Whip-Poor-Will

Too early in the season for that bastard to wake me, but there you go. Night-hawk, goat-sucker. "It is life near the bone where it is sweetest." "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." " Do not depend on the putty." Henry setting the woods on fire, cooking dinner on a burning stump, skinny dipping at the pond. Building a fence for Ralph, taking care of the kids while the sage was away, hot letters to the old boy's wife. Concord was a happening place. I need the letters, I need to mortgage the farm and get a copy of the Journals. Nothing is beneath notice. He had a fox too, and studied the frogs. The other reason for using a mesh bag when collecting morels is that you spread the spores, extend the range. I found myself in a new drainage today, watching where I stepped (crushing a morel is sacrilege) and found a fine stand of fiddle-head ferns. I composed a dinner in my head and when I got back to the house, made it reality. A piece of toast has never been so adorned. Preconceptions are so often wrong, but this one was dead on; I would have shared, if anyone was around, thank god no one was, there wasn't enough for more than one. The perfect meal, not quite enough, the last sop almost sexual, leaves you hanging. MFK Fisher would have been the natural match for this feast, she would have understood. Someplace, she peels a tangerine, strips off the bitter white veins, and warms the segments on a radiator, they balloon, explode in the mouth; a simple explication and one of the most explicit sexual passages I've ever read. How do you do that? Attention to detail. Thoreau expands out by focusing in, by his standards Whitman is almost pornographic, Emily is graphic, what the hummingbird is saying: in nature, sexuality is a given. I'm deeply confused by what I think is going on. An older, attractive, patron of the museum, seems to be hitting on me, I don't want involvement, but I do want conversation; it's a ridge we walk, a narrow edge. At a basic level, we're all strange, inviolate, consider what we know to be concrete, but it isn't. Near the end of Walden Thoreau talks about the railroad cut, the way the sand and clay drifts and patterns. It's a drainage riff. It's beautiful, Joyce, or Stein, out there, couched perfectly in language, musical. Meaning is almost always secondary. The song of this bird, for instance, a whip-poor-will close by, it doesn't mean, it merely is. I do almost nothing but I'm inundated by sign, meaning is apparent, look around, where the leaves point, what's being said. I say nothing in my defense, I'm defenseless, but I'm interested in oak galls. Might make me an interesting person but not someone you could live with. I live alone because I don't want to apologize for who I am. I'm comfortable in myself. What Thoreau is saying in Walden, this place works for me, where's your place? What Olson asked, what Bly demanded. It's always the down beat, kettle-drums in the distance. At the top of my form, I'm in my cups, don't ask me to remember. However far back we go. What we learn, from the natural world, is that the real thing is right in front of you. The flowers blooming. Hold on to that, listen.