Squirrels

Squirrels chewed a hole in the wall of my brother’s room: the east wall, right next to the bed. After years of hearing them scurrying around in the attic, and of thinking their actions harmless, these cousins of rats found a way into the wall, and shortly thereafter, a way out. My father put poison by the hole, and in a few days the box was empty and the squirrels —we hoped —had disappeared back into the wall, back up to the attic and maybe even out of the house where they could die without raising too much of a stink.

Josh, my brother, was not home for this. If he had been, it wouldn’t have bothered him, he says. He would have slept next to the hole, as if to prove something. As it was, he was the one to point out that no one had actually seen any squirrels in the house. “I bet you you’ve been fooled all along,” he said. “I bet you they were rats.” Josh was in school, several miles away.

But the squirrels, or whatever they were, finally busted in. Just a crack was all they needed to get started, and in no time —one, two days —they had a hole big enough to caravan a whole family through. We had heard them scuttling behind the plaster for at least as long as we’ve owned this house —fourteen years that would be, which in squirrel generations is practically forever. Then, suddenly, they were in and out of the room. Dad put some D-Con by their new doorway, and they ate that up and started chewing on the cardboard box. And the hole in the wall got bigger. “But D-Con,” explained Dad, “will eventually make them go off and die somewhere. “Won’t they start smelling?” I asked. “No,” said Dad. “They just go off somewhere.”

Next the birds found their way in. They must have had to go through the squirrel tunnel to get to the hole, which doesn’t seem like a birdlike thing to do, but anyway they did it. Mom opened up the door one day and literally scared the shit out of them, two big crows. She was pretty scared too, but the birds were going nuts, banging themselves against the windows and flying all around the room like the floor was on fire. Mom tried to gather up courage to walk across the room to open the window, but the birds didn’t want to allow her; apparently changing their birdish minds, they started getting defensive about their new home. So Mom closed the door and hoped that maybe the dummies would somehow rediscover that gaping squirrel portal and go back the way they came in.

The doctor, meanwhile, said that you now had a hole in your head, but that you’d be fine. But he apparently decided not to tell you that they’d have to keep waking you up every hour, all night long, to test your neurological functions. Maybe that’s why they didn’t mind opening your door for me at 11:30 in the evening. “This is against hospital rules, you know,” they said to me, but they didn’t seem to be listening to themselves.

Mom told me about the crows, so I went upstairs and opened the door to your room. Nothing was happening —one bird was awake but had retreated, apparently worn out, to a corner. I opened a window and it took about a second to shoo that bird out. The other bird —“I think it was a baby,” Mom said —was nowhere to be found. I suppose we’ll run across it someday, dead in some cranny and rotting away. Or maybe it found its way back out through the hole.

And look at you, brother, lying there like nothing happened. No, you’re tickled over the whole experience. “I just had brain surgery,” you brag with a dull smile.

You had promised, before you went in, that you would wake up five hours after surgery, in order to not miss any of your college’s televised football game, and now here you are. “How are you feeling?” I ask. “The pain’s bearable,” you say. “Aw, look, they’re three points behind. If I’d only have been there, cheering the defense just a little louder!” 


from March to December; photo (Squirrel in the dark, 2005) not previously published

Before Brain Surgery

The hairy brother said,

“They’re gonna shave my head

and have a look inside.”

His little sister cried:

“But you’re not gonna die,

are you?” Her giant tears

fell full of lonely fears.

“No, I’m not gonna die,”

big brother smiled. “Hey,

what’s with you anyway?

It’s just brain surgery!

—So don’t give up on me.”

“You’re gonna be okay?” 

she asked, with one more tear.

And brother said, “Come here,

I’m gonna be fine.”


from March to December; photo (Cache River, 2006) not previously published

Journal - Middle of March, Continued

A thousand warbling echoes
have started to life
within me, never to die...
                -- Walt Whitman




March 17

Saturday. I am at the hospital from 11:00 to 6:30. There are lots of visitors. Josh insists he is not overwhelmed. I am. I am testy, with Parul especially. But later, at home, on the phone, I tell her that I need her. I have called her after a wrenching cry. “Josh is going to be okay, one way or another,” I keep saying —but what about me? Parul helps me, reassures me. Later, I’m saying it again: “Josh is going to be okay, one way or another,” and I say this to Anneliese. And she cries.

March 18

Sunday. Parul and I visit Josh after church, at 10:30. I promise to pace myself so that I won’t be overwhelmed. But I want to be with Josh, because he’s said he doesn’t want to be alone. Ha! There was never less than three people in the room all day, and often more than five. Good! Good for Josh, and for his spirits. And they are rubbing off on all of us. He is able to walk around now, and the IV is no longer needed.

March 19

We still don’t know what is in Josh’s head. There is a spot, 1.69 centimeters in diameter, on the CAT-scan, but it could still be a blood clot or an aneurism (are they the same thing?). We will know more this afternoon. First, Josh is put through one more test: a cerebral angiogram, in which a catheter is inserted into an artery at his groin and pushed up to his neck, where it releases a dye into his head. Josh will have to keep flat again for eight more hours, from 10:00 am when the test was administered. At 3:30, Dr. Raj comes in with his reports. It is a tumor, at the stem of Josh’s brain, a position more commonly seen in younger children. Dr. Raj describes a biopsy procedure, but says the risk —of brain damage, primarily —outweighs the advantage of knowing malignancy or benignity. Instead we can find out what we are dealing with —there are four kinds of tumors, or “nomas” —by how easily it is removed. There is radiation, with 3,000 rads, which can wipe out the simplest benign tumor. A higher dosage will eradicate a more complex tumor. Surgery is possible, but this presents the most risk. And finally there is a new procedure, only done in three facilities nationwide, called a “gamma knife.”  We will learn more in the days and consultations to follow.

It was scary hearing all this, and especially hearing no certain solution nor even a specific problem. And everyone seems to have heard different things. Most optimistically, Don concludes that the tumor is simply not malignant. Perhaps I am the most pessimistic, although I believe I am being objective. At any rate, we must all continue to pray. And we will watch to see whether Josh’s spirits need our help for a change.

from March to December; photo (Muddy River, 2007) not previously published

To Be Or Not To Be

Dead River, Early Spring

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 
(TWL) (1922), Epigraph






          "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in
          ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σἰβυλλα τἱ
          θἐλεις ; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεἰν θἑλω.”

                    See Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, 48 (ca. AD 50, tr. Michael Heseltine
                    1913):

                    TRIMALCHIO

                    Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; 
                    and when the boys cried at her: “Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?” 
                    “I would that I were dead,” she used to answer.” 

                    Apollo had granted the Sibyl a wish in exchange for her virginity; she asked for
                    eternal life but in time she shriveled up, having forgotten to ask for eternal
                    youth: See Ovid, Metamorphoses 14:122-133 (AD 8; tr. John
                    Dryden, Samuel Garth, Alexander Pope et al, 1717):

                    I am no deity, reply'd the dame,
                    But mortal, and religious rites disclaim.
                    Yet had avoided death's tyrannick sway,
                    Had I consented to the God of day.
                    With promises he sought my love, and said,
                    Have all you wish, my fair Cumaean maid.
                    I paus'd; then pointing to a heap of sand,
                    For ev'ry grain, to live a year, demand.
                    But ah! unmindful of th' effect of time,
                    Forgot to covenant for youth, and prime.
                    The smiling bloom, I boasted once, is gone,
                    And feeble age with lagging limbs creeps on.

                    The Sybil also appears in Virgil, Aeneid 6 (19 BC; tr. John Dryden
                    1697). Aeneas, in search of a new home after leaving his destroyed city of Troy,
                    encounters the Sybil at Cumae. The Sybil agrees to act as his escort into hell, 
                    where he hopes to find the ghost of his father, but to enter hell, Aeneas first must 
                    give Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, the bough of a golden tree that 
                    replenishes itself as branches are taken from it. Compare Virgil escorting the poet 
                    through hell in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno (ca. 1321); and 
                    also Hamlet’s meetings with his father’s ghost in William Shakespeare, 
                    Hamlet (1605).  This “sylvan scene” (see TWL 98) also alludes to Satan’s 
                    description of Eden in John Milton, Paradise Lost 4:140 (1667).  

                    Aeneas seeks to comprehend his escort's words at Aeneid 6.116-119: 

                    ...Commit not thy prophetic mind
                    To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind,
                    Lest they disperse in air our empty fate;
                    Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate."

                    ETERNITY, or the thought of never dying, is abhorrent to the Sybil, and her
                    sentiment of a living hell also resonates in an alternative epitaph Eliot had once 
                    considered from Kurtz’s dying words in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 
                    (1902):

                    The horror! The horror!

                    But just as Marlow called Kurtz’s cry a moral victory, Eliot, even as he relates the 
                    Sybil’s wish to be dead, appears to be actively yearning for something beyond the
                    metaphorical grave. See Eliot, East Coker (1940) and Eliot, Little Gidding 
                    (1942) for the poet’s eventual appreciation of a “new start.” More immediately, see 
                    the beginning of this poem for the first of several allusions to the story of Lazarus  
                    being raised from the dead and given a more positive promise of eternal life.


passage and photo from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

Journal - Middle of March, 1990

you shall above all 
things be glad and 
young
   -- e.e. cummings




March 14

Josh is back up. Says he has had a CAT-scan in the morning after more symptoms of double vision, and has come to Chicago at the urging of the doctors in Champaign. He looks very glary-eyed. We bring him to the hospital at 9:00 pm. After about an hour in the emergency room —relatively un-tense! —we meet Dr. Raj, who suggests (strongly) that Josh be checked in that evening. He is left there in the emergency room, and we all go home. (“We” being Mom, Parul, Josh’s friends John Valusas, Dave ____ and Keith ____, and me, with a visit from Pastor Gimmi; Don is home with Annie). 

March 15

Josh has an MRI exam in the morning, and Dr. Raj proceeds in the evening with a neural operation, placing a permanent shunt from Josh’s brain to his abdominal area. He has one fourth of his head shaved and he has holes in his head and in his abdomen. The operation is done in an hour and a quarter, and Josh wakes up in intensive care with an IV in his arm —standard fare for brain surgery; this one went very smoothly. I am at work during the operation, but I somehow manage to get in to see him at 10:30 pm —only three hours afterwards. Josh is awake, watching a basketball game.

March 16

Josh must pee in a cup and stay in bed, and he doesn’t have much of an appetite. He will have to sleep at a forty five degree angle. But his spirits, despite the inconvenience, are high. I finally reach Aunt Grace and Uncle Willard and tell them the news.  I call Josh at the hospital to inform him of this. It is 8:15 pm, and he sounds very groggy. That's natural — but it disturbs me.

from March to December; photo (Muddy River, 2007) not previously published

A Call To Cheer

I'd rather learn from 
    one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand 
    stars how not to dance.

        — e. e. cummings



Dad was a Card fan raised by radio:
No matter who was playing he wore red
And fondly reminisced of Stan the Man,
Jack Buck and Harry Caray on the air,

The classic steal of Brock for Broglio—
As home teams changed still Dad was born and bred
To tune each game in from a distant stand
And cheer the Redbirds on, no matter where.

I’ve been a Cub fan all my life, by Joe,
Been cut so many times and always bled
A shade of blue that’s hard to understand
Unless you’ve lived and breathed the Wrigley air

Where “Let’s play two” means never let it go
And keep on root, root, rooting them ahead
Until they win the big one.  That’s the plan,
No matter when it happens.  I’ll be there.

Mid-March is when I miss him most, you know:
As winter melts away, thoughts fill my head
Of spring and what it means to be a fan
With songs of resurrection everywhere.

Young cubs shake off their sleep and start to play,
Seeing the fields turn greener every day
And hearing the cardinals’ call to cheer, cheer, cheer;
And from a distant stand, my dad is here.


poem and photo from Thirty Birds

Moleskin 2.2

From day one, perhaps in the first moments after birth, I was given a name that I was regularly, determinedly called: Jonathan Andrew Vold.  The family name, from my father’s side, was taken from Lake Lisavold southwest of Trondheim, Norway, assumed by my grandfather John O. Vold. He decided propitiously, coming here alone at a relatively young age, that he would leave his family name, Slupphaug, behind. The middle name, from my mother’s side, was the common name of my mother’s maternal grandfather Andrias Loftness, the youngest of my great great grandfather Gregorius’s twelve children and the only one born in America. The first name, Jonathan, means gift from God, probably preconceived but fitting to how the doctor was able to unwrap the umbilical cord from around my neck in those first seconds of life. Or so I am told.

Generations, Continued

So now I am a father.
The generation behind me is
fading and a newer generation
is overshadowing mine.  They,
my son and my daughter, will say
that mine is the generation  fading fast,
that my parents, my living mother
and the memory of my father, are simply
extensions of the same generation:
we are the old, they are the now;
our light fades, theirs is just starting
to shine brightly.

And now I am a father,
repeating myself it seems, falling
into old habits.  I am the one
who will soon, sooner than anyone
expects, become a memory.  I am
the one, too, who will suffer
the indignities of aging:
if not a slow death, at least
the mirror of mortality, and if not
a drawn out suffering, still
they will see me fade.  And I will be
the one who, all too soon, will meet their
mates and bless their marriages and
watch them, oh so quickly, begin
yet another generation.  I will remain
the old, but they will relinquish
their position as the new and they
will join me as a watchful generation,
slowly fading.

I won’t say I can’t wait,
because I’d rather they stay
the now generation for as
long as they can.  My daughter,
age fourteen, gets her driver’s permit
next year already, and I will come to
terms with that —but not so quickly,
no more, let her stay a little girl
who happens to know how to drive.
And my son, age eleven, is starting
to notice the girls his age, and I can
accept that too — but stay there, son,
go no farther for a while.  Be the
now generation for as long as you can,
yet be aware that infatuation will
only lead to your fading, and as for
cars, daughter, they will get you
nowhere.  Look at me, see
for yourselves.

But of course neither son nor
daughter can see me as anything
but a father.  I have always been
a part of their world but never
a part of their now.  And I can
accept this too.  Just let me remain,
as I should be when they are
eleven and fourteen, still being aware,
to some degree anyway, of their now.
And let them see me, as they should
at their ages, as something of
a constant; it is not yet time for me
to fade.


from Turning the Metaphor; photo (K & A at Old School, 2005) not previously published

Skinny

“Your boy,” they said, “is skinny like your dad.”
I nodded and considered images
Of my old man from twenty years ago
When he was my age.  Now I’m his,
And here’s this boy mixed up in time with me,
Skinny as a ghost resurrected
Making someone think of someone he
Had never known.  “Like who?” he asked,
“Who am I like?”  And everybody smiled
And started telling stories of a man
Who used to be.  “But not like me,” I said,
“Skinny skipped a generation,”
Leaving me with all these memories
Of looking at a man as old as the hills
And this reality: my little boy
As young as I had ever been,
Now looking up at me with skinny eyes.


from Calendrums; photo (Andrew in Lake Forest, 2005) not previously published

Generations, Part 1

I saw myself today.
Not a mirror image of who I am,
not the left to my right,
nothing so ordinary as that.
I saw a spitting image, a living clone,
a reflection refusing to face me,
my likeness walking away.
I saw this from a distance of many years,
but there I was.


“Hey,” I cried, hoping to connect,
but I did not turn around,
and I saw myself pretending not to hear.
“Hey, listen!” I tried again,
but I know it was pointless:
I am, after all, a stubborn man;
but I am a persistent man, too.
I always have been.
I continued: “Listen to me!”
And I continued, not saying a word.

I’d like to think the years have given me
an advantage, that time is good for something,
wisdom, maybe, or experience.
But as I started chasing after myself
—“Hey! Don’t walk away from me!”—
I realized I was not as fast as I used to be.
The years have aged me and slowed me down.
I do not have the energy I used to have.
I am no longer eleven years old,
nor twenty one, nor thirty one.

I am an age I never thought I would be
seeing myself now as I had forgotten I once was.

Once more I shouted: “Hey!  Wait!”
But my image, my clone, my self
was even further away now, and where
for a moment my image would not listen,
now it could not hear.
There was no longer a refusal to turn around;
there was no reason.
Oh, stubborn boy, persistent man!
You who will not listen to the voice of experience,
the wisdom of years,
you who will outpace the ages,
give me time!  Hear my call!
But of course, not only could I not hear myself,
I never saw myself: my back was turned;
there was no recognition the other way.

I am not who I used to be,
but more than this: I was not yet
who I have become: I could not see,
and it was impossible to see myself
in that old man calling out to me,
and I did not hear, or if I heard,
it made no particular impression.
And yet today, the other way,
the impression is indelible.
There I was!
That was me!
If only I could have seen myself
looking back at me.
If only I could hear myself
calling desperately.


from Turning the Metaphor; photo (Canada Geese at Morraine Hills, 2006) not previously published

Sunday's Coming

Old man barely middle aged
Once predicted his demise
Or at least the timing.  Time
Flies.  I’m feeling parsley saged
Afraid of death and otherwise
Out of breath with hills to climb
Over of my own, the time
Ominously rising.  Old
Man said No to nursing homes
Or planning for retirement
Often said Don’t worry Son
I’ll work until my day is done
But home is heaven and I can’t
Wait around for it to come.

poem and photo from Calendrums

Certainty

The river is moving.  
The blackbird must be flying.

— Wallace Stevens






I
Winged creatures crash the corridors of spring And call in kin from everywhere to sing A thousand songs, all with the same refrain: “This is our season, and we shall remain.” At first their sound is harsh and yet in time They bring an easy rhythm and a rhyme To every willing ear, a melody That fills the vernal air with “Certainty!” And all the birds that follow share the sound And make their own to mark their breeding ground, Assuring anyone who comes around: “This is our world, make note of it, and let The record clearly show, let it be said That every spring begins with black and red.” II “— Let there be no doubt! This is our place and time. We have no vagaries to chase, no hills to climb, no valleys to endure, no days to dream, no nights to wonder. Here we stand, as sure as night begins the day and sunlight melts the snow, and here we stay; as sure as winter ends with spring, we take the dormant fields and sing the world awake. Tomorrow is for such wanderers and fools who set out from their churches and their schools in search of something more, but in their souls they struggle over what they want to see and what the future holds for them. But we remain, reminding them of Certainty!”


poem and photo from Thirty Birds

Mockingbird, 1990

March 2

Josh up from Champaign 

for eye exam. Says vision

is jumpy. I suggest he get

glasses that jump in reverse.

Considering his earlier

concern about dehydration,

I write this symptom off

as psychosomatic. The

doctor, as if to concur,

rates his vision as 20-20.

from March to December; photo (Dresden, 2007) not previously published

Moleskin 2.1: Birth

Birth

I was born in Southern Minnesota during the Kennedy years, son of a schoolteacher and a credit reporter, an only child for as long as I couldn’t remember. They say there is little, if anything, our memories can hold from the first four years, not counting what we acquire from photographs and anecdotes, and yet it is during these first years that we start to recognize our parents for who they are, we pattern ourselves indelibly on their examples and we learn things we never forget: to walk, to use the bathroom, to hold a conversation. I’m pretty sure I became a Democrat in these forgotten years, even if I do not have memories of Kennedy. To this day I will not hesitate to tell you where God’s country can be found, as I have been told often enough by others. And though I do not remember a day without brothers, I know there was a time when I got all of the attention.

Mimus Polyglotus

For I, that was a child, 
my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you, Now in a moment 
I know what I am for, 
I awake
— Walt Whitman

I
 
A man before a million souls to me Suggested through his sorrow he could smile Because the one he lost had taught him well Of celebrating death. How can that be? But how he didn’t say, nor did I see Immediately that within his smile He had a million tales of life to tell As one who lived to tell and told to me. A single face within a passing crowd Who sings of moonlight on a distant shore Can echo joy and pain, and in each word Can radiate a purpose and a creed. Here, then, the mourning soul with smiles to bear And hear one who recalls a mockingbird. II My father’s pastor in another time Spoke to his congregation: “Celebrate The life well lived that walks through heaven’s gate And leaves a lasting trail of footprints.” I’m Still resonating to the funeral chimes And eulogies and yet I hesitate To smile at death; I stand before a gate That begs a deeper reason for the rhyme. Prosaically: It’s hard to celebrate The end of things, and one that is no more Is nothing but a fading memory; But even here the moon and waters meet And waves give testimony to the shore, And the mockingbird begins to sing to me... III A poet in the evening of his youth Found revelations in a song he heard Along Manhattan’s autumn shores: a bird Delivering translations of the truth, Repeating what the waves had left him with Forever, what the boy had always heard But never understood, a single word Unveiled within a moonlit whisper: Death. He called it strong, delicious, steady, sweet, Superior and final, then he swore To conquer it and begged for more of it, And in its wake he knew what he was for And in its power he pledged to celebrate, To sing eternally and evermore.


poem and photo from Thirty Birds

Introduction to Mimus Polyglottus

Mimus 
Polyglottus:

The 
Northern 
Mockingbird 



is a bird that likes to hear the songs of the birds around it and celebrate them, make them a part of its own song,

much like a poet does: I learned that from Walt Whitman, through his own mockingbird poem, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, in which he realized his primal purpose as a poet was to keep alive the songs that came before him.

It's a lesson that keeps coming back to me, through poetry, through nature, and by people I pass along the way.


--not previously published; photo from Thirty Birds

March

March starts
like more of February;
they say it roars
but I just hear it groan
with the heaviness of
a tired coat of wool
felt warmer in December
when the wind
was not as sharp, the hope
not as brittle.

March middles like the winter’s edge;
they predicted
a revival, but the dawn
still casts its shadows
and the breeze still
blows the spirit out of me
and I can’t see
the daylight saved, the equinox
or whatever it is that happens
after Lent.

March is spent
on so many passing
celebrations,
like the day the city dyes
the river green
or the night they sit around
waiting for Elijah.
We speak of eggs and rabbits,
connecting symbols of a pagan life
to a feast of sacrifice,
but I will feel the March wind blowing,
stirring up the doubt

Until the wind dies down
and the spirit goes out.


from Calendrums; photo (2007, Dresden Power Plant) from Calendrums