Category: Poets

The Silent Forest Amidst the Noise of Jets

It’s easy to forget that this whole ChatGPT/“The Darkling Thrush” thing started with a simple nod of the head to McNulty’s Ascendance, a book that I could easily identify with, one that helped remind me how I feel about Nature, and the Olympics, in particular.  

Originally, I was going to include a different second poem called Breath that ends with: “Timeless beauty and human grief/between these poles/the world’s suffering wakes anew/with each striking sunrise.”

However, after all the long-winded discussion following my comments on McNulty’s “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn,” somehow it seems appropriate to circle back and mention this McNulty poem, which complements the one previously posted.  

DECEPTION PASS BEFORE THE BOMBS FALL 

Navy jets strafing the heavens, 

the trees gather small intermittent silence

into themselves. 

I walk out through wet winter brush. 

I stop to listen to the story of a leaning cedar 

as it folds its bark over an ancient burn. 

Along charred heartwood 

I feel the rough burnt edge of old bark, 

the burgeoning growth of healthy sapwood, 

as a fighter jet splits the sky. 

Into the leaf’s-breadth of silence 

that follows, a winter wren utters 

Its clear, ebullient song. 

Its notes pierce the darkness of war-noise 

like a blossom of light, resplendent 

with an ounce and a half of hope. 

A digital collage featuring contrasting scenes: two fighter jets emitting fire and smoke in the sky, a close-up of a textured tree trunk, a picturesque river and bridge landscape, and a singing bird surrounded by musical notes and a glowing aura.

Although I’ve been in that area once or twice, I didn’t remember it clearly so I looked it up in Google: “Deception Pass State Park, Washington’s most visited state park, features accessible, stunning old-growth forests, particularly in the Hoypus Point and Hoypus Hill areas of Whidbey Island. These, sometimes 700-850+ year-old, Douglas-fir and cedar forests offer miles of hiking trails, providing a rare, low-elevation, and easily accessible glimpse into the region’s ancient, pre-settlement ecosystems.” 

The Whidbey Island Naval Station is just south of the area.  I’ve only driven by it once or twice, but I remember thinking the Naval Base seemed strangely out of place so near these old-growth forests.  

The poem seems balanced on that incongruity – the stillness of the ancient forest blasted with the sound of jets taking off and landing.  

Of course, it’s probably not literally true that “trees gather small intermittent silence/into themselves,” but they do block most noise, and the Pacific Northwest rainforests seem to do a particularly good job of doing that. 

Perhaps that silence is what makes hiking in the forest so meditative and allows us to notice things we miss when we are distracted by the chatter going on in our heads.  Luckily, I’ve never encountered the kind of jet noise McNulty describes here while hiking in PNW forests, but I’m often distracted by the sound of passenger jets flying over while hiking Mt. Rainier or other Cascade hikes.  There seems to be no place where you can totally avoid human noise pollution.

Luckily, that cacophony doesn’t manage to entirely drown out the elegant Winter Wrens’ song, a song offering hope that man’s destruction won’t destroy Nature, that we, like the “leaning cedar as it folds its bark over an ancient burn,” will be able to restore what our bombs have destroyed.

Unfortunately, our current bombing of Iran barely leaves us “with an ounce and a half of hope.”

Tim McNulty’s Ascendance

With rare exceptions, I seldom know when I bought a book that I’ve finally picked up to read. Surprisingly, I remember when and why I purchased Tim McNulty’s Ascendence.  I bought it in February 2023  because an environmental group I belong to was promoting him as a guide for a trip on the Olympic Peninsula.  I prefer to explore the Olympics on my own and have been doing so for nearly 60 years, but I was surprised that I had never heard of McNulty and wondered what he had to say about an area I love.  

I identified with many of his poems particularly those where he describes his daughter Caitlin’s experiences in the woods.  One of my fondest memories is my first backpacking trip with my kids in Olympic National Park. Dawn insisted I was trying to kill her when we got to a crossing point too late, and the high tide made it difficult to cross; she wasn’t any happier when we had to climb a ridge using a rope to pull us up one side and lower us slowly on the other side.  Tyson just plain didn’t want to carry his own sleeping bag, so I ended up with it on the top of my pack, hitting me in the head every other step.  Still, neither complained when the deer wandered into our camp the next morning to say hello and when we saw a pod of Orcas just off the shore. Those kinds of experiences bind you forever.

I thought about quoting one of those poems here because I did like them so much, but decided that “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn”resonated even more deeply.  McNulty is reacting to a painting by Morris Graves, as he points out in “Notes to the Poems”.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a link to that particular painting anywhere on the net, though there are a lot of Morris’s bird paintings online.  McNulty points out that it was painted at the outbreak of World War II, just before Morris’s internment as a conscientious objector.   

The poem reminded me a lot of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” which was written in 1900, just as Europe was moving towards World War I. As I’ve mentioned before, this poem made me change my college major from Physics to English.

The Varied Thrush happens to be one of my favorite birds, one that spends Summer high in the Cascades or the Olympics —and, hopefully, Winter in my backyard searching for insects in the leaves I’ve piled up for it.

“VARIED THRUSH CALLING IN AUTUMN” 

It may not be entirely relevant in this poem. Still, anyone familiar with the Varied Thrush would know that its brilliant orange-and black-plumage would contrast with the “dark-washed” browns in the landscape almost as much as its brilliant song contrasts with the natural silence of the wilderness.  

For me, the poem, like the drawing that inspired it, captures a moment of beauty in a world that is definitely not always so, never more so than in a time of war, whether it be World War II or the Vietnam War.  

Luckily, such opportunities to discover beauty are not limited to times of war; they are available to anyone willing to venture forth in Nature, not just in Spring when Nature is at its loveliest, but even in late Fall when it’s so cold that even the birds begin to retreat to the lowlands.

The poem shows that small moments in the natural world can stabilize us, deepen us, and remind us how to endure tension without despairing.

Reflections on Life and Loss in ‘Vanish’ by Kevin Miller

Mike Robinson introduced me to Kevin Miller way back in 2006. I’ve written about him a couple of times, but  I just finished Vanish, his latest work, which is, as it turns out, already four years old. The work begins with a quote from Theodore Roethke, “What falls away is always. And is near.”  The Past falls away, but it is always near, and many of these poems seem devoted to those who have passed away and to recovering memories of them and to death itself.

“Field Work” seems to tie in directly with the Roethke quote that begins the work. 

Field Work 

The five-year-old grandson carries 
the short shovel, says, I am a worker. 
His hands pulse red in the cold, 
and he pounds at the earth 
proud to turn soil. He has no notion 
Of entering the house where brothers 
read and play cars. This one will bury me, 
his brother will know what to say, 
the third will keep mischief alive. 
The girl child from another city 
will stand with the boys, her song 
long on tradition steeped in rain. 
When I threw dirt on my father's box, 
showers softened the knock 
of rocks on its pine door. The windows 
in the house of the dead have no glass, 
the music their lives make lifts curtains. 
The far field knows no distance.

Roethke’s last volume of poetry was entitled The Far Field and was published in 1964, the year of his death (and the year I was signed up for his class).  It’s a fairly long poem, but these short excerpts seem to refer directly to the last line of Field Work.  

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, 
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, 
The wheel turning away from itself, 
The sprawl of the wave, 
The on-coming water.

…

I am renewed by death, thought of my death, 
The dry scent of a dying garden in September, 
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. 
What I love is near at hand, 
Always, in earth and air.


I’ll have to admit I’ve never thought of my dead father while playing with my grandchildren or great-grandchildren, but it’s certainly a connection we all consider, particularly as we age. At 83, I like to think my father lives on in me, and I hope that part of me will live on in my grandchildren when I’m gone. 

In Vanish, Miller constantly reminds us of life’s ups and downs and the memories that live with us long after those ups and downs have passed.

John Daniel’s Of Earth

While searching for a poetry book to read to get back to posting, I found John Daniel’s Of Earth: New and Selected Poems with several poems already marked.  The name didn’t ring any bells, but I wondered if I had already posted about it and had just forgotten doing so. I searched my website and found that I had, indeed, published a review of his first book, Common Ground, in 2007 and had raved about it. 

I hadn’t written anything about Of Earth, though.  After looking at “12” repeatedly without knowing what to say about it, I can guess why I didn’t write about it when I finished the book.  That’s not too surprising because writing is much harder than reading. I have many books I’ve finished reading on my Kindle that I keep thinking I should write about, but haven’t been motivated enough to do so ( or, increasingly,  haven’t been able to figure out what I want to say about them). Writer’s block is a bitch.  

I liked Daniel’s Of Earth almost as much as I liked Common Ground, probably because we have many common interests. I’ve spent so much time recently reading Chinese and Japanese literature recently that I was pleased that Daniel used an Ens? to delineate different works. 

ChatGPT describes an Ens? as a 

single brushstroke circle from Zen tradition that embodies emptiness, wholeness, and presence. It captures the very essence of Taoist wu wei and the still strength that “holds others steady.” While it comes from Zen Buddhism, its spirit aligns beautifully with Taoist thought:

• It’s open or closed, like the yin-yang turning.

• It’s effortless, like the Tao’s silent work.

• It contains all things by containing nothing.

In his preface, Daniel notes that death and Nature are two of his major poetic themes, both of which appear in “The Unseen,” a sequence of twelve short poems ending with:  

12

If the way is anywhere, it's here 
in the dodge and mingle of mustard flowers 
flattening as the wind comes on, 
in the blue eucalyptus swirling wild 
with a shimmer of water-sound, 
and even in the stiff oak limbs 
that stir as if remembering just now 
what motion is. It doesn't seem 
so difficult, this fluid aimlessness, 
this ease with which things bend 
as they hold firm — what flows in trees 
and ripples silvery through the grass
is loosening my fearbound spirit. 
that thinking tried and tried to free. 
If I can learn this limbering, 
if I can dance this Earthly dance 
like all things touched by wind, 
when the hour comes I might be ready 
to swirl loose from all I know.

I’ve found my way, and I’ve been “here.” When Bill and I used to hike regularly, pushing to reach as high as we could go in a day, we would often eat lunch while philosophizing about Life, Death, and Nature at the turnaround. What better subject when standing on the top of Angel’s Rest overlooking the whole Columbia River to the east and Portland to the west?

Hiking has always been my preferred escape from the problems that tended to overwhelm me at home or at work. There is a “fluid aimlessness” in hiking through a forest or up a mountain that makes me forget my problems.   

Though I haven’t spent much time thinking about Death, I know enough about thinking that I’m sure it doesn’t do much to free a “fearbound” spirit. 

Strangely enough, I recently bought Bruce Cockburn’s album O Sun O Moon and thought that the song “Colin Went Down to the Water” did a better job of explaining this poem than I could.  

The whole song seems to capture the mood of Daniel’s poem, but the lines 

Colin went down to the water
Bound for the infinite, finally unbound
Freed in the spirit, a way forward found
Into the current, no slowing down

seem particularly apt.