Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

Suite For the Turning Year

35 Suite for the Turning Year I Sometimes when the dogs are asleep, and the whole world seems quietly poised between green and brown, when everything is lascivious with leaves—the ground, the porch floor, the holly bushes, even a few last trees— you can see a glimpse of the way the clapboard house was set within this woods, almost see them nailing the sills under the windows and carrying in the kindling. The air sifts across your forehead, and you look up, hearing the chill jabber of the chickadees, the quick scattering of chipmunks, and in the anonymous distance, the disappearance of the sound of children or was it a car? There is no need for a letter in the mail, no thought of putting away the pots of yellowed impatiens. Just this little time and perhaps, a little more. II Feeling this way in the afternoon. Not because it’s November. The burnished landscape lends an invitation to sit, a blanket across the knees that once bent and knelt to plant a hundred bulbs, 36 pull a thousand weeds. This month’s brown cold is welcome. Within the calm, there is no guilty need to do, no frantic thought that one had better take advantage of the long day’s light. Oh, the dogs still need their walk. And there are dishes. But we can listen to the radio, can watch the slow breathing of the cats, look for this year’s yearlings as they cross the hill behind the house. Still the world must make space for us to sit, walk, sleep, give up itself to give us room. Later this afternoon, after I build a fire, we’ll pull down our book of maps, imagine our breath is giving something back, alchemizing oxygen into gratitude even though we are an inconvenience in the world. III The sun beats down somewhere else and the moon is lower than the tops of the trees. The cats come back from their prowl and curl up in front of the back door. Coming up the street, the headlights on the night shift worker’s car turn into his driveway. We can hear the refrigerator, the pump in the basement, the fan in the bedroom 37 upstairs. If there are ghosts, they have only our silence and the last of the moon’s borrowed light. IV Light lies on the oriole’s nest, fallen empty in the euonymus. Strands of lobelia hang over the edges of the chipped terra-cotta pots on the back step. There’s an old novel on the kitchen table, one cat asleep under the hanging basket. On the porch a watering can is giving in to rust. The cracked pink flamingo stands bent on its iron legs. V Two days of soft snow lie under the moon’s stolen light. It’s early winter. Now a quiet accumulation of cold comes in its slow way. I wait for stillness, its stay. Why think of winter in winter? Maybe to follow my father through the old grass into the deer’s long walk across the snow. 38 VI Sometimes when the snow is nearly deep enough to keep us home, we stay in anyway, carry in kindling, build a fire, unfold blankets, and stack the books we open now and then. Next to us we set a pot of coffee, add a log when we must. Wind passes, whirling little lifts of snow against the window. The dogs sleep as if we’re gone. Others have to leave. We know. The mail will arrive at noon, the newspaper by evening. It won’t matter as much. After sleep, there will be ashes under the grate, a little less wood to burn, more or not as much snow. We may play some Lester Young and Etta James, let his sax and her voice smolder in the coals. VII How good it is to be in here, on the couch, the dogs asleep against the pillows at the ends as if we are safe in the great Kingdom of Rain. Death with its lisping end rhymes stands under an umbrella. 39 The rain against the windows is a language, its assonance an uninvited solace. Cold will come again. We can’t move south. We have sweaters. We depend on a shovel and the neighbor’s...