Learning a Dead Language

There is nothing for you to say. You must

 Learn first to listen. Because it is dead

 It will not come to you of itself, nor would you

 Of yourself master it. You must therefore 

Learn to be still when it is imparted,

 And, though you many not yet understand, to remember.

 

 What you remember is saved. To understand

 The least thing fully you would have to perceive

 The whole grammar in all its accidence

 And all its system, in the perfect singleness

 Of intention it has because it is dead.

 You can learn only a part at a time. 

 What you are given to remember

 Has been saved before you from death's dullness by

 Remembering. The unique intention

 Of a language whose speech has died is order,

 Incomplete only where someone has forgotten.

 You will find that that order helps you to remember.

 What you come to remember becomes yourself.

 Learning will be to cultivate the awareness

 Of that governing order, now pure of the passions

It composed; till, seeking it in itself, 

You may find at last the passion that composed it, 

Hear it both in its speech and in yourself.

 

 What you remember saves you. To remember

 Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never

 Has fallen silent. So your learning is,

 From the dead, order, and what sense of yourself

 Is memorable, what passion may be heard 

When there is nothing for you to say.

--W.S. Merwin

From his first post-college days, W.S. Merwin made his living mostly by translating.  He published many translations of poetry written in many languages, from ancient Chinese poets to Dante to Pablo Neruda.   So this poem can be read in one way as applying literally to learning dead languages, such as Latin. Perhaps it can be applied to reading any poem. But it seems to me that at least some of it applies to memories themselves.

 Anything in the past existed in a context, a kind of language, that has slipped away with that past. It was a context of things, places, people and happenings, and also of feeling.  But we mostly and in a sense necessarily translate our memories of the past into the language of the present.  Yet part of those memories may carry with them something of their context, if we don't try to decide what they mean too quickly.  I think certain powerful lines in this poem apply to all memories, and to memory itself.  But the poem hints at even more powerful ways of apprehending memories, within their contexts and perhaps the wider contexts of our entire lives.  

The photo: The arrow points to the apartment where my parents lived when I was born in 1946, and where the three of us lived for a few more years, at the top of what was then an apartment building in Greensburg, PA on College Avenue, so called because high on a hill opposite this building--and visible from that window--was Seton Hill College.  The building I suspect had been a residence, for this area was once populated by the rich. Up on that hill was a ridiculously large mansion, which came to house the college, and remains part of it.  While still a residence, it contained the first library that a young Andrew Carnegie ever saw.  The building that housed my first home no longer exists.  The writing on the photo is my mother's. 

History of My Reading: Cummington Summer 1970

BK at Cummington 1970.  Photo by James Baker Hall

 "What you remember saves you.  To remember/Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never/Has fallen silent..."  W.S. Merwin

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio…” Neil Young:“Ohio” May 1970

 In June 1970, weeks after the protest occupation, I left Galesburg, Illinois and Knox College. They had been one center of my life since 1964. Except for a brief visit in the 1980s, I never returned.

 While in Galesburg I was staying with Carol Hartman, who was finishing her third year as a student.  She and three friends were planning to spend the summer in Boston.  Since I had been accepted for the eight week summer session at the Cummington Community of the Arts in western Massachusetts, I decided to join them.

Jane Langer and Carol at Knox

 By then of course it was more than that.  Carol and I had been friends since her first year at Knox, when I was a senior. A mutual attraction was evident from the start.  But I was more of an older confidant then.  Carol and her close friends—among them Jane Langer, Judy Bowker, Jan Byrne, and Steve Phillips—more or less adopted me.  For awhile, Judy was “the Little Kid” and I was “the Big Kid.”  I won’t say it was foremost in my mind, but I did remember how important my relationships with older students were in my first and second years.

  Our attraction led to a romance that flowered in that spring of 1970 when we were both free of other such active relationships.  The summer together—before and after Cummington-- was to be the next step. 

Carol passed away in August 2020.  Partly in deference to those who were an active part of her life in recent years, and partly because I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with this, I haven’t shared memories before.  There were decades when our contacts lapsed. She got back in touch with me by 2000, and I have a Christmas card from 2001. At some point a couple of my emails went unanswered.  After that I had news of her mostly through the Knox alumni magazine. In a recent year I emailed her birthday greetings out of the blue—it might even have been in January 2020. 

  To do more than describe the Carol I knew in the 1970s would be presumptuous. So I can’t even attempt a full portrait or tribute. But with the discretion appropriate to circumstances—including the purpose of these posts—I can allude to what I know from that time.

 We stopped in Chicago first.  While Carol visited her parents, I stayed with Knox alum Howard Partner at his apartment in the city. It was in a then-funky neighborhood at Dickens and Fremont.  My first night there I listened to the second Poco album, unable to sleep. (So I recorded in a notebook, which otherwise has the usual and frustrating lack of details about that time, but is filled instead with notes on writing projects, memories and bits of verse. Though I did record impressions of a free concert in Lincoln Park, and a noisy voyage on the L to meet Carol at the Carson Pirie Scott department store, where I was still getting hostile stares for my long hair.) 

At Howard’s I picked a book off his shelf I’d meant to read: Joy: Expanding Human Awareness by William C. Schultz.  Turns out, he said later, that it was my book that he’d borrowed.  So I got it back, and I have it still. Most of it was derived from the Human Potentials Movement, encounter groups and so on.  But one thing jumped out at me then (or so I noted): the relationship between the body (and its ills or health) and the mind or emotions. Pretty standard now, it was largely disregarded in the conventional medicine of 1970.

 Schultz’s book begins with a description of his infant son, his innocent absorption in his surroundings, his joy in discovery, learning and experience. It wasn’t just that his son was often joyful: “Ethan is joy,” he writes.  But typically this does not last. “Where does the joy go?”  Reading this now, I realize that a version of this question—what happens to this kind of innocence, why is it destroyed, and how can some of it be recovered—was the active subtext of my twenties.

 Meanwhile Carol was having some conflicts with her parents, particularly concerning her reluctance to return to Knox for another year.  But they also were skeptical about me, though we never met.  They (meaning her mother mostly) referred to me as “the Polish poet.” Carol said (fondly) that her parents had strange nicknames for her, including "Miss Pasadena" and "Zookie."

Carol and her mother

 After exploring other options, Carol and I simply used half-fare cards (mine borrowed) to fly to Boston, with what we could carry.  Carol’s older brother Raymond was attending M.I.T. (or Harvard, or both.)  She and her friends were to stay at his Fairwood Circle apartment in Cambridge, before a summer sublet was available that probably Raymond arranged.  After a few days there on the floor, I was off to western Massachusetts and the Cummington Community of the Arts. 

My actual memories of Cummington are like snapshots, loosely related.  I also haven’t found manuscripts or notebooks that I can attribute specifically to my time there, which turned out to be only about four weeks.  But I do have a few relevant documents. And I have many letters (remember them?) that Carol wrote to me as well as letters I wrote to her, beginning in 1968 and including while we were separated that summer.  Some of the contents provide  details and a few prods—or even corrections—to memories of Cummington. 

I also have a supplement to memory that’s unique in my experience: a published novel written about the Cummington Community and partially about that summer.  Music From a Broken Piano by James Baker Hall was published in 1982 by the Fiction Collective—the outfit founded by the previously mentioned novelist Ronald Sukenick, among others.  I remember James Baker Hall being there in Cummington that summer of 1970—though I was introduced to him as a photographer, not a writer.

  Some of the characters, a few events and relationships, and even some words spoken, I recall from that summer. But the novel is actually set in the summer of 1969, when this arts community was formed (called “Farmington” in the novel.)  Some, perhaps many people were there for both summers.  The novel seems highly fictionalized, and is somewhat cleverly confusing in that he gives the names of a couple of actual people to characters not based on them but (it seemed to me) on someone else I recognized.  Some of the novel’s events may have in some sense happened in 1969.  That summer did feature (according to a subsequent newsletter), for example, the presentation of “3 Pieces for Broken Piano.”

 Of course I first paged through this novel to see if there was a character based on me.  When I was pretty sure there wasn’t, I lost interest for awhile. Though reading it recently I recognize an imaginative story of those times, it’s useful in this context mostly for ambiance, description of the places, which seem accurate to my recollections.  The ambiance included frequent seemingly important discussions and rapid interpersonal events and impressions, most of which I've forgotten, but even if I remembered them, Baker Hall's novel would convince me to ignore most of them. 

 James Baker Hall was indeed known for his photographs as well as his writing, principally poetry, and was much honored as a poet and teacher in his native Kentucky, where he was the state's Poet Laureate. 

The Cummington Community of the Arts was located on some 150 acres of woods and fields, between Northampton and Pittsfield in western Massachusetts.   It was centered on what had been a working farm, though not in cultivation for decades, perhaps generations. Beginning in the 1922 when it was called The Music Box (which apparently was a summer theatre), Cummington had hosted a succession of arts schools and summer workshops.  A number of famous people had participated at one time or another, including poets Marianne Moore and Archibald MacLeish, artists Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler, and photographer Diane Arbus.

 The Cummington area was best known for another sprawling fallow farm, the former residence of the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant.  Though I don’t think I knew it at the time, we also weren’t very far from the farm where Herman Melville lived when he was writing Moby Dick, and occasionally dining and telling tall tales at the neighboring farm of the Nathaniel Hawthornes.

 Partly because of all this, and the presence of teachers and students from prestigious New England universities, I was perhaps dimly if not consciously aware that I was swimming in different waters, closer to traditional centers of power, past and future.  It wasn’t western Pennsylvania or the Midwest anymore. 

cover of brochure with photo from 1969

This Cummington spread had been reconstituted as a self-organizing Community of the Arts just the year before—that is, the summer of 1969 that Baker Hall had novelized.  Evidently one of the poetry readings I attended at Yale when I was in Stony Creek the previous winter had included a few Cummington attendees showing a film and making a pitch for the community.  I wrote to the address they gave and applied for this summer.  I was invited to attend, pretty much cost-free.  The invitation followed me to Buffalo.

 So on Sunday, June 20 I arrived for the session that was to end August 15. Part way up a hill was the center of the Cummington spread: a large building with kitchen and dining hall, a large barn that served as a dormitory and another barn-like structure with art studios and darkroom.  One of Cummington’s selling points was that it could accommodate several families, and they were housed mostly in cabins further up the hill. There were also buildings down the hill that I don’t think I ever visited, but as it turned out, that’s where the cool people wound up. There were some 45 people there at Cummington in 1970, somewhat straining its capacity.

 As a solo, a newbie and a freebie, I was housed in the big barn.  Baker Hall described it well: I was to live in “more of a stall than a room, with four walls and a door but no ceiling.”  There was no privacy based on sound.  I had a bed and a table for a desk. The nearest bathroom and source of hot water was in the main building next to the barn.  My first letter back to Carol mentioned the cold (later it would be the heat), the weak light (I requested and got a decent reading lamp), and the incessant sound of an oboe player relentlessly practicing his scales. As I was soon to discover, close to half of the “community” were classical musicians and music students, many from Yale.  It was as if a busload of them got lost on their way to Tanglewood. 

One of the C. structures (not THE barn)

Though I was impressed by the country silence and the skyful of stars, the first group meal didn’t suggest that this was going to be a community experience for me (or so I wrote to Carol.)  What I was hoping for I suppose was something like the Black Mountain College experience of the 1930s through the 1950s, that Robert Creeley was part of and talked about—cutting-edge artists and students in various arts (and in Black Mountain’s case, sciences) in an environment of experimentation and cross-fertilization. 

 Apart from high expectations, my hopes were doomed (as I think I knew then) by another imperative: the overriding political issues of the moment.  We were less than two months past Cambodia and Kent State. The Vietnam War was still expanding. It was supposed to be the summer we’d hear the drumming.  But all I was hearing was the oboe, and the vast silence of the country. 

Harvard spring 1970

 Not that there was much drumming elsewhere.  We arrived in Cambridge in time to witness and participate in an antiwar march through Harvard Square, but it clearly was nothing like what we heard had happened there that spring.  It turned out to be the last such demonstration I ever saw there.  For one thing, the students had taken their drums and gone home. That had happened everywhere.  And though political ferment was not over, it had turned sullen on the war, and fractured into separate and sometimes hostile movements.  Women’s lib, for instance, and Black Power. But I was still experiencing those emotions from the spring, including the anger I had suppressed so as not to endanger others during the Knox occupation.  That didn’t make me a happy camper.

 Plus my own diffidence in an unfamiliar situation with people I didn’t quite get.  The only time Cummington is mentioned in a surviving notebook is to quote some unnamed person after I’d evidently held forth on something or other.  “Gee, I didn’t know you could talk like that,” this person said.  “I didn’t know you talked at all.” 

Though I probably read fiction and poetry as well as journalism and so on, the most characteristic reading I did at Cummington—and the only thing I specifically recall—was the Black Panther Party newspaper.  I was constructing a play out of fragments, quotes from its articles as well as other elements, a series of voices.  I never finished it, but the reading helped me see things from another perspective, as I began to more deeply understand what was and is called institutional and structural racism.  Some of this amplified the personal point of view I first found in James Baldwin’s essays, as far back as high school.  This time I did get caught in the rhetoric (revolutionary and otherwise) of the Panthers political engagement and analysis, though not the imagery of violence. Mostly I learned a little more of what it was like to be Black in America.

 The Black Panthers were known in the media for their aggressive rhetoric in favor of violent revolution, which owed some of its intellectual basis to Marxism.  But as their newspaper chronicled, they pioneered social services directed to the Black community.  The best known of these was the free breakfast program, in which the Panthers organization fed more children in the Oakland area particularly, than did the state of California.  The federal public school free breakfast program didn’t exist then, and may well have been inspired by the success of their efforts.  But all levels of government in those years felt free to harass, arrest and at least in the case of Fred Hampton, murder people because they were Black Panthers.

 This was within the more general context of the times.  The Vietnam War period of the 1960s and 1970s was an intense dance of the apocalyptic and utopian. As poet W.S. Merwin described it:  “Wild aspiration and vertiginous despair existed not alternately but at once, and at times we may have clung to visionary hopes not so much because they were really credible as because we felt it would be not only mean-spirited but fatal to abandon them.  We knew a kind of willful desperation.” And I would add, a kind of willed innocence.

W.S. Merwin. Photo by James Baker Hall

 It may be hard to remember and difficult to explain in today’s context, just how different this period was, and how it nevertheless still echoes. “We know that age to be utterly beyond our reach now, irretrievably past, a period whose distance we already feel as though it had stretched into centuries,” Merwin continues (in the preface to his 1992 collection The Second Four Books of Poems), “and yet it appears to us to be not only recent but present, still with us not as a memory but as a part of our unfinished days, a ground or backdrop before which we live.  It could be said that we are haunted by it, which would suggest that that time was not done with in us, that what we saw and felt then is still part of our incompleteness and our choices.”

Cummington was not untouched by countercultural concerns, and some of it founding members probably wanted to integrate them into its communal experience.  But I didn’t sense much awareness around me there of the political ideas and ferment going on then.  The place seemed to be divided among oblivious academics, spaced-out hippie artists and frightened music students.   I felt isolated.

 Later in the summer I came to some empathetic understanding of at least the frightened music students.  On a trip to town or somewhere with a few Cummington people, I found myself at a coffee shop table across from a quiet young woman I hadn’t really talked with before.  She was a music student at Yale. Our somewhat stilted conversation seemed to be loosening up until I said something about the war. She became quiet as I babbled on, until her eyes filled with tears. “I just want to study music,” she finally said.  So I saw that her life, too, was being deformed by the war.   

 By then my isolation had already been dramatized. Since I was getting a largely free ride at Cummington based on my work, I felt obligated to share it, so I gave a poetry reading after a couple of weeks.  However, some discussion the previous day infuriated me so much that I stayed up all night writing a long discursive and often angry poem which ended with the words, “Cummington, you are up against yourselves.”  It was the last thing I read, and I sat down to a complete and lasting silence.  Oddly, I hadn’t expected that.

   However, I was to have one more public performance with a different outcome, before I left halfway through the scheduled eight weeks.

 I had other moments of alienation, as when many were talking about (and participating in) an “environmental art” project, which essentially was digging a big ditch. To me it was the opposite of “environmental” in the sense of ecological, since it was basically an act of needless  (and to me, worse than pointless) destruction of the environment—and as such, a demonstration of human ego that was a principal cause of our depleted planet.  I don’t think anyone else got my point.

  On the other hand there was one event I recall that gave me a Black Mountain College community vibe. Someone organized a performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” which is comprised of a short musical passage to be played 840 times. A complete performance could take from 18 to 36 hours. 

New York premiere of Vexations: John Cage
(standing) with one of the pianists, John Cale
(later of the Velvet Underground.) Seated is
the only audience member to witness the 
entire 18 hour performance.

Though the eccentric and influential composer in late nineteenth/ early twentieth century Paris is now known for several haunting piano works, this Satie piece was not published or performed in his lifetime.  In fact it was not commercially published in the U.S. until 1969.  John Cage (who incidentally had participated in Black Mountain College) discovered the manuscript, and later organized the first concert, in New York City in 1963, in which a dozen pianists played the repeated motif continuously for just over 18 hours.  

 The same basic format was followed at Cummington, which may well have been the second performance anywhere of this piece (most of the documented performances seem actually to have been in the last decade or so.)

  The grand piano was moved in front of the fireplace in the main building, with candles around it.  Seats were provided, and audience members came and went over the hours. There were enough pianists to perform it in relays, though probably they had more than one shift.  I went to listen three times—at the beginning, at some point late at night, and for the finish.  I stayed long enough each time to feel the hypnotic effect, which fatigue and a few tokes tended to enhance. 

 I was not entirely solitary or even misanthropic at Cummington.  I participated in community discussions and some events, did my turns in the kitchen, played volleyball and spent sociable hours usually inflected with wine and dope.  On one of the first days I was part of a group that piled into a car to see the Beatles movie Let It Be at a Northampton theatre, much to the consternation of Chris Horton, an artist and the person in charge of the community, who wanted everyone to focus on Cummington.  But people came and went all summer anyway.  (As for the movie, it played as the dour prequel to the recent breakup of the Beatles, but on the evidence of the recent Get Back cuts of the same 1969 footage, seems more like a reflection of the original director’s offended ego.)

 I also observed (as apparently did James Baker Hall) some of the sexual and interpersonal dynamics of an idealistic group of high achievers isolated together.  I’d already heard of a summer in which four young male philosophers and their wives lived together in one house to “do” philosophy together, and all four marriages collapsed before fall.  At least one marriage openly lapsed at Cummington: a blond wife, the most glamorously attractive woman there, took up with the most strikingly attractive young man.  There were also racial dynamics too complex to get into (though Baker Hall gives it a try, with limited success in my view.)  

Heather McHugh in 1981

One of the first people I met at Cummington was a young poet named Heather McHugh, 22 at the time, who was assigned a room (or stall) near mine on the barn’s second floor.  She visited my room, read some of my poems and declared that I might become as famous as she would be.  Then she reclined on my bed.  I was frozen at my desk for a little too long, so by the time I could move she had already left. 

 In memory, that was about the last I saw of her, though letters to Carol indicate we were casually friendly throughout. Carol even met her a couple of times.  Heather did quickly disappear from the barn, however, becoming associated with the residents of a cabin elsewhere—visual artists or ceramicists and filmmakers, I think.  Anyway, they were what I thought of as the Cool Kids of the community.  She moved down there. 

 And Heather McHugh indeed became famous, at least in poetry and academic circles, with prize-winning poetry collections, much-praised translations and literary essays, as well as teaching.  She’s a literary eminence now.

 I had other casually friendly relationships with people whose names I unfortunately no longer remember, including the slightly older man, also a writer, with whom I got roaring drunk one night. When he tried to drive us in his big old Buick up the rutted hill to his family cabin, it slid into a ditch and we were suddenly pitched at an angle looking up at the stars, laughing hysterically. 

Rhea Ormond at C. 1970. BK photo

I made one friend, an artist and photographer named Rhea Ormond.  She lived in the smaller barnlike building some yards from the big barn, with an enormous studio and a darkroom.  Rhea was enthusiastic, open-hearted, astute and generous.  She got me to collaborate on an oil painting with her, and she also showed me how to develop photos.  I believe she had been at Cummington the summer before, and returned at least one more year.  We exchanged infrequent letters for several years, and met at least once more. Rhea eventually settled in rural North Carolina and specializes in murals and large canvases, while also teaching at a community college.  She’s a valued artist and respected member of her community.

 After awhile I met a guitarist, Alan Jaffe, who lived on the ground floor of the barn.  The “stalls” that Baker Hall described pertained mostly to the second floor, which was on the level of a hayloft.  At least some of the first floor stalls had ceilings and full-length walls, so they were fully enclosed rooms.  Alan lived in one of these.  I’m not sure how we met.  Perhaps I heard him playing jazz on his electric guitar, or maybe Rhea introduced us. In any case, we wound up collaborating on a set of my songs, working them out in relaxed sessions in his large room over a couple of weeks.

 Alan Jaffe was a Yale music student then, and has since become a notable jazz guitarist in New York.  I think he especially enjoyed playing the rock riffs and country licks he probably didn’t usually get to do otherwise.  He had both taste and touch as a guitarist, so these hours were easily among the best I experienced at Cummington. 

 Meanwhile, Carol and I were exchanging frequent letters and occasional phone calls. Soon she arrived for a few days visit. I found an unused room at the bottom of the barn—not really fit for ordinary habitation, but private, so we slept there.  At first Carol was wary, perhaps intimidated by the people at Cummington, and didn’t want to participate in much. But she warmed up to several, like Rhea, one at a time.  

Her visit definitely changed how people viewed me. They could now tell themselves my moodiness was a natural response to being separated from such a beautiful girlfriend. Women whose interest in me had gone nowhere now understood, and at least pretended to approve of, my faithfulness. When Carol left—hitching a ride with several community members driving to Boston, including Heather—I knew that I wasn’t going to spend the whole summer apart from her. 

   Though I was in some ways settling into Cummington life, taking afternoon baths in the main building, heating up water in the empty kitchen late at night for my instant espresso, I decided to go back to Cambridge early.  About halfway through the summer there was a kind of open house event, with community members giving recitals, showing their artwork and so on. Alan and I were going to perform my songs.  That seemed like the best time to leave. I worked out the plan with Carol, who somehow got the use of a vehicle large enough to bring her friends (including a driver) and haul me and my stuff back with them.

 My memory is that Alan and I were set to perform late in the afternoon, pretty much at the end of the schedule. Most of the strangers who I’d seen wandering around all day were already gone, so our audience was a good chunk of the Cummington community, plus Carol and her friends.

 I’ve managed to unearth the lyrics to the songs we did, and I have a tape. Songwriting for me was (and sometimes still is) a process of working with sounds, including the sounds of words, how they fit the rhythm, with rhymes at the end of the lines.  Interpreting them might come later, if at all. 

Alan Jaffe

Alan and I had worked out seven or eight songs, though I doubt we did them all that afternoon.  Alan played electric guitar, I played acoustic guitar, with a mike or pickup, and I sang.  We’d prepared two hard rockers, both which qualified as a possibly new genre of apocalyptic rock: “SST” (surreal imagery of ecological devastation) and “Baby, Are You Looking for Me Now?” which formed the same sort of lurid imagery into a relationship song.  I’m sure we did this one live, as it is the better song, very propulsive, with lines like “Snarls of bible ministers’ broken lives/death cry of the power mower wives…”

 We did a mid-tempo rocker called “It’s Right,” with a kind of John Fogerty Creedence Clearwater vocal line, though with a bit of structure copped from “Get Back.”

This was becoming the “personal is political” era, though these interpretations come after the fact of composition. "It's Right" starts with verses about personal relationships ("When I'm away love, your eyes are in my mind"), then moves to a wider source of meaning: “When love is winning/crying in the streets/ Everyone you meet is your tomorrow.” “To cast the numbers/against the darkened sky/all we know is why and we can be there.” Then it moves to action, if only marching in the street: “When light is moving/across the face of time/the moment’s changing rhyme becomes/the sound of happy feet and I know it’s right…”  A bit of self-mockery there with "happy feet"--a little Lennonesque.

We probably did my 50s-style rock and roll tribute to the Chuck Berry era, called “Berrybush,” which I must have written while I was a Knox student. We had a jazzy, neo-Dylan/Lennon rant, which never got a title better than “Dostoevsky and the Purple Voice,” but I doubt if we did this one live, as I couldn’t possibly remember all the words.  We must have done “His Blue Image,” a slower song with Alan’s choice licks as background to chilling imagery about President Nixon (“the king of ice/with his melted smile and his dagger dice”) and the war.  I notice now that I managed to shoehorn images from Blake (“the horses of instruction”) and James Joyce (“the cabman’s battered face”) in the same verse. The blue image is Nixon on so-called black and white TV.

 We’d worked out two straight-ahead country songs, of the type common on the radio in those days, with simple structures that turned on the reversal of a phrase or image, like “Act Naturally” (which the Beatles copped from Buck Owens.)

  Of these, I’d written “Leaves That Are Green in the Winter” as a novelty number for my hometown group, the Crosscurrents. “No Down Payment,” came more recently, at Iowa.  It’s got a line that resonates with my memories of those months ostensibly at the Writers Workshop, in my narrow Iowa City room.  Several times the singer lists his possessions, which include: “and a bottle of red wine/a book of empty pages/and an awful lot of time,” before the chorus: “But fair is fair/and trade is trade/no complaining about the deal when the bargain’s made/my terms were loneliness for the freedom of a dove/and I’ve made no down payment on your love.” We probably performed this one.

 All of these songs were more or less heartfelt; none more than “We’re All Together Again,” which used the jaunty old ditty (“We’re all together again/we’re here, we’re here) that you can find sung by Berle Ives on the site devoted to Scout camp songs.  My version was slower, with the brilliant, mournful country-inflected backing Alan devised.  With the traditional chorus, it added verses that suggested an inventory of gently disappointed lives at a school reunion. 

 My cache of letters from friends contains many stories about the sad outcomes of clashes with the “real world” of jobs, the meaningless work, crazed or sterile work environments, the awful bosses, the mindless humiliation and boredom, and the accompanying crazed world-- the sense of imprisonment in a lunatic asylum. 

 These accounts began with summer jobs while we were still in college, but the stories—on and off such pages—became weightier after schooldays were over.  This song reflects these sentiments.

 Though the lyrics were completed some time before, letters from Carol this summer also included such stories, as she and her friends dealt with the job market.  Carol applied for an opening as a telephone operator, but was told she was too intelligent.  Her friend Julienne planned to apply the next day, but now knew to play dumb. Carol knew she could have almost any entry level job she wanted, but she kept backing off, as they all seemed so bleak.  

 Later in the summer, the Little Kid visited, and said she had to suppress her true answer to yet another erroneously arrogant boss asking why he should hire her: “Because I’m smarter than you.”

 My song included a verse loosely based on two people I had known, including a Knox student in the past: “Marcia dropped from college, and went into the city/Wrote ads for a bookstore, dressing very pretty/but the air in the city made Marcia blink and cry/She rented an apartment and stayed there till she died. But we’re all together again, we’re here, we’re here. We’re all together again, we’re here.”

 What I felt dying were dreams, hopes, integrity, innocence, changing who we were, and could be. This is not the last word on the eventual careers and achievements over a lifetime of people I knew, but these experiences and sentiments were prominent at that early stage, and at that historical time.

 As for Cummington audience reaction, apparently such sentiments were easier to swallow combined with a melody, a tasty guitar and bouncy lines familiar from youth, however ironically used.  The song went over well, as did the entire performance.  When it was over, a number of community members with big smiles congratulated me, and also stayed to say goodbye.  I even got a big embrace from the beautiful blond having the affair who hadn’t said three words to me all summer. 

 Then I grabbed my gear from the barn, and with Carol and her friends, left Cummington in the rear view mirror.  In three or four hours we were in Cambridge, where over the next years, life would change, more than once.   

Chair Rental

 

Very little was known about anything

 in the old time. It was as a vocalise

 is to a sonata, children in the limelight

 and water rushing over stones

 as though in a hurry to get somewhere.

 It’s possible to joke about it now

 that the trial period has lapsed.

 To not admit you’re miscast.

 America’s old churches were seen as a new

 philosophy of one-upmanship:

 playing, yet not part of the game.

 Thus many things endure, and no one 

gets very anxious about them: spots

 like coins from a tree that who the heck

 could have foreseen in its time anyway?

 Just stand here. Call me potatoes

 and soap. Call me soap and potatoes.

 My husband’s fiancé wished it otherwise.

 There you go. 

--John Ashbery

photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Liars, Liars, Planet on Fire

Apart from more extreme temperatures (including for the second straight summer, the Pacific Northwest), forest fires, floods (northern Alaska to the Ohio valley in the US), the most prominent climate news this week is the deal for climate provisions in the US Congress' upcoming reconciliation bill.  Spurred in part I'm sure by this summer's heat etc., it's being described as simultaneously the most extensive climate-related legislation ever, and not enough to bring the US in line with its UN climate pledges.

But at least as important, and quite possibly more significant, is a story not getting as much attention: the announcement by the Democratic Republic of the Congo that it is auctioning off vast tracts of forest peatlands to oil and gas companies for extraction.  Keeping the country's forests intact is crucial to the effort to lessen the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.  These forests are huge carbon sinks, and cutting down trees for fossil fuel extraction is a double defeat.

But it gets even worse. In addition to the blow to climate, the sites up for auction include habitat for the endangered mountain gorillas, as well as other threatened primate species.  Indigenous tribes could also be displaced.  So it is a blow to efforts to avoid a mass extinction event, and a blow to the cultural  caretakers of the forests.

The Congo government is not the cynical equivalent of those despoiling the Amazon rainforests--it supports saving its forests to address climate distortion.  But those same UN treaties include agreements for the rich nations like the US to pay poorer and less industrialized nations some of the money they need to preserve their forests and to prepare for the effects of the climate distortion that the more industrial nations, like the US, have caused.  And those nations, including the US but also western Europe, have not paid what they promised.  Not even close.

So the Congo is calling them out, and they are likely to be just the first.  That the US isn't paying the relatively small amount they promised is simply outrageous.  In addition to paying into the international fund (which they aren't doing), the US and Europe could be making specific deals with individual countries like the Congo, that asked for $5 billion a year.  They didn't get it, so they've gone to the fossil fuel industry, selling off their future as well as everyone's.  And it's our fault.  

At the same time as this is happening, Netflix is beginning to show a new action series in which one scene cost $7 million.  Not the whole series or the whole episode, not even big Marvel-sized effects, but one fight scene that will last a few minutes on the screen.  This society at the moment can afford to keep its climate promises, and meet its commitments to the future.  We can live without $7 million fight scenes and $300 million movies and a lot for which our governments spend billions. We can't live without the rain forests, or with a mass extinction.  

Hotheads

It so happened that the first articles, books and documentaries outlining what was then called the Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming were coming to my attention just as Pittsburgh, where I lived, experienced several very hot spells during consecutive summers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So my comprehension of the eventual effects of this phenomenon was visceral as well as intellectual.

 Because I was hot. Really, really hot. It was hard to breathe, hard to sleep and hard to think straight. For the next few summers I had one window air conditioner in my apartment, bulky but not so heavy that I couldn’t move it. So during heat waves every evening I installed it in a bedroom window so I could sleep, and every morning I moved it to the window of my home office, so I could think. If that wasn’t enough, I would brave walking through the visible heat waves up the Murray Avenue hill to the ice-bath air conditioning of the Eat & Park. But none of these strategies erased the oppression of heat.

 I saw what the heat did to other people, too. It made some people testy and even violent, others lethargic and dull. Or both, in unpredictable syncopation. It got scary, or at least the nagging source of low-level anxiety. Muscles tensed against the heat as they did against the winter cold, and the worst of it was wondering if it would ever end.

 And so I saw a contour of the future. There would be a period during which society would be challenged to stop a mortal danger before it started to take effect, to address a crisis before it arrived. It was to be the challenge of human civilization’s evolution.

 As I soon learned, it was crucial that it be done this way, because once the danger was obviously here and doing its damage, it would be too late to stop it completely, and harder to stop it from becoming much, much worse in the farther future, pretty much forever.

 But even at first I realized there was another reason. Because once it started getting really, really hot, people weren’t going to think straight. They weren’t going to be able to act with clarity and energy. They weren’t going to have the same cool, calm and collected judgment, they would become prey to impulses and anger, and have fewer inhibitions against violence, anti-social and self-destructive behavior. Because they would be too damn hot. And things would get worse, because overheated people would make them worse.

 All this turned out to be a little naïve, but basically and unfortunately coming true. It seems that it didn’t take actual heat to turn people into hotheads (although some bright underemployed statistician might try coordinating heat indexes with places that host heavy concentrations of climate crisis deniers and other angry extreme right fanatics.) Who needed heat when permission to entertain crude prejudices and crazed ideas from the unconscious, to name scapegoats and profess the counterfactual was given by invisible prophets and very visible demagogues, and amplified by new and powerful social media to form electronically connected cults and mobs?

 So now, largely because society has failed for more than 20 years to take the necessary action to address the causes and effects of climate disruption, the heat—as predicted, if a bit ahead of schedule—is on.  At this moment, the effects are coalescing. 

Extreme drought continues in the US West and Southwest (including Texas and Mexico), with large sources of water visibly drying up. Less obvious is that most of the US is in some form of drought, as is much of Europe, Australia, and huge chunks of Asia and Africa. Other places, like the four corners area in the US southwest, are getting torrential rains and flooding.

 July saw mountain glaciers collapse, most visibly in Italy where people were killed in the avalanche. Meanwhile, Greenland ice is melting so fast and so much with enough water to drown all of West Virginia. Apocalyptic forest fires burn in Spain, Portugal, France and elsewhere in Europe. A decade or so ago, Portugal made world news with its forest fires, but more area has been burned this summer than then, and there’s too much competition for attention for it to be much noticed.

 But strikingly common at the moment is quite simply the heat. England (which is farther north than any US city) experienced its hottest days and nights possibly in history. Excessive heat ranged across Europe, from Greece and North Africa in the south to the Netherlands. Several cities in Germany recorded historic heat highs.

 It’s hot around the world. Large areas of southern China were gripped in heat for weeks, as well as parts of India and Pakistan. And so on. 

This week much of the United States is very hot.  Over 100 million people are dealing with extreme heat, in every part of the country.  A single clump of heat causing record breaking temperatures reached from the West past the Great Plains--triple digits in South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.  Now this heat has moved through the Midwest to the East Coast. Triple digits in every section of the country.

 

Taken together, deaths directly attributable to heat counted so far are in the thousands, while UN officials and climate experts warn that this is all just the beginning, and that climate distortion will keep adding heat and its effects well past the middle of this century, and if nothing effective is done to deal with causes, it will be much worse for much longer.

 Heat can kill directly through heat stroke and dehydration (heat being the primary weather-related cause of death in the US), but it damages the human body in a number of other ways. It seems science is just catching up on this, and so far hasn’t done much of a job warning the public.

 As for effects on the brain, there’s this almost incredibly deadpan report published in the Guardian:

 “It can be hard to think clearly when you’re too hot. Studies have shown that extreme heat can affect mental performance. Hot weather has been linked to reduced cognitive function, judgment errors and higher risk of occupational injury. At extremely high temperatures, the blood-brain barrier begins to break down. Proteins and ions accumulate in the brain, causing inflammation.

 Many people report feeling irritable on hot days, and evidence suggests that extreme heat negatively affects mental health. A recent study in New York found that, on hot days, there were more emergency hospital visits due to substance abuse, mood and anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and dementia. Another study linked rising temperatures to higher suicide rates.” 

Several other effects include excessive fatigue, and the body simply shutting down. None of these should be big surprises to anybody who has endured a severe heat wave, though there’s also short-term denial and bravado, and the tendency to forget the trauma that the body nevertheless remembers.

 So consider the implications when the number of hot days per year increases, and the hottest days are hotter, until the coolest day in a future decade may be equal to the hottest days in this decade. Somewhere along the way, just addressing the effects of climate disruption would normally become a major societal concern, even if such efforts go under different names to soothe the deniers. This would be a normal function of a working society. But these efforts will take planning, gathering resources, agreeing on ends and means, and working together, to deal with the hot present and to prevent climate disruption from getting worse.  Such efforts will need to be multiple, because these effects affect everything, from emergency services to melting pavement, frying electrical infrastructure and toxic air.  These efforts will require cool heads and calm hearts.  But every hotter year that gets more difficult.

 It’s work that needs to be done now, but there's still resilience and surplus resources in the system, so when the heat wave ends, it's possible to forget about it and go on more or less as normal, momentarily focusing on the next shiny and distracting object. But as our society loses this elasticity of resilience by using up its surplus and suddenly non-renewing resources, and dealing with multiple emergencies becomes overwhelming, it will get more and more difficult to ignore it.  But recent experience strongly suggests some will try. 

 Absent changes that anticipate these problems (like a new economic model that prioritizes paying for efforts to address climate disruption, and perhaps even prioritizing basic sufficiency for all, while making billionaires impossible), as the systems of production, transportation, communication and simple governance break down, the challenges will be even greater. It will be no time for deniers to be in charge, and it certainly will be a dangerous time for hotheads to be influential, let alone calling the shots. 

People generally underestimate the vulnerability of systems and resources that seem to work automatically, like the light going on when you flip the switch. Especially in a society that depends on global supply chains, the vulnerabilities are many. 

But I also worry that everyone  underestimates how hard it may be to keep a cool head in an overheated world.  Our best chance may be to address these problems, the causes and the effects of climate disruption, and set the pattern for addressing them, while the heat is not unrelenting for long periods. To use the visceral knowledge much of this country and the world is helplessly acquiring this summer to provide impetus for a future in which cooler heads may prevail.

 Because if climate disruption remains inadequately addressed, the choices we face are not likely to be simply between this society and the same society in a hotter world, with the predictable winners and losers. The choices may well be between a society consciously addressing the causes and effects of climate disruption, and a society that falls into chaos and violence, long before much of the country becomes unlivable because of climate disruption effects. 

 This is a possibility not only within the US but around the world. If I’m lucky I won’t be around to see if I’m right, but unless climate disruption is addressed (especially in an equitable way), this planet may see in this century the ultimate disaster movie in reality : Hothouse Earth v. Nuclear Winter. If the hotheads have their way.

I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again

 In a pine tree, 

A few yards away from my window sill,

 A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,

 On a branch. 

 I laugh, as I see him abandon himself

 To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do 

That the branch will not break.

-- James Wright 

 This short poem furnished the title of Wright’s 1963 collection, The Branch Will Not Break, sometimes considered his best book, and certainly the one that blew me away in college. This lovely little poem, poignant now, nearly an elegy.

Felt in the Blood: Lines from "Tintern Abbey"

 

                                These beauteous forms, 

Through a long absence, have not been to me

 As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye; 

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

 Felt in the blood and felt along the heart; 

And passing even into my purer mind,

 With tranquil restoration—feelings too

 Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

 As have no slight or trivial influence

 On that best portion of a good man’s life,

 His little, nameless, unremembered acts

 Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

 To them I have owed another gift,

 Of aspect more sublime; the blessed mood

 In which the burthen of the mystery,

 In which the heavy and the weary weight

 Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood

 In which the affections gently lead us on…

 .....For I have learned

 To look on nature, not as in the hour

 Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

 The still, sad music of humanity,

 Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

 To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

 A presence that disturbs me with the joy

 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

 Of something far more deeply interfused, 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

And the round ocean and the living air,

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 

A motion and a spirit, that impels

 All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

 And rolls through all things....

---William Wordsworth

These lines are from two sections of Wordsworth poem known as "Tintern Abbey," but its full title presents a more complete picture: "Lines/Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks of the Wye During a Tour.  July 13, 1798."  So a common portrait showing Wordsworth at the foot of the Abbey is more than artistic license--it misrepresents what he was seeing.  The "above" is vague: it could mean above in the sense of a place on the river, or from the hills looking down.  It was probably both, so his view was most likely akin to the picture above (although it seems to have been taken in autumn rather than midsummer.)

The first section quoted here refers to Wordsworth's recollection of his first visit, five years before, and the effect it may have had on him, even if he doesn't specifically remember.  The "mystery" he writes about is mainly death, but also "the heavy and weary weight of this unintelligible world."  Wordsworth had been living through political turmoil at the time of the French Revolution and its aftermath in England. Elsewhere in the poem he alludes to smoke: evidence of encroaching industrialization.  The Abbey itself is a ruin, which shelters "vagrant dwellers of the houseless woods"--in other words, the poor and homeless (or houseless) of the time.  Without ignoring these problems, he found solace and inspiration in nature.  "To some degree, therefore, 'Tintern Abbey' presents absorption in natural beauty as a solution to mental, political and social disconnection," according to literary scholar Philip Shaw.

The second section refers to the present, this day in mid July.  He is on a personal walking tour (not an organized tour or a book tour) and finds his appreciation of the landscape deepened. In nature this time he experiences bonding with a "motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought..."  It was and remains an extraordinary (and eloquent) statement.  Today we have a better idea of the extent of "all thinking things": by some definitions it includes all animals and plants.  And "all objects of all thoughts" covers the rest of existence, beyond simply human civilization that demands our attention.

Despite rhetorical devices now out of fashion, these extraordinary lines, with their subtle music and bold assertions, stand out in the poetry centered on the experiences of the natural world.    

Reproductive Health, Public Health and a Country in Crisis

 

The first wave of reaction to the Supreme Court decision declaring Roe V. Wade null and void--the shock and anger and their articulation in the media as well as on the streets--focused on what seemed to be the central issue of access to medical abortion.  There was also the historical shock of seeing a more broadly granted right taken away--something that hasn't happened in America, and which portends more in the future.  (Other rights have been limited by court decisions, but I don't think any have been just totally taken away before.)

But this week I'm seeing a real health care crisis being described, because of the lengths to which Rabid Right states are taking their anti-abortion lawmaking.  I've heard this abortion debate for decades, but only recently have I heard abortion opponents refuse flexibility and exceptions, such as for rape victims and to safeguard the lives and health of women.  Now ignoring both is standard, and it is leading to an array of nightmarish scenarios, some already being realized, such as the ten year old rape victim who had to transport across state lines for an abortion.  Among those scenarios is criminalizing miscarriage.  There are also medical conditions, some of them fairly common, which threaten the mother's life if she has to seek care that may include an abortion at some distance in time as well as place.

For example, Elizabeth Spiers has detailed some of the medical hazards in her badly titled New York Times opinion piece, "The myth that restricting abortion rights won't affect the rich."  David Hackney, also in the Times, is more direct: "I'm a High Risk Obstetrician, and I'm Terrified For My Patients."  Columnist Jennifer Rubin devoted one of her Washington Post columns to this topic.  I'm not including links because unless you've got a subscription (which I don't, on this computer) you can't access them.  Nor can you access the pertinent if again badly titled Times oped by Pamela Paul: "The Far Right and Far Left agree on one thing: women don't count.")

But accessible to anyone is a rundown of fundamental medical misconceptions that add to the tragedy of these laws in Science News, which ends with a pertinent quote from a doctor, that these laws "place priority of a potential life over the actual life of the person sitting in front of me." It is this prioritizing that completely destroys any semblance of a moral position behind these laws, because they are not only willing but mandating the possible destruction of one life for a potential other life. This is not morality; it is insanity.  Anti-abortion is murder. 

Also: NPR exposes the impact on doctors, and Pew Charitable Trust summarizes threats to health, including public health.  These are direct threats on the lives, health and well-being of pregnant women and women in general, but also real threats to families, especially existing children, as well as fathers and potential fathers, and other elements of society.  And if that doesn't get your attention, also to businesses.

The result of this decision is a marked increase in human suffering, which is also a result of the prior decision on a law limiting guns, and a decision afterwards limiting regulation of climate crisis-causing pollution.  Because of the Court-approved insane limitations on gun laws, a toddler in Highland Park, Illinois, who got separated from his parents at a Fourth of July celebration, will never see them again.  His life is changed forever. They were gunned down by an assault weapon by an unseen shooter at distance.  Who seemingly did it, like the Supreme Court, just because he could.

That in essence is also the outcome of our ongoing failure to fully support a robust public health system in this country, more than symbolized by the ongoing absurdity of simply ignoring the current wave of Covid variant infections, just because we're tired of them, and especially of all the conflict over confronting them.  Now we don't have to worry about people dying of Covid--we're just going to ignore them.

In this case, both parties share blame.  Even here in California, the huge buckets of money sent to the states and then to municipalities because of Covid seem to have been spent on everything except one pertinent place: on public health.  That helps the cowardly process of not dealing with the reality, because if you don't gather the facts, how do you know?  Plausible deniability!  So all the states, red and blue, have turned yellow on Covid.

I always have a focus on the overriding threat of our time, the climate crisis.  And if I were to design a scenario for a society unequipped to address either the causes or effects of globally fatal climate disruption, I would do pretty much everything we are now doing. Within the U.S., I would certainly fracture public health systems so they would be unable to cope with all the challenges--the diseases, the results of excessive heat both physical and mental, etc.--of much hotter summers, of fires, of much more volatile weather--tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, days of downpours, years of drought-- that are already in the cards and in fact happening at this very moment, because for the thirty years we've known about it, we haven't effectively addressed the climate crisis.  And all that is now very likely to get very much worse.

I would further weaken healthcare by giving it impossible yet easily avoidable distractions, like trying to treat pregnant women while staying out of jail.  And of course, impossible if easily avoidable barriers, like the too-often inhuman demands and expense of medical insurance and healthcare for profit. 

I would do all these things and more to create as much societal conflict and chaos as possible, and at the very least force people to devote huge amounts of time, energy, attention and resources on coping with and maybe even fixing these otherwise needless and insanely destructive threats and changes.  Anything to keep everyone's attention away from the single enormous threat to human civilization and planetary life. 

And while a congressional committee lays out the evidence of an insurrection and attempted dictatorship founded upon fraud, I would design an election to put back in power the party that supports that fraud and that insurrection, and happens also to be completely incompetent and uninterested in solving actual problems.  Which is what the polls say is likely to happen.  A lot of this is happening because good people have not done enough, have not voted to maintain the integrity of the Supreme Court, and have not sufficiently valued the future over the conveniences of the present.  But not all of it has happened yet.  There are still votes to be cast this November.      

Wandering At Morn

Wandering at morn,

 Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,

 Yearning for thee harmonious Union! Thee, singing bird divine! 

Thee coil’d in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay, with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee, 

This common marvel I beheld—the parent thrush I watch’d feeding its young. 

 The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,

 Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

 There ponder’d, felt I,

 If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn’d,

 If vermin so transposed, so used and bless’d may be,

 Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country; 

Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?

 From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,

 Destin’d to fill the world. 

 --Walt Whitman 

 When Whitman wrote these lines in 1855, those evil times were about to result in the Civil War. There have been many evil days in the history of this republic, but even on the eve of the worst rupture of the United States so far, Whitman could look beyond them to a long future. Now at this celebration of the nation, we face another rupture, and other mortal threats to the Republic (when asked what form of government the founders had settled on, Benjamin Franklin reputedly said—“a republic—if you can keep it.”) 

 The many threats to our democratic Republic and to the resilience of our government, our identity as a nation and its place in the world, as well as the rights and welfare of our people, are accompanied by a salient fact: unless we address our climate and environmental crises successfully, the future is likely to be short, and a dysfunctional America will shorten it further. There may not be time for another resurrection.

Whitman's faith in the American future arguably was fulfilled.  But with that Thrush and its world itself threatened, for us to believe in the possibilities sung in the second stanza requires more faith than Whitman’s.  Yet that future may depend on those who have that faith, or at least urgently act as if they did.

The New Song

For some time I thought there was time

 and that there would always be time

 for what I had a mind to do

 and what I could imagine

 going back to and finding it

 as I had found it the first time

 but by this time I do not know

 what I thought when I thought back then

 there is no time yet it grows less

 there is the sound of rain at night

 arriving unknown in the leaves

 once without before or after

 then I hear the thrush waking

 at daybreak singing the new song

--W.S. Merwin

photo by Cartier-Bresson