Month: October 2005

Northwest Trek

Despite a rather heavy cover of clouds and cool weather, Gavin and I headed out to Northwest Trek today. It wasn’t an ideal day for photographs, but I couldn’t resist taking my camera.

I think I’ve mentioned that I’m not terribly fond of zoos where animals are caged, but part of the appeal of NW Trek is that the animals run free and a tram carries passengers through the site. That means that you shoot what you can, as you can. I like that feeling, and I particularly like the idea that the animals, though penned, aren’t caged.

Of course, with limited range and unlimited exposure to people, the animals soon become far too tame for my taste. I avoided some of the more obvious shots and attempted to create a realistic feel, as in this shot of a swan:

I also love this shot of a fawn hiding in the grass because it’s the kind of shots I might actually capture in the wild:

My favorite shot of the day is this one of one of the caged coyotes, though the cage he’s in is much larger and has a more natural setting than the ones you’ll see in most zoos:

I did get some knock-down-dead shots of the animals, but somehow I don’t like them as well as these as they seem strangely artificial, though I’d probably be bragging about them to everyone I knew if I’d actually captured them in the wild. Either that, or someone would find the digital negatives on my dead body after I’d gotten too close to the wolves or to the black bear.

It turned out to be a rather expensive trip as I ended up buying a year-long membership for a hundred and five dollars, lunch for two, and a stuffed owl for Lael because I felt guilty about leaving her at the baby-sitter’s today. Expect to see more shots from here in the future.

Kizer’s “A Month in Summer”

The section entitled â€?”The Sixtiesâ€? in Kizer’s Cool, Calm and Collected is rather short compared to other sections in the book. Many of the poems are labeled â€?”Chinese Imitations.â€? However, the most interesting poem to me is â€?”A Month in Summer,â€? a rather odd combination of confessional poetry and haibun formalism.

Too long to quote in its entirety, I will try to suggest why I found it intriguing. In opening, Kizer notes, â€?”I have come to prefer the four-line form [of haiku]which Nobuyuki Yuasa has used in translating Issa because, as he says, it comes closer to approximating the natural rhythm of English speech. Though not convinced that the four-line haiku is better than a three-line haiku, it’s an interesting idea.

The poem consists of thirty days of journal entries written in haibun form describing the ending of an important relationship in the narrator’s life.

THIRD DAY

Strange how tedium of love makes women babble, while it reduces men to a dour silence. As my voice skipped along the surfaces of communication like a water bug, below it I sensed his quiet: the murky depths of the pond.

Alone, I play a Telemann concerto on the phonograph. A rather pedantic German note on the slipcase speaks of â€?”the curious upward-stumbling theme.â€? Can we upward-stumble? If so, there is hope for us.

When we go away
I play records till dawn
To drown the echoes
Of my own voice.

…

TWENTY-SEVENTH DAY

Seen through the tears
This moonlight
Is no more poignant
Than a saucer of cream.

Why the artifice of this haibun, which I have appropriated from a culture which doesn’t belong to me? Perhaps to lose me. Perhaps because the only way to deal with sorrow is to find a form in which to contain it. And, at last, surely it is time to study restraint

It’s intriguing how a poet can present material this personal, this emotional without embarrassing the reader. I know I wouldn’t want a complete stranger telling me these kinds of things about his or her life, but somehow they feel perfectly acceptable in a poem.

In reading this â€?”poemâ€? it struck me that, though I’m not sure I would want something this personal put on the web as it happened, I would love to write a blog that followed this format.

I tried to use the haibun form for several of blog entries, specifically those describing my cancer surgery and recovery. Perhaps unconsciously I felt like Kizer that I needed a formal structure in order to present those painful feelings.

Unfortunately, I lacked the discipline needed to write haibun’s daily, but I still think it may well be the ideal format for a blog as it conveys the important aspects of one’s life succinctly, a quality sadly lacking in far too many blogs, even some I love dearly.

For anyone interested in contemporary use of the haibun, this long poem might well justify looking this collection up in a local library or, may one dare suggest, buying the collection.

Loren’s Wild Bird Chase

It wasn’t a good day for birding, despite the fact that I drove twice as far as usual, got lost more than usual, and walked a twice as many miles as usual. All of which probably shows that effort doesn’t count nearly as much as good timing in birding.

I drove up to Seabeck looking for eagles, but didn’t see a single one, only to be told later in the day that there were there in the spring and will be back in the winter, but apparently are on vacation right now.

In fact, the only new bird I saw today was this Common Loon in his plain, drab, non-breeding plumage:

Ironically, I saw him before I actually got to Seabeck, as I was driving across a small inlet.

I did see a Belted Kingfisher in all three places I went to today, but still wasn’t able to get a picture better than this one, taken at Belfair:

No matter, it was a beautiful day, though I wish I’d taken my regular lens rather than my 400 mm telephoto because the best pictures were the scenery:

Through this lens
my whole world
seems bedazzled

Kizer’s “Through a Glass Eye, Lightly”

Carolyn Kizer’s 500 page Cool, Calm & Collected will probably take me awhile to finish. Though my favorite Kizer poem from the 50’s is â€?”The Intruder,â€? a close second would have to be one I don’t even remember from my previous two readings of The Ungrateful Garden
:

THROUGH A GLASS EYE, LIGHTLY

In the laboratory waiting room
containing
one television actor with a teary face
trying a contact lens;
two muscular victims of industrial accidents;
several vain women — I was one of them—
came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye.

It was a long day:
Deborah waiting for the blood vessels
painted
on her iris to dry.
Her mother said that, holding Deborah
when she was born,
â€?”First I inspected her, from toes to navel,
then stopped at her head…�
We wondered why
the inspection hadn’t gone the other way.
â€?”Looking into her eye
was like looking into a volcano:

â€?”Her vacant pupil
went whirling down, down to the foundation
of the world …
When she was three years old they took it out.
She giggled when she went under
the anaesthetic.
Forty-five minutes later she came back
happy! …
The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face
(you know, it never bled?),
stayed happy, even when I went to pieces.
She’s five in June.

â€?”Deborah, you get right down
from there, or I’ll have to slap!â€?
Laughing, Deborah climbed into the lap
of one vain lady, who
had been discontented with her own beauty.
Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily
in the empty eye.

Despite the fact that this poem seems to me to read more like a short, short story than a poem, I like its immediacy, its conversational approach, its non-sentimental tone, and its clear message.

I’m afraid most of us are prone to comparing ourselves to those that are more â€?”blessedâ€? in some way rather than to those who are less fortunate. We do so, of course, so that we can convince ourselves that we must have, or that we deserve, something we probably don’t need at all.

Modern readers will have to remind themselves that this poem is written in the bad, old days when contact lenses were made of glass, not plastic, and cost much more than a pair of eyeglasses. You wore them out of vanity, because you wanted to be one of the â€?”beautifulâ€? people, not some nerdy bookworm.

It’s hard to read the poem and not remember just how lucky most of us really are, no matter how much we’d like to lose twenty pounds, have straighter, whiter, teeth, or have 20/20 vision. It’s even more embarrassing to discover this by meeting someone who seems perfectly happy without those things.