Sunshine, Sunshine

Whither the sun, its charms an elixir.  I can't remember who wrote that but today is was on display in Sitka, AK:  a full grown man with a nice sized pot belly skate boarding down the middle of the main street of town, taking sweeping turns across both lanes with a police car behind him, kicking his board up in front of the bar and walking in with a tip of his hat as if the cop were valet parking his rig... and the cop drives on without incident.  Men who drink to excess as their occupation down on a small beach near the science center with their pants rolled up and enjoying their drinks like proper picnickers in the sunshine.  Men and women with shorts and tank tops on, exposing skin that hasn't seen sun for probably ten months, now turning a shocking pink in some cases and in others a fine haze of red on of their brown skin.  Smiles on faces that haven't smiled in months. Even the drunks in the darkest bars have sunburns.  

A lovely mania comes with spring in Alaska.  At the Public Defender we will still have our share of crimes.  People will overdo.  Reckless people will be reckless.  But still, spring crimes usually have a different feel to them.  More outward and exuberant.  I saw and old friend walk out of the bar today and he was a bit unsteady, but he had a swagger and a bounce in his step, squared, shoulders like a boxer coming out of his corner and a slight bounce, even though he was having a hard time keeping his balance.  He had a fresh burn on his skin.  He looked like he had just finished winter King fishing, He had money in his pocket.  He had been drinking most of the night before and the day.  He had friends in town.  It was sunny and he could lay down to sleep almost anywhere and he would wake up in a lucky, beautiful world.    No one should argue with a man in such a mood, for such a man believes himself to be invincible, and at that moment he is. 

Such is the effect of sunshine in the spring.  Just as strong as the light gloss of a suntan on a small child after a winter of sniffles and colds of staying inside a trailer house watching cartoons.  Today her mom takes her to the beach and strips her diapers off and lets her walk for the first time naked in the sand,   Her sensitive skin exposed for the very first time to the sun.  The baby laughs and dabbles in the water and screams and laughs and pulls away and slaps at the strangeness of it all: through her mothers eyes she sees a world so new and vast and beautiful it almost makes it worth considering staying on in this town another year.   

And when we go to bed tonight we'll all feel the touch of heat the sun left on our skin and we'll wonder if, in this wet country, sunshine should be what we are baptized in.  

 

Spring day, mow the lawn

the dandelions won't mind

they will multiply!

 

JHS--Sitka, AK

Coming to Juneau April 26, and Ketchikan on the 28th

Looking forward to another book trip, and particularly looking forward to reading in the public libraries of Juneau and Ketchikan.  I love it that the great independent bookstores in each town will be selling books after each reading.  It should be a wonderful time.  I hope to see all my friends who can make it out in Juneau on Saturday night and Ketchikan on Monday.  In Juneau contact 49 writers if you are interested in the workshops I'll be teaching.

 

Watershed occasion this week for Jan and me; Finn Straley landed his first permanent job that he both likes and he is suited for.  A full time job that he can survive on, this is a big deal for a parent, particularly for the parent of a young man who is artistically inclined in this day and age.  

 

I was way more emotional when I got his text saying "I got the job" than I was at his college graduation.  This means he really is capable of taking care of himself.  My faith is confirmed.  It took me back to that first moment I held him in my arms and that paniciy  ice water ran through my veins...."my God he is so small and helpless...I have no business being a father... when is a real adult going to come and take over?"   Jan was way more confident.  She always was.  Even when Finn decided he was going to be a stand up comedian.... My Lord.  But we could not scold him. We had always done exactly what we wanted to do.  We always only did what we were passionate about.  Me... a poet, private investigator, novelist?  Are you kidding, who was I to lecture about security.  Jan as well, she was always an independent researcher who chose the field work and soft money over the security of tenure and the degree track.  She chose to be with the animals rather than in the lab during her building years.  We did what we loved and so has he.   

But it feels good... he's got a job working with another comic doing creative work he is suited for and he still does three or for stand up shows a night, he puts in his time... doing what he loves, building his chops.  

 

My last blog entry I was pulling out of a low period and I was wondering what my writing stood for... and this week I have been thinking about it.  Mostly I think it can be deadly if you over think it... or more accurately if you force this type of concern into the creation of a kind of credo.  I think of the lesson Finn has taught me.  Last time he was home he told me what he  thinks about before he goes on stage,  "I've worried and I've practiced... but in the end I just remember to look them in the eye and tell the truth.  Louie C.K. wrote that."  

Yep.  That's about it.  Or at least that's enough for now,  "just look them in the eye and tell the truth."

 

 

       NO SMARTER THAN BEFORE              

 

Two weeks ago a young girl I know

was flown off the island

after a horse threw her to the ground 

and the doctors didn’t know

how badly her brain was injured.

 

 The foolish old man that I am

had a headache in one particular spot in

my head so painful and hot that it closed my eyes

against my will and I thought I would die.

 

When I was better

I felt I had learned something

and I tried to summarize what it was: 

 

“There is a red chair 

laying sideways  

in a rocky field

and the sorrel pony 

rattles an iron bit in her mouth

as the plane lifts off in the rain.”

                                John Straley, Sitka Alaska 

Missing in Action

 “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”--- The opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

 

I was gone for a bit; nothing interesting, a cold, work, a bout of depression and I'm back.  Depression is, for me is like the psychological flu that comes around on a schedule.  It can be bad or worse and this bout was not so bad, but it is always uninteresting.

Today, as many people have been, I've been thinking of the passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great Colombian journalist and novelist.  There are many terrific things written about him since his death, and I have no great insights into his career or his body of work.  I always thought the first sentence of One Hundred Years Of Solitude was one of  the best opening lines of any novel.  How could a person read that sentence and not continue reading?

Greatness of a writer, I think is a collaboration of the writer and their times.  That is, the work finds a usefulness in the world and GGM's work found a use.  It seemed to help define a cultural imagination and an identity.  He didn't do this all on his own, it was a job that needed doing before he came along whether he knew it or not.  There was a culture of course, and there was imagination, but he gathered it together in narratives that captured the current conflicts and dramas and he gave dignity to the characters.

It really is a kind of miracle how a writer does this and avoids the pitfalls that surround the storyteller on all sides.  Particularly the storyteller with political skin in the game as GGM did.  He was a radical leftist  and yet he mostly avoided both narcissism and sanctimony, which, again I believe, drags down much contemporary political writing today.  Of course, the Latin American tradition in literature is influenced by indiginous and hybrid religious culture which have both a great respect for metaphor and a high tolerance for rational contradiction.  This is the fertile ground for writers like Isabelle Allende, Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Alfredo Vea Jr. who could/ can impart important contemporary commentary in their storytelling without sacrificing wit, passion, or the dream world of our souls.

Anyway... there are better writers writing about him... I've been thinking that, these writers stood for/ stand something. and I ask myself what do I stand for? What does my writing stand for?  This is what just thinking about great writers does.

 

Good Friday, light rain

and the sun breaks through the clouds

like a promise kept. 

 

jhs-- Sitka, AK 

 

Angoon

Snowing here today. Old, old, totems with moss growing off the top.  Clan poles for each of the houses.  Shark, Bear, Salmon, Killerwhale, Raven,  I walked around to all my interviews. Years ago I learned to take my time.  There was a woman I admired a great deal.  I still do.  She is the current Writer Laureate of the State of Alaska. Nora Marks Dauenhaurer. She is a linguist and a poet, a very dignified woman and a powerful intellectual.  I used to feel tongue-tied around her.  Whatever I said felt wrong and I'd tried to rephrase it and then that was wrong.... Augggg.  Once at a gathering, I decided to try just relaxing and not saying anything.  I sat down next to her and an agonizing ten minutes went by and not a word was said...then another ten.  Then Nora looked at a magazine on the table and it had a picture of the candidate running for president.  She said,  "What do you think of this guy?"  I said,  "I like him.  I think I'm going to vote for him."  She said, "Me too."  Then another ten minutes.  Silence.  And another fifteen.  I started to sweat.  Pretty soon she put her hand on my knee and moved to get up and she looked me in the eye and said,  "John, it was good talking to you," and left.  

What did I learn?  Absolutely nothing...except that she seemed happy, and more comfortable when I kept my mouth shut.  

Now I try and allot more time for interviews than I used to.  When I go to someone's house I try and sit if I can and if people will have me I just listen to whatever they want to say, without my tape recorder running.  I just sit and listen and say enough to let them know I'm interested.  Because I am.  I say,   "No way!"  "You are kidding me!"  "That's kind of like that in Sitka but in Sitka they...."   I watch their babies, and squeak their heads, and I just listen.... Women mostly....  I don't sit and talk with Native people who are drinking alcohol because it almost always gets ugly...  I've been in too many situations where racial tensions come to the surface easily and fights want to happen, guns want to come out, or knives. It's not usually personal...well it is but it doesn't matter...the information isn't worth much and I can't be where new crimes start,  I'm investigating old crimes.

But in late morning when the babies are fed and dressed.  Men come by selling fry bread...or with smoked fish for their Aunties.  It can be a delightful time to sit and listen.  People joke about "Indian Time" how Indians are always late...but you see it in white subsistence communities too.  You get on a different clock.  The house I sat in today was crowded with stuff,  toys and cooking tools, religious icons, then there are people coming in and out,  grabbing food out of the refrigerator.  The old Aunty sitting in her wheelchair presiding like a queen while a three-year-old races her trike around the kitchen table bumping into the table. The television on with only music.  The music from Frozen...is that it?  The three-year-old with no shirt on and a lioness backpack and glittery Princess slippers.  Her mother lying on the couch talking to a friend on her cell phone. The Aunty telling me about the times when she was a girl when the bears used to come right down into town and the girls could talk to the bears but the White Police Officers messed all that up with their guns by shooting at the bears.  I just listen and I don't take notes and I don't turn on my recorder.  I just watch the little girl in her Princess shoes go around and around and around the kitchen table and another uncle comes in and dishes himself some spaghetti and walks back outside with a paper plate dyed red and maybe tomorrow I'll get down to business.

Snow falls on totems.

Ravens on Satellite Dish.

I'm unstuck in time. 

jhs--Angoon 

 

Your Comments?

What?  I just discovered people were making comments!  Holy...um...Cow!  I thought they were little private notes to me...but no, they were meant to be posted.  I'm so sorry.  I'm a lunkhead.  I think they are posted now.  Thank you for taking the time to write.  Now we will all be famous to the fifteen people who read this blog...isn't that right?  That's the new Andy Warhol-ism everybody gets to be famous to fifteen people, for as long as they want? 

I'm off for a work trip to Angoon tomorrow and I will try and write a not work-related report if I can: weather, flying, general descriptions, maybe even some photos.  Angoon is pretty amazing on a lot of levels. The Salvation Army runs the Bed and Breakfast where I stay...it's the only game in town. They are damn nice folks and they make a hell of a good cookie. I'll keep you posted.

Anvils

Hard grey sky and north wind blowing. Spring wants to jump back to winter but the herring won't let it happen.  The fleet fished again today and there was some spawning out on the islands.  I haven't seen any branches come in yet but hoping they will soon. Whatever the temperature spring is here.  

Another month and another poem for the group.  Jan is headed to her doctor in Seattle. Her medication is losing its effectiveness and we don't know what the sawbones can pull out of his hat this time.  She is a beautiful soul and does not fret or worry but I am a big baby.  We used to travel through the country near the big mudslide in Washington State.  I can't imagine that kind of suffering.  I think of all the families and rescue workers down there and wish there was enough love to keep them safe from cruel and arbitrary bad news, but of course there isn't.  There is only enough love to dress the pain once it comes.  

ANVILS 

 

Down the road, curtains billow out

open windows, and the boys delivering eggs

have the collars of their coats turned up

waiting for tiny b.b.s to begin falling. 

 

I was sworn to protect her, for the rest of my life,

but this was a new kind of precipitation

we could not have expected:

nuts and bolts clattering and cracking the window casings,

yolks running yellow in the road where the boys have dropped

their cartons and run home, and the dented mailboxes are falling

over.

 

I cradle her in my arms and try to explain things

as hammers fall from the sky

whirling like scythes tearing the limbs from the trees,

and the eaves of the houses begin to shred away

 as the woodsheds become dented then tumble in,

dogs begin shrieking, scrambling under houses and digging

their way under stumps where desiccated

raccoons had gone to die.

 

Finally the anvils begin to fall,

as I’ve only imagined

they would someday.

The whomp,

whomp,

of their foot fall as the first few hit the ground scattering gravel

from the cratered ground

and the next go through the roofs

of the houses down the road, then all around

us, as we hold on to each other tighter 

and tighter, not knowing what

could be coming

next, 

or more accurately

 

not wanting to know.

                                             John Straley/ Sitka

When The Rules Get Hard: The Detective Parenting Guide

Yesterday it snowed in the morning, wet fat, postage stamp flakes, making paper mache on the porch until everything was white and then the sun melted it away. The gulls are singing their herring song and the fleet is in with all of its usual bustle.  Spring is shouldering its way into Sitka.

I suppose anyone who has raised a child to adulthood and that adult child is halfway presentable and out of prison, that parent thinks they are experts at child rearing.  Jan and I seem to have run in a crowd of great parents:  swim team parents and baseball parents,  chess team parents, they did it all. We did our share I suppose, and though we adore our son...sometimes I wonder,  I’m not sure I was really a great parent.  

First…my parents weren't all that great by modern standards.  I was horrified when I did research on FASD for my job recently, because I’m certain my mother never gave up her alcohol and cigarettes when she was pregnant with me.  She had lived through the Depression and World War II AND Prohibition,  she was not giving up cocktails for a her fifth pregnancy.  It hadn't hurt the other four.  My folks used to watch Jan and I discuss raising kids and shake their heads….“Jesus H. Christ,” my mom said a few years before she died,  “I don’t think I ever heard the word 'parenting' until you brought it up. You just feed ‘em and love ‘em and make sure they can read.  I mean really.”

I remember the first chores I had to perform were how to make a martini and how to build a fire in the fireplace. Also, my folks were sick of organizations by the time I came around.  I was told that the Boy Scouts of America were unacceptable because of the neckerchiefs and their close association with the Hitler Youth.  Neckerchiefs not Boy Scouts.  The truth was my other siblings had done scouting and my mom was done with it. So I didn’t start off with a great role model.  First, I’m not one for rules anyway.  I like discussions.  Finn Straley grew up in a swirl of language and discussions.  Of course there were rules when he was a baby…chewing…burping…peeing in the potty, that kind of thing.  But as he got older concepts got more complex.  Some things were “funny at home and not funny at school.”   It wasn’t always easy:  I remember walking downtown in Seattle where Finn’s Grandma lived and we came to a busy corner. He was a little cherub with golden curls and an impish smile.

“Remember what I told you about corners in the city?” I asked him.

He looked up at me with a furrowed brow,  “Stop, Drop, and Roll?” he said hopefully.

“No…,” I said, “Something else about coming to Seattle.”

“Don’t say ‘shit’ at Grandpa’s house, because he doesn’t think it’s funny.”

“All true, and good to remember, but corner-specific.”

He looked at me squinting as if he were trying to suck the answer right out of my brain.

“Stop…Look…and Listen,” I told him. 

“Oh Brother!” Finn said, looking exasperated and blowing air out his lips like a horse, as if there was just too much to remember in this life.

And there is, that’s the problem with rules.  Hard to remember, particularly if you have hardly ever had to walk across a busy intersection in your entire young life.  It’s way easier to remember not to say “shit” at Grandpa’s, because that’s something that could possibly happen. 

Later, Finn wasn’t all that crazy about having a father who was a private investigator as a teenager.  Whether it was true or not, Finn believed I knew what he did before he got home.  It so happened that I often did.  The police officers would sometimes call me, if they got hints of dopey teenage behavior.  Reports of car surfing or ghost riding the whip often made their way to me before Finn was off the hood of his car.  The worst for him was my punishment, which was often listening to my detailed description of cases I had worked on where young men had become quadriplegics.  

It was the Detective War stories that killed him, this really bothered the young Finn.  Every time I represented some young doofus who ended up doing something incredibly horrible that resulted in a long prison sentence it would invariably send me into a tizzy and I would rush home  to confront my otherwise perfectly angelic son.

“Hi Dad”

“Hi Buddy, How was school?”

“Good, How was work?”

“Good… except I met a kid who took too much LSD and had sex with three underage girls and now is being tried as an adult and is going to prison for seventy-five years.  Tell me that you are not doing anything, even remotely like that.”

“Good.  I’m going up to my room, until you are not crazy anymore.”

No, it was not easy being the teenage son of a private detective, and a natural-born worrier.  There is a Zen saying, “There are lots of ways to get lost in the world.”   I tried not being too hysterical as a parent.  Jan was pretty level-headed, though she did have her peculiarities, like her need to explain every biological detail in nature.  Like showing the Toddler Finn how mosquitoes suck blood from your body using a hand lens so that the little bugs grew into the size of killer pterodactyls in his mind and he ran screaming from the sound of one. 

In the end I settled on one golden rule for my parenting experience, the one inviolate principle I could find no exception to:  “Be kind to the dog and don’t do meth.” 

It really about covers it all, and I have to say so far it’s worked.  Finn Straley is a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, California, who has so far stayed out of prison and has a phobia of mosquitoes, and most of the natural world.  

 I may be a crappy parent but he is still a good man.  One could do worse for a sampler on the wall.

 Be kind to the dog and don't do meth.

 

The herring gather

on the beach outside our house.

I miss you so much. 

 

 jhs---Sitka, AK

Seth Kantner and Doing the Hard Thing

Hard rain for a few minutes and then clearing, then downpours again.  I need more words for the different types of rain. 

For Humanities 120 this week Seth Kantner called in from Kotzebue.  He's the author of Shopping for Porcupine and Ordinary Wolves.  He is a natural talking to classes with his storyteller's tone, who is comfortable around a fire or a coffee pot, or on the phone with a friend.  He is self effacing but...I've learned, partly from self reflection, that self effacement often protects a healthy ego...which is what someone needs who pushes himself.  

Though his first book was fiction, I believe Seth Kantner is a truth teller down to his bones.  He is both more empathetic and tougher than almost anyone else I've ever met, which are both good qualities for a truth teller. (I hate the term "non-fiction writer")

You might already know this from his work...but he was born in a sod igloo some two hundred river miles from Kotzebue on the south side of the Brooks Range.  His parents were back-to-the-landers and he was raised wanting more than anything to be an Inupiat hunter but he was white. His books are almost romantic parables of the boy raised in the wild, if they weren't so honest and realistic about the harshness of the conditions.  He loved  the dogs that pulled his sled, he told us but a dog's life had no real meaning or value and was sacrificed at the first hint of slowing the progress of the team.  He admired nothing more than the old Native ways, but found hard times and ugly conditions along with the friendships in the village. The gift of his writing is that he says what he encountered and he doesn't color it up to fit anyone’s mythology or fashion, often it's brutal...and ugly.

Brutal on himself: he spoke to our class about his choices and why he made them after he left his home school environment in the wild, went to college in Fairbanks and Montana then came back to live near his old homestead, in the far north.  I asked him about the "sense of place" in his own writing, and he said characteristically,  "I don't really know about literary terms.  I just know that I don't really want to write about anything other than this place.  I've been to Sitka and it's beautiful.  I've been lots of places in the world now and they are interesting but they are not my country...they are not the place I can tell stories about...or write about I guess."  

I asked him to compare himself to his old homestead and what qualities did they share, he said,  "Wow...I don't know...disorganized, windblown, maybe...open to the elements.."   

"Remote?"  I suggested. 

"Yeah"  Remote...hard to get to, I suppose."  

Later we were talking about how he was raised and his life now.  He said,  "It was interesting,  I just remember that doing almost anything was hard...." (He mentioned there were no clocks and there wasn't the usual rush or time anxiety.)  "It was hard but I liked it that way and I still do.  I like doing things absolutely the hardest way."  He told the story of asking his wife if she wanted to go camping and she said,  "Yes, I want to go camping, but I don't want it to be hard,"  and Seth thought to himself,  "Why would I want to do that? You know, do it so it’s easy."    

We agreed that writing is hard.  I say that to Jan all the time when I'm working on something. Writing is hard.  Seth said he would much rather butcher a moose than write a paragraph for one of his columns for the Anchorage paper.  I don't feel that way...I'd rather write a paragraph than skin a moose....but I'd be happy to set aside any paragraph to have some good moose meat to eat. Yet, we are both dyslexic, and writing will always be hard.  Making the transition from the music we hear in a storyteller's voice to the little black marks on the page, is tortuous... particularly in the beginning.  It's hard to understand if you don’t have your brain wired this way, but for a dyslexic to spell correctly is like a blind person pretending to see. Certain things just don’t make it from the eyes to the brain correctly: words as collections of letters, faces into our memories, sometimes.  But the upside for the weirdly wired brains is that we hear music everywhere and we can remember it.  We can even see it sometimes.  But as I said...it's hard to explain.  

Seth is an extraordinary man with all of the talents and struggles of a dyslexic writer, and maybe his books are so great just because they were so frigging hard to write.  Why would he want to do something easy?  His books have gotten a lot of attention and they deserve it.  His photographs are stunning.  

He told our class how he loved it when visitors would come by the homestead: “It would be one thing if a bear came up and licked the window but if a visitor came by THAT was exciting.”  If you ever get a chance to visit with Seth Kantner you should take it, you can hear the tone of the visitor who has come by dog team to rest his bones and laugh. 

This is an extraordinary and authentic voice.  Find it in his two books and online.  He has surprises for you and he might challenge some of your assumptions about life in the north, but nothing good is ever easy I suppose. 

 

So much rain tonight

the gutters flow black as blood

under the street lamps. 

 

jhs--Sitka, AK 

 

 

 

 

The Storm and Pattiann Rogers

Storm blowing up tonight.  I was wrong, five boats went out on opening day from Sitka when the seas were big, but the wind had not built to what they are calling for tonight.  They went out and set in the big seas and are back already.  The prices are high right now and they have caught their quota at the good price and can sit out the storm with satisfaction.

Yesterday I wrote about crime and Bukowski.  The other theme that has always animated my writing is the world on the other side of my windows.  I've loved stories about animals and adventures ever since I was a kid.  I loved Greek and Roman myths, my parents always talked about the old world and my dad read the old literature aloud to me.  To this day I love the stories of transformation from human to animal and back again. The happiest times I had working was as a young man working with horses and mules.  

I've always loved the poets who took nature as their theme. One poet I've stuck with over the years is Pattiann Rogers.  Born in the south and living in Colorado now, she has a genius for language that matches the complexity and density of experience.   She is no wide-eyed schoolgirl when it comes to nature.  Check out one her most popular poems:  

The Hummingbird: A Seduction

If I were a female hummingbird perched still
And quiet on an upper myrtle branch
In the spring afternoon and if you were a male
Alone in the whole heavens before me, having parted
Yourself, for me, from cedar top and honeysuckle stem
And earth down, your body hovering in midair
Far away from jewelweed, thistle and bee balm;

And if I watched how you fell, plummeting before me,
And how you rose again and fell, with such mastery
That I believed for a moment you were the sky
And the red-marked bird diving inside your circumference
Was just the physical revelation of the light's
Most perfect desire;

And if I saw your sweeping and sucking
Performance of swirling egg and semen in the air,
The weaving, twisting vision of red petal
And nectar and soaring rump, the rush of your wing
In its grand confusion of arcing and splitting
Created completely out of nothing just for me,

Then when you came down to me, I would call you
My own spinning bloom of ruby sage, my funneling
Storm of sunlit sperm and pollen, my only breathless
Piece of scarlet sky, and I would bless the base
Of each of your feathers and touch the tine
Of string muscles binding your wings and taste
The odor of your glistening oils and hunt
The honey in your crimson flare.
And I would take you and take you and take you
Deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted.

 

All I can say is Wowza!  Nothing Mickey Spillane ever wrote was so sexy.  Though to be fair to Mick, he never tried from the point of view of a hummingbird.  Pattiann Rogers is an extraordinary poet who is incredibly vigorous and funny.  I guess by vigorous I mean that she accepts no limitations to her imagination and to her manners.  If someone suggested that a subject or a tone was not appropriate for a poem, she would run straight toward it.  Difficult scientific concepts attract her, philosophical wit, tradition, and the avant garde attract her. She is not "correct" in any way, but is dedicated only to her delight and passion for praise, praise for the complex and and interconnected world we find before us.  One drop of her work may be an antidote to a volume of Bukowski's.  This is not to compare the two for there is no reconciling the two, that may be what I try and do in my odd crime novels.  No, Pattiann Rogers is open to the new and is as stubborn as a rusty valve.  There is nobody else like her, out there writing poetry.  

I've heard that there are a group of women who gather early in the morning once a year to roll naked in the morning dew.  Where?  I do not know.  But I like to think that their ranks are growing, and that they are is testament to this extraordinary early poem: 

 

Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew

Out among the wet grasses and wild barley-covered
Meadows, backside, frontside, through the white clover
And feather peabush, over spongy tussocks
And shaggy-mane mushrooms, the abandoned nests
Of larks and bobolinks, face to face
With vole trails, snail niches, jelly
Slug eggs; or in a stone-walled garden, level
With the stemmed bulbs of orange and scarlet tulips,
Cricket carcasses, the bent blossoms of sweet William,
Shoulder over shoulder, leg over leg, clear
To the ferny edge of the goldfish pond—some people
Believe in the rejuvenating powers of this act—naked
As a toad in the forest, belly and hips, thighs
And ankles drenched in the dew-filled gulches
Of oak leaves, in the soft fall beneath yellow birches,
All of the skin exposed directly to the killy cry
Of the kingbird, the buzzing of grasshopper sparrows,
Those calls merging with the dawn-red mists
Of crimson steeplebush, entering the bare body then
Not merely through the ears but through the skin
Of every naked person willing every event and potentiality
Of a damp transforming dawn to enter.

Lillie Langtry practiced it, when weather permitted,
Lying down naked every morning in the dew,
With all of her beauty believing the single petal
Of her white skin could absorb and assume
That radiating purity of liquid and light.
And I admit to believing myself, without question,
In the magical powers of dew on the cheeks
And breasts of Lillie Langtry believing devotedly
In the magical powers of early morning dew on the skin
Of her body lolling in purple beds of bird’s-foot violets,
Pink prairie mimosa. And I believe, without doubt,
In the mystery of the healing energy coming
From that wholehearted belief in the beneficent results
Of the good delights of the naked body rolling
And rolling through all the silked and sun-filled,
Dusky-winged, sheathed and sparkled, looped
And dizzied effluences of each dawn
Of the rolling earth.

Just consider how the mere idea of it alone
Has already caused me to sing and sing
This whole morning long.

- PATTIANN ROGERS

 

She has tons of books.  Find them and buy them.  They will change your life.  If you get a chance to hear her read do it.  Drive a couple of hours if you have to.  Take your sweetheart and get a hotel room.  It is worth it.  There is a lot more laughing at one of her readings than at a showing of American Pie III  Really there is, she is funny.  If you want to see your sweetheart blush, call out for the Hummingbird poem, and tell Pattiann that I told you to do it, and she'll get a laugh out of that.  

 

A good storm blows in.

Lanyards rattle the flag poles.

Come, let me hold you. 

 

 jhs--Sitka