Black Hole Sun 

“After a month of interior weeping it occurred to me that in times like these I have nothing to fall back on except the sun and moon and earth.”
                       -Jim Harrison, from his poem “The theory and practice of rivers”

I used to feel guilty for my vagabond spirit until I read everything that lives moves . . .

I just read that the poet Rilke once said angels are birds of the soul.  I've always supposed this about birds, so it's nice to have it verified.  The picture I tried to take earlier today but failed was out on a dirt section road cutting through remnant river bottom cornfields.  It was there I saw a winding ribbon of a million blackbirds in some impossible sky dance.  This feathery aggregation furling and unfurling as if a single animal spirit, was harassing a single, hapless red tailed hawk.  The hawk looked terribly embarrassed and confused.

After another look, Rilke actually thought angels are evil bird souls.  This is obviously not what I had in mind, and I fully admit I’m selective about what I choose to believe.  So angels are definitely happy bird souls.  Case closed.

I am happy tonight because of a long poem about rivers, a sharpened pencil, some succulent red wine and the sweet sound of Gillian Welch singing a long, meditative song about Billy the Kid from the radio in the kitchen.  Remember that pleasant but peculiar metallic wood pulpy smell of sharpening a pencil in the fifth grade?  I’m using one now, and I still use them at work (Dixon Ticonderoga #2) even though scorned by colleagues for my old-fashionedness.

Earlier today my daughter and I went to my parents’ country house for an early Thanksgiving.   Last year about this time, we wandered off into the forest and found the ruins of a forgotten homesteader's cabin, which we excavated with a shovel and trowel.  All my years of archeological study, analysis and fieldwork came down to a father and his daughter digging for broken bits of colored glass and rusty tins from some ramshackle dwelling from 1911.  I've had the recurring thought that even though I didn’t become the scholar of my dreams, to spend one afternoon with my daughter on Thanksgiving working on our own little archaeology project, makes it all worthwhile.          

Well, we didn’t wander off into the woods in search of buried treasure this morning.  We haven’t had a hard freeze, so the ticks and chiggers are still plentiful in the tallgrass and forest.  But we did walk the section road running parallel to a large pasture with horses and buffalo.  The sun finally came out to warm on our faces, so I tried to capture the feeling with my camera lens pointed into a black hole sun. 

My favorite Sunday radio show used to be “Songs From the Plains”, hosted by some bee-keeper farmer girl named “Honey”.  But the show went out of business so to speak, replaced by “Tumbleweeds All the Way Down”, straight out of Austin, Texas.  I’m listening to it now.  It’s a fabulous show, so much so that I think it’s my new favorite . . . only place around these parts you can here Gene Autry, Gillian Welch and the Screaming Trees in the same program. 

Yes’um.    

http://kosu.org/programs/tumbleweeds-all-way-down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwNdLjqaMLs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQETBG3h874

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_SiVabBvC4

Reading this long, meandering prose poem about rivers has been entirely calming, a sort of liquification and reflection of the soul . . .     

“Sitting on the bank, the water stares back so deeply you can hear it afterward when you wish.  It is the water of dreams, and for the nightwalker who can almost walk on the water, it is most of all the water of awakening, passing with the speed of life herself, drifting in circles in an eddy joining the current again as if the eddy were a few moments’ sleep.”

            -Jim Harrison, from his poem “The theory and practice of rivers”