norbert blei | night notes

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No.169 | February 19, 2009

NIGHT NOTES: 2/19/09

It’s a line I heard late last night on public radio, the BBC overnight news. About 2:15 A.M. I noted it so I would not forget, come daybreak. I noted both the time and the line–a line I wish I had come up with.

How could I not have thought it? Seen it? Said it? Made the comparison?

The BBC reporter was in Canada, discussing Obama’s visit there today, relating some of the reactions amongst the Canadians. And suddenly there it was, coming over the darkest airwaves at two in the morning in my own living room…there was the line, hanging there… glowing in the dark.

I memorized it immediately. And for safe-keeping, turned on my reading lamp, reached for pencil and paper, and wrote it down:

“Obama is the Miles Davis of politicians,” I heard the voice say.

Jesus! Of course! Of course! Perfect!

KIND OF BLUE…(I reached for my old LP copy)…all the while visualizing the dark man with the bright horn on stage, alone (he was always all alone)…”So What”, “Freddie Freeloader”, “Blue in Green”, “All Blues”, “Flamenco Sketches”.

I switched to the stereo, set the old LP on the turntable, put the arm and needle down on “All Blues”…let the sound envelop the room.

I turned the record jacket over to an incredible little ‘jacket note’ penned by no other than Bill Evans (“Improvisation In Jazz”) …and swallowed the first three paragraphs like a poem:

“There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

“The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.

“This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.”

Obama…the Miles Davis of politicians.

–Norbert Blei/night notes/2/I9/09

norbert blei | the poetry of persona and the divided self

Poetry Dispatch No. 269 | February 6, 2009

The Poetry of Persona and the Divided Self
by
Norbert Blei

Not every poet finds a reason or need to develop a voice within a voice, another ‘persona’ if you will, but for sometime a number of poets (Americans in particular) have been getting outside/inside themselves in a way writers of fiction create `characters’ or characters to voice other levels of meaning.

CAUTION: It may seem an easy thing to do. But it’s not something you can play around with like: “I think today I’ll write a sonnet” ten consider yourself Shakespeare. Rather…it’s a voice that may (or may not) call you when you are ready to listen—and record. One way or another, life itself propels you in this direction. Which is always the way of authentic writing. When it’s bullshit, it’s bullshit. When it’s true, it’s true.

The late John Berryman, author of an American classic, THE DREAM SONGS, is one of these poets who introduces the character of Henry in his work. A likeable guy. So much so that the reader begins to feel comfortable in the possibility that Berryman and Henry are one or share the same sensibility which the recorded moment requires—sad, sensitive, self-indulgent, self-disparaging, confessional roustabouts with something unsettling to say about life, art, the American dream:

Books drugs razor whisky shirts
Henry lies ready for his Eastern tour,
swollen ankles, one hand,
air reservations. Friends at the end of the hurts,
a winter mind resigned: literature
must spread, you understand,

–from “Dream Song 169” of THE DREAM SONGS, Farra, Strauss, Giroux

Henry = Berryman? Some resemblance, perhaps. Though Berryman himself states: “The poem, then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white-American in early middle age sometimes in black face, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof. Requiescat in pace.”

Paul Zimmer, (FAMILY REUNION: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, THE ZIMMER POEMS, etc. University of Pittsburg Press) is an immensely entertaining yet serious poet with his own special take on an alter ego who looks at the real world through the small-town eyes of a character named Zimmer. The titles alone pull you immediately into his world: “Zimmer and the Ghost”, “Zimmer Remembering Wanda”, “Zimmer Imagines Heaven”, “Zimmer’s Last Gig”, “Zimmer Is Icumen In”…

ZIMMER’S HEAD THUDDING AGAINST THE BLACKBOARD

At the blackboard I had missed
Five number problems in a row,
And was about to foul a sixth,
When the old, exasperated nun
Began to pound my head against
My six mistakes. When I cried,
She threw me back into my seat,
Where I hid my head and swore
That very day I’d be a poet,
And curse her yellow teeth with this.

My friend, Illinois poet of the people and the prairie, Dave Etter, has to date never developed a whole book of poems to a character of his named Doreen (shades of an old high school sweetheart, word has it) but she pops up occasionally in his work, especially in a book of prose poems, HOME STATE (Spoon River Poetry Press).

PAJAMAS

Doreen always sleeps in a pajama top—that’s all. Winter or summer, just a pajama top. Who wears the bottoms? How would I know? Nobody, I guess. She probably uses them for dust rags, or maybe she gives them away to some girl who sleeps only in pajama bottoms. The way Doreen squirms and kicks her legs in bed, I can understand very well why she opts for tops over bottoms. What do I wear between the sheets? Well, it’s none of your business, but if you must know, I wear neither pajama tops or pajama bottoms. You wouldn’t either if you slept with Doreen.

On the international scene, one poet in particular of the post-modernist school, Zbigniew Herbert of Poland, brings a thoughtful character to light, Mr. Cogito, who seems to carry the whole sad history of Eastern Europe on his shoulders as he ponders the state of our times.

MR COGITO THINKS OF RETURNING TO THE CITY WHERE HE WAS BORN

If I went back there
probably I wouldn’t find
even shadow from my house
nor the trees of childhood
nor the cross with n iron plate
the bench where I whispered incantations
chestnuts and blood
not a single thing that is ours…
…while all around
piles of ash are growing
up to my shoulders
up to my mouth

from MR. COGITO, The Ecco Press

Back in the rural Midwest, over in Minnesota, the poet Leo Dangel sometimes sees the world through Old Man Brunner’s magnificent, munificent eyes:

OLD MAN BRUNNER SITS ON HIS PORCH

Old Man Brunner never cuts his weeds.
Right up to the house,
sunflowers and fire weeds
grow tough and hard as small trees.
In the summer evening, Old Man Brunner
sits and surveys his jungle,
his sleeves rolled up,
his cracked shoes beside him.
Old man Brunner’s feet are white,
white as angel feet.
He hold one white foot in his brown hand
and cuts his toenails
with a tin shears.

-from OLD MAN BRUNNER COUNTRY, Spoon River Poetry Press

It is almost impossible to read any of the many collections of the late Bukowski’s (Charles) poems, stories and novels and not come up with a street-wise character, part buffoon, part philosopher, part loser, part poet…semi-serious slant on himself, Bukowski likes to call Chinaski:

THE SOULLESS SELF

I met the movie star, he’s playing Chinaski
in my new movie, I pout my hand on his shoulder: “you’re
all right, Ben,” I tell him.
then the famous Italian director puts his leg up on
the table: “now I’ll drink with you Chinaski,” he says.
(that’s the way he always drinks, I’m told.)
“o.k.,” I say and I put my leg up on the table.
I drain my glass, he fills it again, I drain it
Again, he fills it again.
they know I’m a real guy then.

-from, OPEN ALL NIGHT, Black Sparrow Press

Tom Montag, one of our best Wisconsin poets did a book, Ben Zen THE OX OF PARADOX with my press, (Cross+Roads Press) in l999 which is a wonder to read, behold. I won’t say It’s all Zen; I won’t say it isn’t Zen. I will say that for any reader with the slightest interest in the subject, not to mention a love of poetry—Tom Montag speaks to you in this book—through the simple presence of a wise old farmer, who sounds a lot like a Zen monk, speaking in koans:

Engineers are like poets,
Ben says, only backwards.

If you don’t have
Truth in your heart

You won’t know
What you have.

Anything will fit, Ben says.
You just have to learn to wear it.

Oh to a be the junkman, Ben says.
To have everything no one wants.

Much as I’ve been,
Ben says,
I’ve never been enough.

There do not seem to be as many women writing the poetry of persona as men, though one in particular, Lyn Lifshin, whom I have read for more than twenty years in hundreds of little magazines, has written “more than a thousand” (she tells me) “Madonna” poem (in addition to her regular poetry) and is still writing them. Her “Madonna” is—ribald, rambunctious, erotic, excessive, demanding, demeaning, ironic, iconic, horny, heady, outspoken, outrageous…born to deliver the double whammy. Her latest books are: COLD COMFORT and BEFORE IT’S LIGHT (Black Sparrow Press). Collections of her Madonna poems, are hard to find. Check out: www.lynlifshin.com I leave you in her (“Madonna’s”), warm, anxious hands:

MADONNA OF THE MESSY HOUSE

around her bed:
spoons like lovers
licked and left

LEFTOVER MADONNA

makes you feel
good twice

WOK MADONNA

gets you going
fast, leaves
you in your
own juices

INDIAN SUMMER MADONNA

unexpectedly hot
but she doesn’t stay

MADONNA OF THE SEVEN DWARFS

is into feminism
likes to tower over men
thinks of them all as dopey

POETRY SUCKS MADONNA

takes what she
can’t use
and uses it
so it won’t
use her

from Wormwood Reviews, #’s 82, 87, 92, 117

For a number of years now a local character by the name of Olaf has been knocking on my door, pulling up a chair here in the coop, drinking all my brandy, telling me some of the damnedest stories. But I’ll save him for another time.

norbert blei | updike’s poems

Poetry Dispatch No.267 | January 29, 2009

UPDIKE’S POEMS

by
Norbert Blei

He was one of our last major American writers who also paid attention to a lost art form: light verse. There was always humor in Updike’s lines, but he seemed especially fond of playing with words, rhythm, sound and ideas, “lightly’ in verse.

A contemporary of his, Phyllis McGinley, the queen of suburban light verse (THE LOVE LETTERS OF PHYLLIS McGINLEY, 1954) achieved considerable fame and respect herself in this form, though she came nowhere close to ‘also’ mastering the novel, the short story, journalism, criticism and ‘serious’ poetry.

As I continue to downsize my considerable library, I come upon book after ‘cheap’ paperback book–faded covers, yellowed or tanned pages, margin notes, underlined passages, bent spines or books still spotless, brand new…priced 35¢, 75¢, $1.00, $1.25 etc. Who could possibly love or honor these books more than I? All small, precious ‘pocket books’ that I cannot—give away? Sell? Trash? Who would want this stuff today, given what’s out there? Of what possible value would these antique texts be to anyone but (hopefully)…a ‘young’ writer who prefers to hold a real book in his hands? Or a serious reader? Any reader at all? This is the stuff even a library doesn’t want. Literary fodder. Extinct. Books destined to be ‘disappeared’ in one manner or another. So… I may as well keep them and request to be burned and buried with my old paperback books.

Among these, I find and delight in (once again), young Updike’s light verse.

FOREWORD

My poems, at Mammon’s grim behest,
Have been collected here by Crest.
Forgive them, if they seem to thin;
Diaphanousness is no sin
In ballerinas’ skirts, so why
My own transparency decry?
It pleased me once to write them, and
I’m pleased to place them in your hand.

[from VERSE, Crest, 1965, 75¢]

THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING HOME

Was I clever enough? Was I charming?
Did I make ay least one good pun?
Was I disconcerting? Disarming?
Was I wise? Was I wan? Was I fun?

Did I answer that girl with white shoulders
Correctly, or should I have said
(Engagingly), “Kierkegaard smolders,
But Eliot’s ashes are dead?”

And did I, while being a smarty,
Yet some wry reserve slyly keep,
So they murmured, when I’d left the party,
“He’s deep. He’s deep. He’s deep”?

[from VERSE, Crest, 1965, 75¢]

As much as my life is devoted to reading and writing, as fortunate as I am to be always near, in touch with writers, artists, readers, here/there/everywhere, I have rarely heard ‘serious poet’ come up in any discussion of John Updike. “They” will give him his light verse…but then it’s off to his ‘pretty prose”, his cultural perceptiveness, his sexual city and suburban motifs in short and long narratives.

But here’s a reminder: the man wrote a hell of a ‘serious’ poem as well. Don’t ever forget—or deny him this.

Who knows when any writer ‘discovers’ death creeping into his work for the first time. For some, it’s there in the very beginning. For others, it slips into his or her mid-life prose and poems. Still others may inadvertently write ‘goodbye’ only days or months before they write the final word.

ALL of the above seems ‘probably” true in Updike’s light and heavy world of getting one’s whole life down in words.

Burning Trash

At night—the light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy source—he thought of death.
Her father’s hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.

One was the cheerful fullness of most things:
Plump stones and clouds, expectant pods, the soil
Offering up pressure to his knees and hands.
The other was burning the trash each day.
He liked the heat, the imitation danger,
And the way, as he tossed in used-up news,
String, napkins, envelopes, and paper cups,
Hypnotic tongues of order intervened.

[Collected Poems 1953-1993 , Knopf, 1993]

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market-
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

[from Collected Poems 1953-1993, Knopf, 1993]

The poem, “Requiem” by all indications was John Updike’s most recent—and last word on the subject. It will appear in a forthcoming collection of his work:

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
‘Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise – depths unplumbable!
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
‘I thought he died a while ago.’
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

norbert blei | skating backwards

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 167 | January 27, 2009

Skating Backwards

by
Norbert Blei

Once after the war the small boy went from the city in a new blue Buick convertible and skated a frozen river in a forest preserve with his favorite uncle who was like a father to him.

Uncle Stephan was a soccer player, a soft ball player, an archer, a photographer, a singer, and a speed skater. He was married to Aunt Edith who always complained about her health. Uncle Stephan had a thin mustache and wore flashy shirts and pants the boy’s father called race track clothes. The blue Buick convertible, the family suspected, was bought on the black market after the war when new cars were almost impossible to buy. Uncle Stephan, who worked for his family’s business, which he hated, was a neighborhood butcher who provided for the family during the war when food was scarce. Packages of meat wrapped in pink butcher paper and tied in coarse string would miraculously appear once a week behind their kitchen doors.

There was some mystery and jealousy to Uncle Stephan which was never mentioned outright. Something about the way he dressed, the way he spent money, the way he ignored Aunt Edith while she worshipped him, which was whispered by the father, the mother, aunts and uncles in the family. But in Uncle Stephan’s presence all this disappeared. The family always seemed happy to see him. Everyone ate and drank and laughed and told stories. Often stories in another language. Sometimes Uncle Stephan would reach for the small boy, “Come here, Sport,” grab him and tickle him till the boy screamed, and Aunt Edith would scold the uncle, accuse him of acting like a child, and the boy, filled with laugher and tears, would come back for more.

He loved Uncle Stephan, who often took him for thick strawberry malts, drove him around the city in his black market Buick with the top down, kidded him about girls, taught him to play soccer and soft ball. Uncle Stephan knew everything. All the boy’s aunts loved him. Including the boy’s mother.

“Okay, Sport,” he said to the boy as they approached the frozen river,” let’s see if you can catch me.”

In the boy’s eyes, he had entered a Christmas card world of woods and snow and children in bright mufflers skating on ice in an afternoon sun slowly turning to twilight skies and lavender shadows, backlighting the black branches etched in snow. He skated very slowly, uncertain of his balance, absorbing the natural world around him, feeling a part of it. It was like nothing he ever witnessed or felt in his neighborhood. Nothing so alluring as a river and the quiet of a forest in winter.

This was the same river where one summer he stood on a bridge and watched men fish from green wooden row boats with white numbers painted on the bow. Bullheads and carp and sunfish were somewhere under his feet at the moment, somewhere under the ice. This was the same river he had seen his Uncle Stephan one golden autumn kissing a woman against a tree. The boy pushed hard with his blades, glided, pushed again and fell. Got up and followed the curving river of ice, his legs shaking.

Up ahead he could hear Uncle Stephan singing, see him moving gracefully on black leather skates with long silver blades. See him making a beautiful arc in the distance and pause to wait for the boy under the bare branches of an old willow tree leaning over the frozen bank. A young girl about the same age as the boy, stood next to him.

“Here he comes,” he could hear his uncle tell the girl. “He likes you. He’s shy around pretty girls.” Both the girl and the uncle smiled and began skating backwards in circles around the boy as he approached.

The girl had beautiful dark eyes and long brown hair. She wore a red coat, red mittens, and furry white earmuffs. She stopped in front of the boy and extended her arms toward him. The boy took hold of the girl’s red-mittened hands and followed her as she skated backwards, pulling him toward her.

Slowly he fell into the rhythm, push…pull, push…pull…

The boy was in love with the girl, the long white river of ice, the black branches of the trees overhead against the falling light. The uncle went back to the car to get his camera and took a picture of them skating away from him down the river, holding hands, balancing each other. Neither had much to say and the afternoon passed quickly.

“Time to go, Sport,” the uncle yelled. “It’s getting dark.”

Years later, alone on a small lake a great distance from the city, near an invisible Canadian border where he settled in midlife, the boy who is now the age of his Uncle that afternoon on the river, skates backwards in the night, swiftly gliding around and around a frozen lake, extending his arms toward the darkness, pulling it with him.

Copy of the original publication of the hand-painted cover edition of 25 copies.

from WINTER BOOK, Ellis Press, 2002; originally published by Chris Halla, Page 5, #6, (Limited Edition), 1995, as a chapter of an experimental novel, WHAT I KNOW BY HEART SO FAR. Winter Book is a mature performance with a satisfying sense of completion. The season is winter; the dominant theme is the acceptance of small wonders, including decay and obscurity. Like Blei himself, Winter Book is alternately nostalgic, angry, and amusing. It is in some respects a very public book, in others a very personal collection. The journalistic profiles are Blei’s own experiences and friends, including public figures like Chan Harris and Al Johnson, and Door County natives, poets, musicians, and artists. Blei’s fictions explore the Door landscape on a deeper level. Blei is an astute observer whose attitudes are shared by readers inside and outside the County. Once again the personal becomes the public, and Winter Book, like Door Way, records communal experience.

david clewell | new year’s eve letter to friends

Poetry Dispatch No. 263 | December 31, 2008

Christmas to New Year (2009)
“Memoir” Dispatches, #7

DAVID CLEWELL

Editor’s Note: I’ve been sending this poem to friends on New Year’s Eve for more than ten years. The same poem. It’s become my ‘Auld Lang Syne”, my “White Christmas”, my “As Time Goes By”, my… Good words have staying power. Admittedly every year I look for something different, something new, something, perhaps, even better. But I’ve never found it and honestly don’t believe a better poem exists for this moment. At least for me, how I see myself and others in time, present history, emotional ups and downs, all those everyday feelings of “in-spite-of-everything-it’s-okay” one wishes to pass on to friends. There’s also something about the poem at this historical point in our country’s time that is almost prophetic. Poems as commonly original as this possess that quality too: they always speak to the here and now.

I once ‘knew’ the poet, David Clewell, in a correspondent sort-of-way, a friend of other writer-friends (Dave Etter in particular), maybe thirty years ago, when Clewell was already on his way of becoming somebody in poetry, and I was still struggling as a ‘former Chicago writer’ with a meager reputation, howling in the rural, exiled on a peninsula in Door County, Wisconsin. (His book, from which this poem is taken, went on to win the National Poetry Series selection in 1989.)

Clewell used to haunt used bookstores—and occasionally send me some rare find, which he sensed was meant for me. And he was always right. Just the book I needed to read at that time. But life has a way of clouding over things, disappearing things before your very eyes—friends as well. Which is some of what this New Year’s Eve poem is about. Not forgetting friends who keep us alive. Passing on this generosity of spirit.

I hope through the mystery of cyber space this note somehow finds its way to Dave, wherever he is these days. But then, he surely lives forever in this poem. And the bowl and spoon continues to be passed on, received, with immense gratitude. —Norbert Blei

P.S. Dear reader, please open the link to “wisdombook” after the poem.

New Year’s Eve Letter to Friends

by David Clewell

Every year the odds are stacked against it
turning out the way you’d like:
a year of smooth, a year of easy smile,
a year like a lake you could float on,
looking up at a blue year of soothing sky.

Mostly the letters you’re expecting never come.
Lovers walk out and keep on going
and in no time they’re no friend of yours.
Mostly, the sheer weight of days
gone awfully wrong: a tire blown out,
someone’s heart caving in,
the hole worn finally through the roof.
Sometimes it’s only a few tenacious cells
digging in against complete dissolve.
The smallest strand of DNA, stretched thin
over thousands of years, goes taut
and finally holds.

I’ve watched men at the Mission staring out
into the middle distance,
putting up with the latest version of salvation,
all the time wondering just
how long until the bowl and spoon.
They’ve been around long enough to know
the good part’s always saved for last and
there’s no promise they won’t make to get there.
Each year cuts our life down to size,
to something we can almost use. So we find it
somewhere in our hearts: another ring shows up
when we lay open the cross-section.
One more hard line in the hand
spreading slowly out of its clench.

It used to be the world was so small
You could walk out to the end of it
and back in a single day. Now it seems
to take all year to make it mostly back.
And so this is for my friends all over:
a new year. Year the longshot comes home.
The year letters pour in, full of the good word
that never got as far as you before.
The year lovers come to know a good thing
When they find it in the press of familiar flesh.
Walk out onto the planet tonight. Even the moon
is giving back your share of borrowed light
and you take it back, in the name of everything
you can’t take back in your life.
Imagine yourself filling with it,
letting yourself go and floating
through the skeleton trees to your place
at the top of the sky.

And here’s the best part, coming last,
just after all your practiced shows of faith.
Even now, while you’re still salvaging
what passes for resolve.
Remember this, no matter what else happens:
this year you’ll never go without.
It’s no small thing you’ve been in line for,
this bowl and spoon passed finally to you.

from BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE, Viking, 1991

David Clewell has published seven collections of poems–most recently, The Low End of Higher Things – and two booklength poems (The Conspiracy Quartet and Jack Ruby’s America). His work has appeared regularly in a wide variety of magazines, including Harper’s, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Ontario Review, New Letters, and Yankee. His poetry is represented in five-dozen anthologies. He’s been the recipient of the Pollak Poetry Prize (for Now We’re Getting Somewhere) and the Lavan Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His Blessings in Disguise was a winner in the National Poetry Series.

Clewell teaches poetry workshops (introductory and advanced), 19th & 20th C. literature, and topics-in-poetry seminars. He directs the Creative Writing program and coordinates the attendant Visiting Writer Series, which he started in 1986.

WISDOM – http://www.wisdombook.org/

norbert blei | down to the lake

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No.164 | December 26, 2008

Christmas to New Year (2009)
‘Memoir’ Dispatches, #3

Editor’s Note: This is the third, end-of-the-year/holiday, offering in words to date as I consider the various interpretations of December, winter, Christmas, the coming year. Please check the first, “Carol Ordal”, now archived with the original postcard mentioned in the piece, at www.poetrydispatch.wordpress.com, and the second posting, a winter haiku by Imakito Oku at www.bashosroad.outlawpoetry.com . It’s my hope to send a daily posting in this spirit till (and including) January 1, 2009. Please read, enjoy—and send it around, if you feel so inclined. — Norbert Blei.

P.S. The first jpeg (painted by Charles ‘Chick’ Peterson) remains pretty true-to-form at this winter moment in Door(though deeper in snow); the second is an audio cassette cover ‘a voice’ in winter; the third, the short, complete Epilogue from the book from which the following excerpt was taken

Down to the Lake

Epilogue

He steps into another day much as any other day, looking for something … something to orient himself, re-adjust his presence…something to make the day new, different…something to retrieve out there, bring back to the table. Whatever it is that lies in wait, comes alive inside his own musings, ultimately turns him back on the same path, anxious to begin again.

He walks down the same road toward the same small lake as he has done for years…usually uncertain of the season, the mind busy shuffling images, thoughts, conversations, passages from books, poems… memories of other days walking the same road…the night before, yesterday morning, last week, years ago… his two small children pulling a wooden wagon filled with buckets of bright cherries picked from there across the road, where once an orchard grew … summers in a red rowboat drifting on the small lake, the bobber centered in ripples, the circles widening to infinity, to nothing but smooth water…fishing for bass and perch near the old boathouse, when the old boathouse and the dock were still there to lend a primitive spirit to all the lake touched along its shores …when the lake was mostly unknown, unmarked, hard to find, and quiet but for the wind singing over the water, inside the trees…when the lake took you by surprise in winter, snow-blinded you, held your footprints on ice, encompassed you in an immensity of white merging into the horizon … memories of small, ancient-like bonfires on a winter’s night, townspeople gathering to skate…that time the snowy owl sat for days in the maple there on the way down to the lake.…times of pink prairie rose in bloom along the road in spring… autumns of wild apples and northern lights…the winter his old neighbor crawled through the parlor window, snow drifted so heavily against the door…

He walks in a diminishing darkness toward that moment night recedes behind him, and the slightest glimmer of first light begins spreading over the east, over the road, the woods, the small lake waiting ahead. He has come to love this moment when the night withdraws the darkest mysteries, uncovering the landscapes bare truths—dirt roads, telephone lines, chimney smoke, a black dog watching him from a distance, white birch trees, an entanglement of branches, evergreens, fallen trees…the long history of stone fences.

A day of no particular date but a sense of winter in retreat, the earth turning over on its back…maple sap running. A wake-up feeling of cold upon his face, around his neck, down his shoulders …a comforting cold, flipping his collar up, catching a slap of wind in the eye, loosening a trickle of cold-warm tears upon the cheeks…a tickling sensation of gentle flakes of snow falling invisibly, though the old road appears newer, whiter.

The black dog, catching up with him, running ahead, stopping, turning to gaze at the man, running forward in a frenzy again…the joyousness of dumb animal life, constant curiosity and playfulness, plummeting toward whatever lies ahead, while the man lumbers in the animal’s wake…waiting for the mind to empty…hands curled warmly inside black mittens, snow flakes tickling his face, the wind in play in the tips of the tall pines just ahead, swaying so slightly. He stops to watch the wind in the trees, the towering height of pines and hardwoods on both sides of the road, leading down to the lake–the density and darkness of the woods beyond and within …nowhere he cared to tread. He might never find his way back again.

He comes to the small crest in the road he knows so well…the ‘hill’ where his children went sledding in winter…the hill from which he catches a first glimpse of the small lake…so easy to saunter down in his walk toward the water. More breathtaking to negotiate on his way back.

His mind, in every direction this morning …returning to that field of tall pine he passed moments ago…once an open farmland, stone-picked, then gone to weed—fox dens, milkweed, songbirds, mushrooms, wild asparagus. Years later, pine seedlings were planted by the county forester…hundreds of finger-length pines tucked in place, row upon row, up and down the empty field from the road to his old neighbor’s house in the far distance. How long ago was that? He can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Long enough for those seedlings to reach the height of thirty feet or more. Nobody now cares about the open field turned to thick pine, the stone fence that ran forever down the property line, why the old neighbor lived so far in from the road you could barley see light in his windows at night …the sweet strawberries he grew and gave away, the flower garden of huge poppies, orange and pink, he tended in memory of his wife, the birdhouses he made from hollow cedar logs raised on poles high in the air, or nailed to the sides of the barn…how he died one night in his rocking chair a long time ago, looking out the front window, facing the first snowfall upon the new pine seedlings.

It’s still early, still almost dark but growing lighter the closer he moves down to the lake. Another gray-on-white day. Nobody’s about. No one on the road. Nobody on the lake. No light in the few farmhouses he could see. Hardly anyone living here this time of the year— remembering those early years he found himself alone among distant neighbors. He longs to get back to that. A time that occasionally visits him on days like this, early morning. Winter. The land the way it used to be.

He approaches the small lake…that opening at the end of the road, an expanse harboring drifts of snow, wind-swept clearings of pure ice…not a sound but his own breathing.

He takes a tentative first step out, into it all…breaking through the snow crust…punching in footsteps…heading toward the center, the first small clearing, an island of ice.

He hears the wind come up from behind him. Sees morning light, a lighter shade of gray, reaching up into the trees across the white lake. Watercolor gray, a Payne’s Gray an artist might spread in a wet wash…to catch it, hold it…cold, warm… make it all come alive in that moment of absolute solemn, moving light.

If he shuts out everything inside, if he concentrates on only the stillness, he can hear the sound of snow falling. His blood coursing.

He is inside a snow dome. Turned upside down. Under the ice, fish frozen in place, circle the darkness in wonder of water. Above, snow filters down upon the solitary man, alive in a glass ball…vanished upon a small lake.

The center of white. Where the only road leads.

He looks to the heavens, feels the gentlest flakes bless his forehead, nose, eyes… opens his mouth, childlike, in communion, tasting the sacred quiet.

He stays that way a long time…standing on ice… snow coming to an end…lighter, warmer…isolation, loneliness, love. Just being there.

The walk back would come soon enough…turning, retracing his path.

The walk back would be the same.

The clutter would reassert itself. Thoughts invade his steps. Hands on his watch tell time. Somewhere in the distance a truck would start up. A door slam. A dog bark. His own heavy breath, speak to him, as he trudged up the hill.

The light would be behind him now.

There would be sun.

He would be walking into his own shadow.

from MEDITATIONS ON A SMALL LAKE, A Door County Classic/New, Expanded Edition, Ellis Press, 2008, $15

Editor’s Note #2 (‘almost’ a commercial): In the spirit of gift-giving, buying, choosing…(BOOKS!)…a fleeting thought… ‘after Christmas’ offer, of sorts. In case you bought the wrong gift for someone, forgot to give someone a gift, want to give a gift to yourself, etc.…MEDITATIONS ON A SMALL LAKE has a long record (third printing) as the perfect gift for just about any occasion, especially Christmas. It’s also appropriate for summer visitors to Door County, for people concerned about the preservation of the environment, be it Door County or anywhere else in the world, and for anybody e just trying to get a feel for this unique place. 112 pages. Illustrated—by two of the county’s best artists: Emmett Johns and Charles Peterson.

Given the current economic pressures…How to make $15 (plus $2.50 postage go even further??? Well, until DECEMBER 31, 2008 and/or till the current shipment lasts (ie. the shipment from my publisher, which I help distribute for him to a few stores in the county throughout the year) I will include, at no extra charge, (while the supply lasts) a copy of the audio-cassette (a $10 value) “The Quiet Time—Door County in Winter” (readings by Norb Blei/Music by Jim Spector) which includes one of the most popular, frequently played/read pieces at this time of year: “Christmas Eve in Door.”

To makes things easier (worse?) I’m prepared to help out the economy be even extending a little credit—should you need it. (I’m a trusting soul.) Send $17.50. When you can. (The sooner the better.) But please, send it by the end of January, 2009.

In the meantime/for now: If you would like a copy of the book and tape, just e-mail me your address or the address you would like it sent to. I will put both in the mail…well, as early as tomorrow, for any orders coming in before tomorrow’s post dispatch from Ellison Bay (11:30 A.M.) If you would like the book signed or inscribed, please include the name(s).

MEDITATIONS ON A SMALL LAKE by Norbert Blei

In the forty years since Chicago writer Norbert Blei bought an old farmhouse and settled into northern Door County to live and write, he has built a considerable body of work (stories, essays, poems, public/commercial radio commentaries, public television programs, newspaper columns, magazine articles, online writing, and books) devoted to his adopted landscape, expressing both his love and concern for the stark beauty of this fragile,Wisconsin peninsula.

While the writer continues to address the loss of rural character and community in print media, online writing (www. bleidoorcountytimes.com), and books, this new, expanded third reprint of his 1987 bestselling book, Meditations on a Small Lake, remains a testament to the changing times—informative and thoughtful in its defense of the preservation of the natural landscape, be it Door County or any rural landscape threatened by over development and crass commerce as “place” attempts to retain some sense of history and spirit.

The author has added three new essays to Meditations on a Small Lake, and substituted the original photographs of the first two printings with drawings by artist Emmett Johns, casting a whole new light and feeling to the book’ interior.The quiet, starkly beautiful and arresting cover drawing by Charles Peterson of Ephraim continues to retain its remarkable force in drawing the reader into the book upon a single glance.

I reveled in sunrises, sunsets, the eerie but welcome approach of fog…the fields so freshly washed after a thunderstorm, the serene secrecy of snow falling all night while one slept deeply through it, then awoke the next morning to the wondrous transformation of the landscape, a work of art in progress only partially recognizable, finding myself whispering through the windowpane lest I disturb the white world outside, speaking openly of it.

“Silence is the only voice of our God,” said Melville.

He walks in a diminishing darkness toward that moment night recedes behind him, and the slightest glimmer of first light begins spreading over the east, over the road, the woods, the small lake waiting ahead. He has come to love this moment when the night withdraws the darkest mysteries, uncovering the landscapes bare truths—dirt roads, telephone lines, chimney smoke, a black dog watching him from a distance, white birch trees, an entanglement of branches, evergreens, fallen trees…the long history of stone fences.

Meditations on a Small Lake, Ellis Press, 2008, Illustrated, 112 pp.