poetry

Leave a comment Posted on March 8, 2024 Educational Ambassadors, podcast

Taking the crooked path

In one county to the east, toads and spring peepers sing in wetlands, warmed in the urban heat island. They are quiet here on The Quarry Farm. There is no hint of green as you look over the lowland treetops. Spring wildflowers have better sense than Golden-crowned Kinglet that conceal themselves as much as possible in bare treetops, calling their thin, high-pitched call to anyone that arrived a tad too early.

It was chilly enough for coats for the March 2 hike. We followed White-tailed Deer, Eastern Fox and Gray Squirrel and Wild Turkey tracks in the nature preserve. A Great Blue Heron left a nearly complete fish skeleton for us to find on the south bank of the quarry wetland. The birds were quiet, for the most part. Two days later, I counted 16 avian species in the short walk between the farm animal sanctuary and the pavilion. The temperature hit 74 degrees F. This weather is crazy. Today, the toads, salamanders and spring peepers remain burrowed deep under the quarry and oxbow water and forest floor leaf matter in anticipation of a weekend of rain and wet snow.

As the weather changes its mind, the wild and domestic animals here do not change theirs. Two weeks ago, our beloved, elderly Sophie, the best porcine educational ambassador ever, died. As always, the animals gathered around the grave until the ground was smoothed over. Donkeys Lucy and Silky had to be whispered to and hugged. Everyone slowly wandered away. Two weeks later, everyone is love-struck and besotted; infatuated and obsessed. Spring will be here officially on March 21. Spring twitterpation is now. The fostered re-wilding Canada Geese call to the wild ones on Cranberry Run. The goats bark and huff, bumping foreheads across the paddock. Patches, Pockets, Gerald, Mr. Fabulous, Caramel, Sydney and Chicken Ricky crow their rooster hearts out when American Woodcocks hurtle through the evening sky. Tom turkeys Edgar and Bernard strut their impressive stuff while turkey hen Souix does her best to avoid them. There is whole lot of “Get off my lawn!” happening this season.

During Winter’s coldest, the chickens warm their feet by riding around on the donkeys, pigs, and goats. I’m sure the feathered spot of warmth is soothing on the mammals’ backs. In the midst of Spring chest-thumping and display, two individuals share a daily lesson of tolerance and respect. Tom Turkey Bruce has always been unsteady on his feet. he came here a few years ago after being dumped in a park. He was found spinning in circles, unable to walk more than a few steps due to probable fattening in close confinement. Canada Goose “K” (named for the tag around his left ankle) prefers the company of Bruce to the rest of the Canada geese. K keeps an eye on Bruce, making sure the two are never far apart. In the evening, K will match steps with Bruce as he makes he slow way into the barn. On Monday, Steve watched the two approach the door. Bruce waivered when he got to the steps. As he turned away from the enclosure, K reached out and gently prodded Bruce into the building before hopping in behind him.

Tim Jasinski, Wildlife Rehabilitation Specialist for the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center, was interviewed recently for the podcast Wildlife Rehabilitation: From Rescue to Release. His focus was on Canada geese. Among other things, he talked about some of their behaviors that often make them a target of human aggression. Rather than try to understand the reason for why Canada geese do what they do, we drive them away or worse. But if a stranger walks up to your child and picks them up, wouldn’t you fight bill and flapping wing to stop them?

Three weeks from now, 31.6 percent of the global human population will celebrate a man who made the ultimate sacrifice for all. We observe the time leading up to the observance by meditating on written word, coloring eggs and eating fish on Fridays, all the while arguing—warring—about who should be even our most distant neighbor. What if we share the fish, and not just on Fridays?

1 Comment Posted on September 14, 2015October 10, 2015 Educational Ambassadors

almost autumn

almost autumn and the sky squeezes blue
through the eye, guilt
from a moment of weeks; two days,
one leaf between a bible

of pages

black and white and velvet brown feet pad
through fallen leaves.
and still another falls to join them
and another still
and another still

Just a week, now, until fall; seven days and yesterday felt every bit the season. We ferried Captain John, the opossum, and Carlton, the potbelly, to Lima for an evening program in the amphitheater at Johnny Appleseed’s Ottawa Metropark. It was cold in the bottomland where the structure sits, the wind constant and insinuating.

But this is less about that than it is about earlier in the day. For the first time in weeks, in months, yesterday afternoon we worked our way to the back field. Certainly because we missed the woods and the field, the stream where it runs past the quarry and the quarry itself, but also as an introduction. And in keeping with this Merlin of a post, where time first marched backward from evening to afternoon, now there’s cause to relate a time two weeks back…two weeks and two days, not to put too fine a point on it.

This is Cady.

Anne named her for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, among other things, was an American suffragist. Cady came to us through the Putnam County Dog Shelter. She was abandoned in a Columbus Grove apartment not too very long after she’d birthed pups and almost certainly not for the first time, the birthing or the abandonment. The county’s dog warden, Mike Schroth, let us know about her situation, granted us the opportunity to invite her into our family. So, 72 hours after the county assumed responsibility for her welfare and 48 hours after we introduced her to Mister Bill (who gave her a sniff and then turned his back) and to the chickens (who paid her no heed at all) and to the turkeys (who took an immediate dislike to her and now pester her wherever she goes within the fenced-in area that is the animal sanctuary, unrelentingly reminding me of that Sandra Boynton cartoon), Cady relinquished her given name, Baby, and came to The Quarry Farm, new baptized.

So, yesterday, 12 days after Baby became Cady, we introduced her to the wilder part of The Quarry Farm, the woods and fields beyond the fence. And again today, yesterday having proven a bounding success. With Lolly, Cady peered into Cranberry Run, braved the bridge, skirted the quarry, tore through the leaves on the main path to the back field, grazed her way across the field, padded along the ridge above Coburn’s Bottom and then back and back and back and back.

On the way, she passed, unremarked, goldenrod and ironweed

and a catalpa, alone, in the midst of the goldenrod,

a viceroy

and a dragon.

Who knows what she’ll see next time, Cady, in the fields and along the stream? Or the time after that, for she’s not going anywhere, our Cady.

Welcome home.

Leave a comment Posted on March 28, 2014 Uncategorized

Zen and the Art of Chicken Dancing

For those of you who’ve been paying any kind of attention, the fact that I have a singular fascination for one particular type of bird should come as no surprise. Chickens. I’m talking about chickens. For those of you who thought, “crows”, fair enough, but no. While all corvids caught my heart long ago, they’re a different chapter in the work-in-progress that is The Quarry Farm.

So, chickens. And, more to the point, my fascination with them. And, to grind out an even finer point, how that fascination manifests. I’ve spent more than a fair amount of time wandering with the birds that share this piece of ground with us. I’ve fed them, held them, chatted with them, sung to them and simply sat and pondered the meaning of life with them. And they do, in my opinion. Ponder the meaning of life. I assume, anyway, that that’s what they’re doing when they grow still and quiet, their eyes unfocused and staring. They’re trying to make sense of the nonsensical, resolve order out of the chaos that surrounds them. Or so I choose to believe in more contemplative moments.

Chickens. They’ve proven fine companions, a wellspring of calm and the source of a flurry of creativity. They have, and here we get right down to the point, served collectively as a literary muse, even going so far as to inspire a unique style of poetry. It has Asian roots, but its own voice and a distinctive East meets Midwest vibe.

We call it Chaiku.

Chaiku, in its most basic form is nonsense, but nonsense with a direction. Take this piece, entitled surprise and the very first chaiku originating at The Quarry Farm:

buck buck buck buck buck
buck buck breeawwk-uck buck buck
buck buckGAWWWK buck buck

There are, of course, other pieces that fit a more traditional mold. They range from the absurd

unconventional wisdom
Angry chickens dance,
feet drumming their dark fury.
A wise earth trembles.

to the comical

a matter of perspective
What is now a hen
was, times past, a dinosaur.
Respect your breakfast.

to the truly zen

scratch
Hungry red chicken
stalks the yard in fits and starts.
Too late, cricket jumps.

and

evening
red and purple sky
horned owls stir in cottonwoods
in the coop, silence

and

morning
little yellow house
staccato taps on white door
chickens are restless

Audrey, Too and Anne

Postscript This winter, eight new chickens, four roosters and four hens, joined the flock that calls The Quarry Farm home. They were part of a larger seizure of dogs, ponies, horses, pigs and fowl carried out by the Allen County Humane Society in the middle of what climatologists called the Polar Vortex and that I simply thought of as The Damned Cold Days. Suffice it to say that the conditions all of the animals were in were inadequate. The chickens came here skinny and dehydrated and while all bore signs of frostbite, some were missing toes and pieces of toes. One, a big white congenial rooster, didn’t survive the winter: a consequence, we believe, of both age and injury. So now there are seven: Wesley, who we suspect to be a bantam rooster cross; Audrey, Too, a red hen who has developed the habit of leaping to our shoulders or onto our arms; and two white roosters and three spotted white hens who have yet to reveal their names. At present, the individuals in the flock total 31, though with Easter on the horizon, that number is likely to rise.

1 Comment Posted on March 23, 2014March 25, 2014 Uncategorized

perhaps Spring

Coburn’s Bottom

This Winter past was tenacious, a Narnian epic of cold and ice and snow that took heed of D. Thomas’s advice to “…not go gentle…” Even so, Spring arrived this past week, though with very little fanfare, very few signs to tell the difference between Wednesday’s Winter and Thursday’s Spring.

There are hummocks of snow on the leeward side of slopes, dirty brown and coarse with thaw and freeze. In what some locals call Coburn’s Bottom, there is still ice where we would expect to find clear vernal pools, and ice on the quarry as well. Near the Cut Off we would ordinarily see signs of spring wildflowers: at the very least, their tender shoots breaking ground. But not this year, not yet. No trees that I have seen are budding and even the bane of The Quarry Farm, Japanese honeysuckle, seems lifeless and brown.

But as obstinate as this Winter has proven itself to be, Spring is equally resolute. The signs are there if you look sharp and keep your ears open.

Skunks and raccoons and squirrels all shriek and whistle and bark their intentions, whether amorous or combative. Turkey vultures are making their way back, riding what thermals they can find and woodcocks, too, those strange little baseballs with wings and beaks, buzzing and whickering in the night. I have seen a killdeer or two and heard a red-winged blackbird. And there is duckweed on the quarry and Canada geese and mallards and wood ducks.

So, rather than the raucous, slippery immediacy of Cumming’s in just-, we’re experiencing a different sort of Spring, something more along the lines of…

Spring Is Like a Perhaps Hand
By E.E. Cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

Leave a comment Posted on March 18, 2013March 18, 2013 Uncategorized

Signs

I woke up this morning with this in my head:

[In Just-]
by e.e. cummings

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and
the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

I have a passion for poetry and cummings is one of my favorite artists. Inevitably, this particular piece of work comes to mind at some point in March. While not the first sign of Spring, it is a significant one for me. Still, you needn’t look to the page, or even delve into the convolutions of my sleep-addled mind to find the artistry of onrushing Spring.

Of late I’ve seen the return of turkey vultures and red-winged blackbirds and American robins in arguing masses so large that they’ve painted an acre of the big back field nearly white with their droppings. I’ve heard the buzz of a woodcock and the whickering of its wings as it flew toward the moon to prove its worth to a potential mate. Skunks and ‘coons and squirrels quarrel and fight in the woods and Canada geese and mallard ducks, in flocks and individual pairs, holler from the quarry.

In the lowest lying areas of The Quarry Farm, back in the woods and well below the quarry itself, on the ground referred to by locals as Coburn’s Bottom, vernal pools have already formed. These temporary ponds serve as habitat for a host of ephemeral animals: fairy shrimp and salamanders and mayfly nymphs and dragonflies. Within a few months, the pools will have evaporated, but their inhabitants remain in burrows underground or as eggs, tiny packets of a potential future.

And then there’s the greening of the woods, with mosses already climbing up the trees and laying soft blankets on the ground. It’s easy to forget that this whole area was once rainforest. It’s easy to forget, that is, until you take the time to walk into an Ohio woods and take an honest look around. And if it’s not a matter of forgetting – if, in fact, you didn’t know – then the realization of where you are is an epiphany and you’ll never look at a stand of trees in Northwest Ohio in quite the same way again.

(e.e. cumming’s [in Just-] was originally published in The Dial, Volume LXVIII, Number 5: May, 1920)

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