Welcome to Day 31 of 31 Days of A Sense of Place.
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13 Ways of Looking at This Place
I.
Depths of snow,
no sound,
except the crunch of a woman walking, and a chickadee.
II.
My mind was like
three minds,
three bumblebees on an aster.
III.
A huge bumblebee blurred across the Autumn Joy.
Nothing else was noted.
IV.
A grey squirrel and a crow
Are almost one.
Two crows, and even three crows,
Are not.
V.
I’ve never known which to prefer,
The nearness of here and now,
Or the farness of there and then,
The monarch posing,
Or just after.
VI.
Ice clings to trees
On a shivering slope.
No shadow crosses.
The mood freezes in glacial air,
Months at a time.
VII.
O lovers of summer,
imagining yellow sun and birds.
See how the turkeys preen on the fence
While the woman watches?
VIII.
I know deep fog,
The unseen trees nearby.
But I know, too,
That the trees are there,
And snow is involved.
IX.
When the grasshopper perched on the buddleia,
Its red legs bent
At surprising angles.
X.
At the sight of an ebony jewelwing
On a green branch,
I gasped.
XI.
A winter’s visit
To the Maine coast:
Often, rocks and sea foam calmed her,
In that she understood their shadows
As reminders of the emanating past.
XII.
The river is swirling.
The brook trout must abide.
XIII.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
What else was new?
The blackbird rarely sat
In the white pine limbs.
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Thanks for checking in this month! And thanks to the other 31 Dayers who kept at it.
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This project is a bit like Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird, in that I’ve written about a sense of place from vantage points that may not obviously connect with each other. I haven’t attempted to tie them together. In the end, these 31 days of looking at a sense of place may overlap, contradict, form a whole, or collapse like a flan in a cupboard, as Eddie Izzard would say. Thanks for stopping by.
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