At 5:22 Pacific this nest in Florida held one Bald Eagle sleeping head tucked under wings in a cold and blustering wind.
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Thanks for that link, I’ll be monitoring it along with this eagle cam in Big Bear, California
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4-L2nfGcuE
fine link.
-stopped at the southern boundary of the Great Dismal Swamp on a grey winter morning and was treated to a bald eagle perched in tree along with the wake of a beaver heading towards his lodge. The surface was partially iced and there was a scattering of snow present. Reeds, pines, cypress, oak bearing mistletoe rose from water and low ground.
It was quiet, cold, cogent.
Took fotos, now lost.
Keepin them babies warm – see that chick peepin out from under?
Always have loved raptors, especially big hawks and eagles – alone, unafraid, unashamed. I lived for years in cities, San Antonio and Chicago and San Francisco and Oakland, until I finally started to get out to a place in the Oakland Hills in ’89. It was just below Skyline Drive, which is the line along the top of the hills you see looking East from the city or the Gate Bridge, beyond which is only down, into the valley through the tunnel of the East Bay.
I’ve always been a walker/hiker, and I started up the hill even before I got unpacked. Past Skyline I walked East into the woods to where I was standing on the edge facing America, behind me downhill all the way to Japan. For what seemed like the first time in years I got quiet, quiet enough that the little critters started coming out and getting surprised to see a human in their neighborhood.
And then I heard a whoomp of wings and looked up to see a golden eagle approximately the size of a 747, stepping out of a nest right over my head about 20 feet up.
A few years later I saw Baldies in Alaska on a cruise ship gig, in Sitka where they’re as common as starlings. Massive and impressive, but nothing will ever compare with stepping into that Golden’s back yard unexpectedly.
Rob, I know that area around Skyline Drive well. I dated a girl who was a member of the first class after Skyline High School was opened. You could walk around in those woods and get lost and forget you were in the center of a metropolitan mass. This was in the early sixties. The area may be a drug user camping area now.
I had to make the drive from the town of Sonora in the Sierra foothills (100+miles) but the trip was worth it.
Currently there are dozens of Bald Eagles perched in trees watching for the cows to drop their calves. Bald and Golden Eagles eat the after birth. I live a couple miles from the convergence of the Lemhi and Salmon rivers in Idaho.
Nice morning today, mainly clear skies and -11 deg F. Great weather for birds of prey watching.
Love the Dismal-Matamuskeet area. Bald eagles, ospreys, marsh hawks. The best place I’ve seen for baldies was the Snake River canyon. They sit in the treetops, but from the road above the canyon, they look like they’re sitting in bushes right on the side of the road.
have property near there.
heard noise in the barn at dusk, went up the stairs to the loft and a hawk, lightbluish-grey, was trying to get out through a closed window. I tried to open it, the hawk was about two feet away and above beating its wings. I had maybe forty seconds of watching at that distance- it was beautiful. it finally glided down into the eaves and I got the window open. gone in the morning.
had a chamois cloth on a nail, dried as they do. looked close and there was a tiny bird nestled in the folds asleep. had a long look then got the wife so she could see. walked away. gone in the morning.