March is kind of dogshit in the yard, time.
Filthy snowbanks.
Ditchwater rising with bobbers of fireball bottles.
The smell of things that have been waiting all winter to rot.
This doesn’t exactly inspire hunger, but here we are, lean from winter and wartorn, not hungry with our eyes and tongues like the salad days of summer, the cornucopia of fall, but hungry with our guts, only because we need to eat each day to get to tomorrow. Some times seem like just a time to get through. And we never know exactly how long.
My favorite living writer, Erin Block, got photos this week of a mother mountain lion and her kittens feeding on a cow elk stashed under the snow. They come and feed for a time each day, unhurried, unworried, and leave, full-bellied and red-faced, fueled for whatever the day might bring. This is how to keep from starving in March. So, I take my queues from the cat. I don’t fuss over food, I eat what I have, I pull fish from the river, potatoes and kraut from a cold barrel underground and eat my fill, enough to get me to tomorrow. I haven’t even come close to getting the unhurried and unworried part, but I’m working on it.
Here’s a new poem by Erin that she said I could share with you here. You should follow the link through her name above to see the footage of the cats, they are, in the truest sense of the word, amazing.
Windbreak
I don’t remember sunsets as a kid,
but these starlings
filling out a cottonwood
face west,
like they know
you never know
when you won’t get to see
a day end again.
Don't plan to be an old woman.
That's what my mother teaches me.
Show, don’t tell me
you’re scared of the years
between now and then,
like cottontail tracks in snow
that stop just before cover.
Maybe it was an owl,
a hawk—
the shadow you see first
and lose in trees
that don’t have any name
but Windbreak.
Show, don’t tell me
you’re hungry,
like a wolf with worn-down teeth,
like tipped-off cheatgrass
where mule deer graze
come February,
when everything’s thin
like headwater creeks.
The Buddha told us of this trouble:
We think we have time.
So we howl our plans
at a full snow moon,
forgetting everything wanes
and that’s the way
the world slouches
toward starvation,
one night at a time.
I went and sat in a shack on the river, with a hole cut in the ice to pull fish out. I always think that sitting in a box, slowly jigging, for a whole outgoing tide will feel like forever, but it’s never once been long enough.
I eavesdropped on the neighbors, five old men, friends their whole lives, telling stories about sixty years ago, just yesterday. They air their deepest griefs in that crafty old man way where everything comes out as a joke - no emotions are acknowledged or verbalized but are still somehow released and commiserated. It gets the job done. It saves time.
I hear ice falling from the banks and splashing into open water right behind my shack every few minutes. It scares me, a real and healthy fear, not wanting to crash into cold water, and I’m thankful for how it reminds me, every winter, that I have not yet fallen through the ice.
“Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him -- illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind -- and everything is all right.” - Anton Chekhov
I am one of these people who needs a hammer, and I’m ashamed that I often need it to be loud and near. A friend said recently
“ I dont think human beings do well in the absence of imminent peril or exigency. Modern life is abstract and the juice can be lost in the spaces between the undeniably actual and the various limbos”
I think he’s right.
Here’s a poem I wrote last winter, just after the ice had melted, and I was wondering what would be my hammer, then. It’s not hard to find one lately, if I read the news.
If you’d like me to read this poem to you, press play at the top of the page.
Hammers
Two times this week a stranger has gotten into the passenger seat of my parked car
an accident.
I didn’t jump or say “hey?”
I just sat there and watched, unblinking
Not an extra heartbeat
Both were women
Both bewildered.
Both shouted and ran off like I had tried to stuff them into my trunk.
Why was I not surprised?
I was not expecting them - I could have gasped
Sometimes it seems like I’m watching my life more than living it
I let all kinds of things happen
Without a sound
On my way home I pass a scene
Not an accident
A ring of scattered orange skins
around an empty space
Just big enough for a man to be
in the middle of the road
On the peak of a hill, a sharp bend
I try to imagine what kind of person would stand there on the yellow line
Eating oranges
Grinding their cigarettes into the peels
I bet they don’t flinch when a stranger gets into their car
I bet if they hear a log truck whining up the hill
They toss another orange slice into their mouth
like popcorn
And turn to watch the show
I woke up the next morning to a phone ringing
a phone with a cord on a wall
decades dead but the cadence so fresh I sat up ready to run down the hall and answer it like after school
but it was a woodpecker rapping on the top of a hollow pine
and no one’s home
Chekhov said
that behind the door of every contented man
there ought to be someone with a hammer
banging
reminding him with constant thuds
that there are unhappy people
and life will sooner or later show its claws
and trouble will come to him.
I think this is fair
and easy
while I’m fishing on the frozen pond
and the ice booms and cracks
under my feet
while I’m drilling holes
in what can’t be solid ground
because it’s water
but now what
that the ice has melted
It’s spring
and I’m fishing now from silent, sandy banks
does the drumming grouse hit hard enough
or will it need to be the log truck around the bend. 
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