A Deep River Year
April 23,  2014

Today is William Shakespeare's birthday, a date kept by convention because nobody knows exactly when he was born.    He died on April 23, too, an odd fact that I learned in high school English literature class--one of those peculiar things that takes up residence in your head even though it 's hard to work into conversations at dinner parties.   However, we should give thanks for Shakespeare, and for his signature written across all of Western culture.   He gave us the glory of words, and the glory of an imagination that captures the very essence of humanity--its heights and its depths--in poems and plays that shall endure to the end of civilization.    Today, to honor his legacy, I am going down to the steps of our Town Hall and read all 154 of his sonnets, a manageable feat compared to reading all the plays.   

Still, I hope that my voice holds out.    This body of flesh, like all humans', will give out long before the words of Shakespeare.   And here, in these sweet days of April, I want to sing a "Hey nonino" like the Bard's lover and lass walking across Spring's green fields.   Because in the passage of years, our days become all the more precious.  They are to be held, cherished, sung.   Shakespeare reminds us that soon this abounding life will fade, giving way to autumn's "bare ruined choirs" and the twilight years of "death's second self."     So, he concludes,   "This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,/    To love that well which thou must leave ere long."    And we do feel this love, and every Spring its sweetness seems to grow more strong as our time on this tender planet ticks away.

Last week I visited an elderly acquaintance whose remaining Aprils are numbered.    She greeted me with joy and a contagious laugh, and held out her aging hands to display an array of artwork on her fingernails.   "Look at my nails," she beamed.   "For Easter!"    They were pastels, green and yellow and blue, and two were decorated with rabbits.   We laughed together, glad that some joys are ageless.   There is still a fire in us, old and young.   It is sometimes banked in the corner's of our soul's hearth, coals gone cold from neglect or from the long accumulation of sorrows.   But the embers burn and wait for a breath to raise them to life.   A few daffodils may do it, or the smell of rain, or sunlight on the river, or the violets erupting in a barren meadow.   Or, who knows, love itself may yet smile  through those bare ruined choirs, fill our hearts, make us paint our nails and  read some Shakespeare on April 23.  Hey ding a ding, ding!

Easter Hands

I would hold this day,
tight in my aching grasp,
made weaker by the unfeeling years
as they wear this body toward dust.
I would hold this Spring
in Easter hands,
sink them deep into the turned earth,
run these fingers through long grass,
raise them to catch the sky,
or hold in them some wondrous seed
where life is hidden away,
a sentient spirit caught until the dark
enfolds it, and then the rain
calls it to find its morning.
I would hold today
in Easter hands,
until the bones and flesh go limp at last,
and then I would give back
the wonders that they always held,
give them again to the spring
where lovers come to drink,
give back the joy, the fire,
give back the golden blossom
of this one and treasured life.

--Timothy Haut, April 23, 2014

A Deep River Year
April 16,  2014

 
Fifty years ago one of the most powerful earthquakes in modern history caused massive destruction and loss of life in  Alaska.   It was Good Friday, and when the earth roared and rumbled, collapsing buildings and roads and sending enormous tidal waves throughout the Pacific, there were those who believed that the apocalypse had surely come.    They were reminded of another earthquake that shook the earth during a terrible crucifixion centuries ago.   Omens in the earth and sky have been forever with us.   A comet marked  the assassination of Julius Caesar and the Norman invasion of England.    A lunar eclipse presaged the fall of Constantinople.   And we still feel a primal awe in the face of these cosmic visitors, as if they say to us, “Pay attention!”

This week across North America there was a full lunar eclipse, the first of four "blood moons" that will visit us between now and September of next year.   These eclipses are called "blood moons" because the moon turns a reddish color as it passes into earth's shadow.   At least one conservative preacher is getting some publicity by calling this “tetrad of blood moons” a sign that the world as we know it is about to come to an end.   But the truth is that the world as we know it is always coming to an end.   Countries change governments and cultural norms shift as we sleep.    Technology is changing the way we live so rapidly that we can barely keep up.  Our friends and loved ones age and die, and we will, too.   Life is change. 

Today we awoke to a coating of ice on the ground, even as we went to sleep believing that another winter was over at last.   Monday  we sat outside in the April afternoon and watched a hawk circle overhead.   The forsythia thicket was chattering with sparrows as its first golden bells nodded in the breeze.   Phyllis smiled at the big maple in the front yard and said it looked like the budded tree had flowers in her hair.  Clouds drifted overhead, and suddenly a beautiful sundog glimmered through the tree branches.   This bright bit of rainbow light is a sign, too.   Like the great earthquakes, our little sundog appeared during Holy Week.  It lasted just a moment, and we were lucky to be looking up just then.     Maybe it was reminding us that something holy is going on even in the crux of change.  I believe that is always true.    Rain is coming, the sundog promises.    That is good news for the peas and lettuce newly planted in the garden.  And I think it is good news for all of us who wait expectantly for signs of a  new day.

Smile in the Sky

The world is free-falling,
broken-winged ,
flailing in a crosswind
that bends trees, shakes earth,
turns the taciturn moon to look away.
So, afraid of what we cannot see,
we hold on to little things,
pretend our permanence.
We work the morning puzzle,
take a walk, do laundry, eat an orange.
We look out the window at Spring.
Today the dog lies in the new grass,
smells the change in the air,
rolls to let the sun warm her underside,
sleeps as if all were well.
We wish it so,
feel the flame of sun in the free-fall of the world,
scatter tiny seeds into broken earth
in case the rain comes,
and look up as a ragged piece of rainbow
suddenly smiles
at the edge of this frail day.

--Timothy Haut, April 16 2014

A Deep River Year
April 9,  2014

The little wren in our back yard is singing its heart out again.   It has been a long winter, but yesterday the air was soft and the rain didn't seem to cast a pall over the day at all.  Late in the afternoon the sun smiled from the breaking clouds, and it was a time to just stand and wonder at the age-old miracle happening around us.   "Now the green blade riseth," the French carol proclaims.   And a day of Spring rain seems to green the earth right before our eyes.  Over on Elm Street, a yard is filled with blue Siberian Squill rising from the winter-weathered grass.  But there is nothing as full of Spring's joy as the song of the Carolina wren on a tender afternoon.   The bird books say that the song of this wren sounds something like "teakettle, teakettle, teakettle!"     Perhaps so.   And this seems appropriate for this little creature who inhabits the edges of a world that makes us feel like we are home at last.

We all have a place that makes our heart sing.    This morning my wife Phyllis left before dawn to visit a hospital and orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.   She has made that trip a number of times since the catastrophic earthquake there in 2010.  Back then she felt a tug at her heart to go and offer her nursing skills, mostly in community health clinics in the devastated neighborhoods where cholera was epidemic.    What she found amid the broken buildings and impossible streets was people with amazing spirit and even joy, and they have taken up residence inside of her.   These past weeks she has been collecting baby clothes, powder, diaper cream, and other supplies to distribute to new mothers who sometimes have nothing to offer their babies except love.   She may also visit the city morgue with Father Frechette of  St. Damien Hospital as he seeks to offer a dignified and loving burial to bodies that have remained there unclaimed.

On the counter in the kitchen Phyllis' datebook lay open to a page where she had stuck a small handwritten note from our granddaughter.   "Dear Mimi," it said.  "I love you so much I can't wate [sic]  to spend the night at your house."     That's how Phyllis feels about going to Haiti.  Maybe that's how that wren feels out behind the barn, singing Spring into being.  "Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle!"

Wren's Song

Over the just-turned earth,
up into the budded branches
of great trees swaying in an April breeze,
through the glass of a kitchen window
shining with afternoon light,
the song soars,
a mighty thing from a tiny heart.
It is an endless emanation of joy,
as if this melody has been bottled up
too long,
and now flows wild and free
as Spring and love,
as if the canticle itself had wings and feathers
and must take flight.
Perhaps we all are wrens,
and every sullen creature--
every humble, wintered one of us--
has something burning deep inside,
a fire, a joy, a love, a song,
and we will not live,
nor will Springtime ever fully come,
until we dare to sing.

--Timothy Haut, April 9, 2014

A Deep River Year
April 2,  2014

Last night we heard them.   In one of those marshy areas where life first rises every Spring, the peepers were singing their tiny hearts out.   Here in New England, the annual appearance of Hyla crucifer is one of the surest signs that Spring has come.   These little tree frogs climb out of the muck of their winter habitation and begin their ceremony of love.    They are hard to see, but when you find one, you will know it by the cross streaked across its back (hence the species name crucifer).    In high churches, the crucifer is the person who begins the mass by carrying the cross down the center aisle into the chancel.   In the cathedral of nature, little Hyla crucifer begins the celebration, too, carrying its cross into Spring’s moonlight while filling the night with their song.

There are other signs of Spring abounding now, too.   Monday was the last day of March, and now we are feeling April’s gentle embrace.  The pussy willows are in full tuft, soon to sport the golden pollen which will be carried away by the soft breezes of April.    There are still snowbirds around, but fewer of them.   The inexorable journey northward has begun.   The allure of this season is in my blood.  My great uncle Emil was a Midwestern bachelor farmer.  He could read a change of weather by the feel of the air and the movement of the leaves in the trees, and his garden was planted by the phases of the moon.   Peas were the first into the ground, always in the waxing moon before Easter.   I never disputed this wisdom, because he could make anything grow.   I grow a garden because of him, I think, but I make it a little simpler.   I plant peas the last day of March.

A few weeks ago the prospects of a March planting was not hopeful.   Snow covered the garden, and the sod underneath felt pretty hard.   But this is the miracle, the one that the peepers feel deep in the mud of their cold ponds.   The sun gives life, even when we don’t see that it is happening.   March 31 dawned cold and raw, and soon ice and sleet was falling upon us.   But by afternoon it was done, and the sun peered out.    At five o’clock Phyllis and I stepped into our bedraggled remnant of a garden, turned the earth and crumbled a handful to see if it was dry enough, then raked an area clear enough to press wrinkled seeds of Cascadia peas into the dirt.     I wanted to sing like a peeper.

Peepers and Peas

Such a sound!
High and shrill,
their voices fill the night,
and we pause in the darkness
surrounded by Spring,
senses keen to the scent of awakening.
We are held by this mystery,
the surge of life,
the turning of a clock
that is deep inside the world.
I gather a handful of wrinkled seeds,
press them into the moist earth
and give them to the darkness and light
with a wordless blessing,
believing that they, too,
understand the wild song of peepers
and know that something holy,
like love,
is stirring them to life.

--Timothy Haut, April 2, 2014

A Deep River Year
March 26,  2014

He leaned forward in his wheelchair, his eyes hidden behind an enormous pair of sunglasses as a protection from the bright sunlight streaming through the window.   So I could not see the grimace, or the tears, as he told me the briefest story of their life together of over sixty years.    They had met once upon a time at a silver factory where she worked, and where he drove a delivery truck.   From the first he had loved her,  had set his sights on marriage.  

On the wall was a photo of their wedding, she in her long white gown, he in a suit that seemed like an extravagance--something awkward and out of the ordinary for him.    We do things like that--the fancy clothes, the flowers--out of sheer love.   And that is what it was, all those years, Art and Jean, husband and wife.   "Wasn't she beautiful," he said.   I turned to see her twisted on an institutional bed, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open, trying to die.     She could not answer now, could not tell her version of the story of this life.   "Yesterday," he said, "I woke up in the night because I heard her calling me:  Artie!  Artie!"   The nurse’s aide had come to him, helped him up from the wheelchair, held him by the waist as he leaned as far over the bed as he could reach--far enough to press his lips on hers, to answer her cry in the night with one last kiss.

Before I left Art there, in the room beside his dying wife, he shared a last confession.   "You know she was married before-- when she was very young.   He went over to fight in the war, and died in the Battle of the Bulge.  She never saw him again."   He paused, swallowed hard.   "And now she'll be back with him."    I took his hand, and we sat in silence for a moment, balancing in the space between us the weight of sixty years as a fragile treasure.

Holy Ground

We should not see some things, perhaps:
the stranger's tears that flow 
in some unguarded moment
when joy or loss or hurt
tears open the silent heart;
the most private touch
of hand to face of lovers
in their delicious, tender darkness;
a mother grasping  a child
in their first or last parting.
These things happen on holy ground,
bidding us to silence, or awe.
So when this once most eager groom
bends to kiss
this aged, broken bride--
still in his fading eyes
the most beautiful of mortal souls--
I turn away.
And this I know:
If she should die
in this one moment,
it would be love itself that wraps
them both around,
filling this antiseptic room
with some wild incense--hyacinth or sweetest rose--
and I would have to bend in reverence,
remove my shoes,
and thank the sun and stars
that this old world may wear us down
and tear our hearts apart,
yet  also give us this.

--Timothy Haut, March 26, 2014

A Deep River Year
March 19, 2014

Today is St. Joseph’s Day,  most notably the time when the swallows return to the old mission in San Juan Capistrano, California.   But I remember this day every year for another reason.     It is Irene’s birthday.   For many years she and her husband operated the little bakery on Main Street, getting up in the dark of the night to make the breads, cakes and rolls that would fill the glass cases and welcome morning visitors.   The cinnamon buns were my favorite, and maybe the dark, sweet squaw bread for which they were famous.   But the real joy was Irene’s welcome, in her strong German accent, as she offered a “Good morning, sweetheart!” or “How are you, darling?” as I walked through the door, then slipped an extra roll into the bag.  March 19 was Irene’s birthday, and every year I would bring her a bouquet of daffodils to thank her for being a gracious part of my life.

The bakery has been gone for many years.   But March 19 still pops up in my mental calendar:  Irene’s birthday.    The year unravels that way.  Not just a succession of numerical dates, but a tapestry of memories that mark the important moments of our lives.    For me, this week not only significant for Irene’s birthday.  Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, was the anniversary of the day that our son suffered a severe brain injury that left him hospitalized and recovering for over a year.   Thursday is the Spring Equinox, when I look forward to having flats of seeds sprouting in anticipation of this summer’s garden.      Friday is the annual Volunteer Fire Department banquet, on a night which sometimes ends with the joyful nighttime song of the spring peepers.

These occasions will not be marked in newspapers or history books, but they are every bit as important to me as the headline events of our time.  They mark the people and experiences that have shaped me, the simple gifts which have given me joy, the challenges that have stretched me and helped me grow.   They make me stop in time, to remember, and to be grateful for all the holy days I celebrate.   Today I will get a bunch of daffodils, and give thanks for Irene.

St. Joseph’s Day

Today the swallows return
To the old California mission,
And  Spring will be here again.
One curious legend claims
That the birds fly thousands of miles--
All the way from Jerusalem--
Carrying twigs which can float,
So that they can perch on them
And rest during their long journey.
Perhaps we are sojourners, too,
And the twigs we carry
Are the memories
Of those who have peopled our lives,
And the dark and sweet passages
That have sustained us on the way.
I gather a bunch of bright daffodils
To remember this day,
To honor one good and shining face
Who smiles in my gallery of grace
As spring comes again.

--Timothy Haut, March 19, 2014

A Deep River Year
March 12, 2014

 Walking through the center of town early this morning, I barely noticed them at first. There were blackbirds high up in the trees, flapping their wings and moving from branch to branch in the gathering daylight. Ten minutes later and a few blocks away, they were still up above me. I once knew a man who believed that a flock of crows followed him around, even as he moved from place to place, city to city. There is either a certain aura of paranoia about the suspicion that we are being followed--or an overdeveloped sense of our importance in the cosmic order that makes us think that even the birds are interested in what we are doing.

 When I got home, I was settled in to reading the morning paper and having my coffee when my wife, Phyllis, called me to the back door. She smiled as we stepped outside, and pointed to the tall maple in the side yard, where a large cloud of male red-wing blackbirds had taken roost, their spring song filling the morning. They were back! The red-wings’ arrival is one of the surest signs of the changing season, their unmistakable trill and distinctive “conk-a-reeeee” proclaiming, “It’s Spring!” Soon the females will arrive, too, and the marshes will be busy with nesting.

 The hills and yards are still a mess of gritty snow, but for now, I have my oracle. Today or tomorrow I will take a walk through the mushy snow that fills the woods, and I will hunt for the first striped points of skunk cabbage rising from the mud. I may find, along the way, a few snowdrops taking the sun in a sheltered place, or see an early bee hungry for a crocus. I even will be glad if a few blackbirds are interested enough to follow me.

Signs

 You have to know
 What to look for.
 Spring is not first announced
 By waves of daffodils
 Or the eruption of blossoms
 On the wild forsythia.
 Go among the sodden leaves,
 And look for a stretch of mud
 Where a skunk cabbage peeks out,
 Oblivious of cold,
 Or watch for a haze of red
 On the face of a distant hill,
 Or notice a sealed willow bud
 Split into a silver smile,
 Or listen for a song in the morning
 As a dark visitor flashes its wings
 In flight,
 A crimson badge of joy.

 --Timothy Haut, March 12, 2014