April 6: Heron in flight

I should never answer the phone when I'm working late. Just as I was leaving work I got a particularly unpleasant call, the kind that manages to depress that feeling of lightness I often get at the end of a long work day (especially now, the hours of remaining daylight still seem like such a gift). I slouched toward the car in a dour mood when I just happened to glance up. A great blue heron flapped across the still-blue sky, right over my head--the first one I've seen this year. As I drove home, my eyes followed the big bird slowly winging its way down river, then bearing east over the rocky ridge of Mount Battie. A moment resonant with ancient beauty, just when I needed it.

Watching the heron's
slow seaward flight erases
unease from my mind.

April 5: Approaching Easter

The moon ripens as we approach Easter weekend. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Interesting that such an important Christian holiday would have lunar--and thus, dare I say, pagan--origins. In fact, the very word "Easter" probably derives from the name of an ancient fertility goddess--Oestre, Astarte or Ishtar. The fertility symbolism is even more obvious when you think about the main representatives of Easter: rabbits and eggs. (I witnessed first-hand as a child, during a rabbit cage-cleaning moment gone awry, the phenomenal fecundity of rabbits.) Even the concept of the resurrected god dates back to many pre-Christian cultures with stories of Attis, Mithras, Osiris, and more. So you don't have to be Christian to fully embrace the feeling of revival in the air right now, as sap rises in the trees, leaf buds swell, the day's light lingers longer, green shafts of lily leaves re-emerge from the underground, loon returns to the river to fill the night with his stirring tremolo, and goldfinches molt into bright breeding plumage. Renewal seems possible for any of us. It's just the way we roll in spring.

Finch sprouts more yellow--
even the birds glow brighter
as Easter moon swells.

"Transportation"

NB: This blog posting is not a haiku post but a general-information-about-Kristen's-poetry post. Sorry for the interruption! If I had a website, I'd be posting this there, but I don't, so...

Transportation is the title of my book that was published in December (see my December 15, 2011 blog entry), and it's also the name of the last poem in the book. Today I had the incredible honor of hearing that poem read by Garrison Keillor on "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio. You too can hear and/or read the poem by going here. This has got to be one of the highlights of my life as a poet, and I was really feeling the love today. Thank you to all of you who sent such kind words in response to hearing my poem! It means so much to me. Poets don't usually get a lot of fuss made about their work, so this has been an amazing experience.

I've had a lot of people inquire about purchasing a copy of my book, so here's the scoop: Transportation is available for $16.00 (includes shipping in the US) directly from the publisher, Megunticook Press, otherwise known as me, at 12 Mount Battie St., Camden, ME 04843. Mail a check made out to Kristen Lindquist (that's me) and include your mailing address, and I'll send you a signed copy right away. The book is also available at The Owl & Turtle Bookstore in Camden, ME; Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, ME; the Reading Corner in Rockland, ME, and Longfellow Books in Portland, ME--please shop at our independent bookstores if you can.

Again, thank you for your interest in and support of poetry!

April 4: Red halo

Looked up in the night sky to see a big blurry red halo almost entirely encircling the waxing gibbous moon. We've been watching the HBO series, "Game of Thrones," in which a red comet appears in the sky as an omen, we're told, of dragons. What might a red halo portend? Global warming?

Fat moon, red halo.
An omen: are dragons here?
Are we due some fire?

April 3: Moon with vulture

Coming home from work early this evening, early enough that the sky was still a deep blue, I looked up to see a vulture soaring above a fat, white, gibbous moon just rising over Mount Battie. I'm not sure why the juxtaposition struck me as so remarkable, as none of the elements--mountain, vulture, moon, blue sky--were unusual in and of themselves. But taken in all together, they made me pause, breath held for just a moment, until the vulture soared upriver and out of sight.

Soaring late in day,
vulture catches up with moon.
Both crest the mountain.

April 2: Sun after a grey day

At day's end the sun finally shines, and the joy of it is that I'm able to sit out on my back step--well insulated, but outside--and write for a little while before dinner. The low light breaks through bare branches to make the river gleam like polished silver. The neighbor's dog barks her last round of the afternoon. The neighbor kids are jumping on their trampoline; I can hear their squeals and shouts. I even sneak in a few minutes of hooping on the lawn, with my shiny new hoop decorated in blue and silver tape. The cardinal cheers me on with his song of "tew, tew, tew" from somewhere near and high, and a downy woodpecker squeaks from a nearby stand of maples. 

Unexpected sun--

a few moments in the yard

are the day's highlight.

April 1: Dead blackbird

A friend tells me today how, walking on a beach in February, she and her husband came across a dead red-winged blackbird. The bird was untouched, a male, black with bright red and yellow feathers on its wings like epaulettes. He was heading north early, hoping to get to the best territory ahead of the others--but he seems to have made the journey a little too soon. He probably froze to death, dropping out of the sky from cold and exhaustion, one of the harsh statistics of migration. He may have flown all the way from South America before he landed on that beach in New Hampshire.

Some impulse made my friend want to keep the bird's body, rather than just tossing it back into the waves. So she brought it home, five hours away, and tucked it in her freezer between the peas and the shrimp. She doesn't know what to do with it now. She's not even legally supposed to have a blackbird in her freezer; the Migratory Bird Act prohibits owning even a single feather of a migratory bird, though most of us do. I think she wrote a poem about it. She might donate it to a nearby college's biology program. Or give it an elaborate burial.

No meal left for gulls,
the blackbird's body, preserved,
becomes a relic.

March 31: GPS

Driving home from Portland tonight, watching the GPS screen (I wasn't doing the driving!), it occurred to me that when you only focus on the screen, all you get are a network of lines that don't even show all the little side roads. What you don't see: the house where someone I know lives, that great restaurant we stop at sometimes, osprey nests, several fields featuring flocks of turkeys, where my grandmother's trailer used to be (now a car detailing shop), the turn-off to a good farm stand in the summer, big bare oak tree on a hillside, a trailhead to a good hike, one of Paul's favorite fishing spots, more homes of people we know, the pond where some buffleheads are still hanging out, a wetland where we heard peepers, a view of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter...

The way home reduced
to a single orange line
across a black screen.

March 30: Matched pair

A pair of geese--probably the same pair as last year--has a nest near my office. I think it's somewhere along the shore of the river near the access road to the Seabright Dam, but I haven't wanted to go seeking it out. I'm sure the constant traffic of town vehicles to access the dam, dog walkers, fishermen, and then in warmer weather, swimmers, harasses them enough. But while I've conscientiously kept my distance, I've been very aware of their renewed presence this past week. One or both of them always seem to be there, beady black eyes on the lookout, those sleek black heads and necks every so often rising like periscopes on the lookout. They probably pay as much attention to our goings-on as we do theirs. There's something I find inexplicably comforting about their presence, despite their aura of intense alertness. Perhaps grazing animals of any sort--and these big birds do seem to spend most of their time heads down, poking around in the grass--have a pastoral effect on a landscape.

Our neighbors, the geese,
keep a close watch on us all.
Eggs are so fragile.

March 29: Snow on daffodils

These early spring snowfalls can be painful, especially if you've been teased by "real" spring weather already--air like warm breath on the back of your neck that made you sweat, that whispered sweet nothings about swelling leaf buds and opening flowers. We woke this morning to more snow falling, though accumulation was minimal. They call this late snow "poor man's fertilizer," because it's supposed to somehow help the greening. Once it melts, of course. And my lawn does look like it's reviving a bit.

In our garden right now, bright green shoots of chives look positively savory. Bulbs--lilies and tulips--are sending forth an advance guard of greenery. The rosy tips of peonies are poking through the surface of the soil. And I already had to pull up some dandelions. But the view from our front step, looking up at Mount Battie, resonates with the misplaced glory of the season past: the mountain's crags and ledges frosted with snow. The white ridgeline of larger, higher Mount Megunticook, visible up the street, is even more dramatic. I feel like we're living right on the threshold between two seasons struggling for power, winter on one side and spring on the other. What makes it bearable, what makes it possible to enjoy the delicate beauty of the snowy mountains despite my longing for heat, is that I know spring will eventually win out.

Daffodils' green necks
barely bend beneath the snow.
They too wait for sun.

March 28: Snow pellets

This morning, the office phoebe returned. This afternoon, a co-worker and I were mesmerized watching as a light snowfall shifted from big loose flakes to pellets of ice that rolled off the shingled roof like thousands of tiny white marbles. This random snow shower didn't linger; no snow clings to the grass. And now it's raining. One of those raw days I'm thankful to be inside, under a solid, secure roof.

Roof over our heads
easily sheds snow pellets,
and later, the rain.