over the next two days. Night time temps are in the teens. To cap it all off snow is predicted for Saturday.

Now, I like winter, but it does take some time for me to adjust to the change and anticipate the pleasures of the season. I hope to keep fishing on the good days when they come, and I plan to get out to enjoy the particular beauty of the winter landscape. But I'm not ready yet.

A pleasant boost in this adjustment phase has come from some recent winter-themed posts on The Wood Between. I look at these works of art and suddenly I can hardly wait for winter.

Chris Wormell

Yuri Vasnetsov

William Hyde

"Just Now" by W.S. Merwin

"The Storm" George Inness, 1885

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away

the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me

that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for

not patient not even waiting no more hidden

than the air itself that became part of me for a while

with every breath and remained with me unnoticed

something that was here unnamed unknown in the days

and the nights not separate from them

not separate from them as they came and were gone

it must have been here neither early nor late then

by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

"The Hermit of the Wood" Harrison Cady

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

"Peonies" by Jim Harrison

"Peonies" Matilda Brown 1907

The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they're becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they'll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" by Wallace Stevens

Friedrich Hechelmann

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" by Wallace Stevens

from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. © Vintage, 2015.

"A Lazy Day" by Paul Laurence Dunbar

"The End of the Day, Adirondacks" Winslow Homer, 1890

The trees bend down along the stream,

Where anchored swings my tiny boat.

The day is one to drowse and dream

And list the thrush’s throttling note.

When music from his bosom bleeds 

Among the river’s rustling reeds.

No ripple stirs the placid pool,

When my adventurous line is cast, 

A truce to sport, while clear and cool,

The mirrored clouds slide softly past.

The sky gives back a blue divine, 

And all the world’s wide wealth is mine.

A pickerel leaps, a bow of light,

The minnows shine from side to side. 

The first faint breeze comes up the tide—

I pause with half uplifted oar,

While night drifts down to claim the shore.

1904

"Driving the Beast" by Christopher Bakken

Painting by Deb Gengler-Copple

             In the thick brush

they spend the hottest part of the day,

             soaking their hooves

in the trickle of mountain water

             the ravine hoards

on behalf of the oleander.

             You slung your gun

across your back in order to heave

             a huge grey stone

over the edge, so it rolled, then leaped

             and crashed below.

This is what it took to break the shade,

             to drive the beast,

not to mention a thrumming of wings

             into the sky,

a wild confetti of frantic grouse,

             but we had slugs,

not shot, and weren’t after their small meat,

             but the huge ram’s,

whose rack you’d seen last spring, and whose stench

             now parted air,

that scat-caked, rut-ripe perfume of beast.

             Watch now, he runs,

you said, launching another boulder,

             then out it sprang

through a gap in some pine, brown and black

             with spiraled horns

impossibly agile for its size.

             But, yes, he fell

with one shot, already an idea

             of meat for fire

by the time we’d scrambled through the scree.

             And that was all.

No, you were careful, even tender,

             with the knife-work,

slitting the body wide with one stroke

             then with your hands

lifting entire the miraculous

             liver and heart,

emptying the beast on the mountain.

             Later, it rained,

knocking dust off the patio stones.

             Small frogs returned

from abroad to sing in the stream beds.

             We sat and drank.

The beast talked to its rope in the tree.

             And then you spoke:

no more, you said, enough with mourning,

             then rose to turn

our guts, already searing on the fire.

"Trying to Pray" by Twyla M. Hansen

"Cookmaid With Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit" Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1585 - 1627)

With my arms raised in a vee,

I gather the heavens and bring

my hands down slow together,

press palms and bow my head.

I try to forget the suffering,

the wars, the ravage of land

that threatens songbirds,

butterflies, and pollinators.

The ghosts of their wings flutter

past my closed eyes as I breathe

the spirit of seasons, the stirrings

in soil, trees moving with sap.

With my third eye, I conjure

the red fox, its healthy tail, recount

the good of this world, the farmer

tending her tomatoes, the beans

dazzled green al dente in butter,

salt and pepper, cows munching

on grass. The orb of sun-gold

from which all bounty flows.

"Trying to Pray" by Twyla M. Hansen from Rock. Tree. Bird. © The Backwaters Press, 2017.