Winter Notes: These Cross-Quarter Days

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February 3: Cross-quarter days  We’ve gotten past about the longest January I think I can remember. The cold, the snow, the dreadful events impossible for any decent person to turn away from. The resultant grief. Offering support to those caught in this vortex of cruelty and violence visited on so many by the government is necessary—and somehow not enough. And yet. Just the other day I noticed that it was still light at 5 pm. Surprise! The dark post-solstice January pause is over; suddenly we’re at the cross-quarter days.  I say days advisedly: we are halfway between the solstice and the spring equinox, but measurement, like everything else I’ve ever heard of, depends on your perspective. Time, day and season depend on where you are, which calendar you use, even which astronomical calculations. St. Brigid's day is February 1,  and Groundhog Day is, of course, February 2, as is Candlemas. These are based on the Gregorian calendar, and are not quite the same as Imbolc,...
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April is Poetry Month 2014: Kumin's "The Brown Mountain"

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Maxine Kumin
This past year, we have lost fine poets that I grew up reading. Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Maxine Kumin all made nature their poetic home and the source of their word-hoards.  Each was from a different home ecosystem and thus utilized different language and imagery. Yet their subject matter carried in common the themes of beauty, death, love, and life with others that great lyric poetry entails. Walcott’s high-flown eloquence, Heaney’s stubborn earthiness, Kumin’s plain speech; all are worth reading and savoring.

Just recently I was out in the backyard stirring my still-frozen compost heap, muttering incantations--imprecations--under my breath as I endeavored to wake it up for spring.  Maxine Kumin lived on a horse farm, and her compost heap was of another order entirely. For Poetry Month this year I present her meditation on compost.

The Brown Mountain

What dies out of us and our creatures,
out of our fields and gardens,
comes slowly back to improve us:
the entire mat of nasturtiums
after frost has blackened them,
sunflower heads the birds have picked clean, the still
sticky stalks of milkweed
torn from the pasture, coffee grounds,
eggshells, moldy potatoes,
the tough little trees that once 
were crowded with brussels sprouts,
tomatoes cat-faced or bitten into
by inquisitive chipmunks,
gargantuan cucumbers gone soft
from repose. Not the corn stalks and shucks,
not windfall apples. These
are sanctified by the horses.
The lettuces are revised
as rabbit pellets, holy with nitrogen.
Whatever fodder is offered the sheep
comes back to us as raisins
of useful dung.

Compost is our future.
The turgid brown mountain
steams, releasing
the devil's own methane vapor,
cooking our castoffs so that from
our spatterings and embarrassments--
cat vomit, macerated mice,
rotten squash, burst berries,
a mare's placenta, failed melons,
dog hair, hoof parings--arises
a rapture of blackest humus.
Dirt to top-dress, dig in. Dirt fit
for the gardens of commoner and king.
 (From Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010)

Related Posts:
Walt Whitman, Deep Ecologist (Poetry Month 2013)
April is Poetry Month 2011
Gardener's Work
National Poetry Month in the Garden (2010)

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