Report: that I have been making progress when it comes to memorization: "Richard Cory" by Robinson, "Pied Beauty" by Hopkins, "Casabianca" by Bishop, "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" by Hopkins, "The Voice" by Hardy, "Three Moves" by John Logan, "Of Mere Being" by Stevens, "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Most of these have rhyme to help me along, except for "Of Mere Being," which was difficult, because it lacked this mnemonic device.

Recently I discovered James Schuyler, one of the New York poets who also qualifies as a nature poet, who puts nature off kilter enough to rouse the skeptical. This poem is one that's been an the back of my mind; now to bring it into the fore.


Salute

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

For the past year I've not written on this web site because (as anyone who googles me knows) I've maintained a web site, for my neighbors, on the great blue herons who nest in my neighborhood. The nesting area is threatened by development, not that they're an endangered species, yet I would still be sad to see them gone.

The heron site ended up under my name, when I'd intended to use a pseudonym, so that my public writing life would not be "soiled" by this purely local endeavor. And why do I regard the mixing of the two as soilage? Why don't I want it known that I spend/waste/utillize time not just in the supposedly high-minded task of writing poems but also in trying to make real change on a purely local level? Beats me. But I do not underestimate my capacity for shame.

The irony is: the heron web site may have hurt the herons. It alerted everyone to their presence, everyone including the developer, who promptly laid out his roadbed through the rookery (though the impact of the road waits to be seen).

One of the reasons I haven't written anything here is that for the past year I've been writing on a web site/blog that is devoted to a great blue heron rookery (nesting area) in my neighborhood that is threatened by development and which state biologists hadn't been aware of. The result is that the developer must build in such a way that minimizes impacts to the herons (which are not endangered). And the primary victory is that herons continue to nest there despite logging of the development site and the access road to the development, which runs through the rookery.


Here is a poem about the GBH that someone made me aware of when I was blogging for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Turns out that it is Portland's official bird, and William Stafford was commissioned to write a poem about it.



Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron" by William Stafford

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from the dawn to the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.
It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
"If you keep the faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is."

This anthropomorphosizes the bird a bit more than I would like, but I think it is terribly difficult to write "the civic poem."