In Writing: Dale Hobson

Sugar season: when one of my old Listening Post essays can be boiled down into 31 syllables, it tastes sweeter.

Spring Morning

One daffodil in a vase 
on the kitchen table 
in a pool of sunlight.
Coffee in shirtsleeves
before an open window.

There is a qualitative difference between grace and its near relative, luck. Luck, for good or for ill, is bestowed randomly by an indifferent universe. Grace feels like a personal gift from one who knows your inmost desire.

Grace

Sometimes while a storm still rages
the sun shouts out from the horizon.
Sometimes the locked door pounded on
a hundred times before is found ajar.

There is no way to make it so. So,
wait for it, wait more, and love life.
A long season runs between planting
and harvest. Anything could happen.

Just ran across a draft of this written back when I was doing an April poem-a-s-day challenge. I think it cleans up nicely.

Fluid Dynamics

The whirlpool behind Sugar Island dam
where snowmelt drops to the penstock
sends ripples back across the flow,
breaking up the reflection of clouds
trying to move east against the current.

The vortex runs white for a moment,
shredding cumulus, then resumes draining
the sky of blue. The penstock runs north
to the powerhouse, to wring the water’s
watts. What does it wring from the sky?

I once read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Heavy sledding, but there was this one bright moment when it all became perfectly clear. My hair stood on end for about five seconds, and then it all fell apart again. I am a big-time science wienie and was struck by an article in this morning’s EarthSky e-newsletter. My abstract that follows explains how 95% of everything is beyond our ken.

An English Major Explains the Universe

Astrophysicists tell us that everything we perceive,
from the end of our noses to the edge of the universe,
using all of our senses and all our high technology–
that’s five percent of what there is. All the matter 
and the light by which we see it, is less than the tip
of the iceberg. We might have suspected this all along.

Twenty-seven percent they say is made of dark matter, 
about which we know nothing except that it has mass.
And all the rest, sixty-eight percent, that’s dark energy.
And we know nothing about that except that it pushes
everything apart better than gravity holds it together.
If you think about it, we could have suspected that, too.

The astrophysicists think dark energy comes from
supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies,
is dark light that shines from dark stars, one might say.
Easy to believe come nightfall that darkness outweighs
the light; it pours out thick and heavy from shadowed woods.
But the dawn still comes to chase all the darkness away.

Being cold a lot is good for the ingenuity. There a lot of ways to get warm, both literally and figuratively. Ignore the folks from more blessed climes who try to tell you that it’s like hitting yourself with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop. So what.

Cold Village

I can’t lie; it’s not paradise. Winter is too long,
too cold, with more than our fair share of snow
(though not quite so much as in years past).
I was reminded of it this week by a little thing.

The thermometer went to 30 below overnight,
and didn’t rise above zero all the next day—
old-school cold. And there I was again, dressing
myself while standing on top of the heat vent. 

I worry little about the cold these days, having 
a reliable furnace and sufficient funds to fuel it.
It also helps to avoid going outdoors too much
between Thanksgiving and Mothers’ Day.

But having enough heat passes for prosperity
in a northern winter. Just ask anyone without it.
Though a woodstove and woodlot can do in lieu
of income. Nothing like cold feet up on a boot rail.

Winter got set into my bones when I was knee high.
Out sledding, fingers so froze I cried as they thawed.
Hypothermia from biking the paper route. Waking
to an icy heat vent when the coal stoker crapped out.

Which it did on a regular basis– mid-century tech
welded to a 1920s cellar monster. And walls filled
with 1800s insulation, bricks stacked in between studs.
You could hang a wind chime in front of the window draft.

These days two-incomes keep us warm and cozy, mostly,
though it’s never safe to take that for granted. For instance,
when sleet fell for a week straight in 1998 we had no power,
no cook stove, no water. And all of the trees were falling.

Everyone poor and cold again–except, of course, the Amish.
Luckily we found ourselves rich in friends, who took us in,
and warmed by the way folks pitched in and helped out
all over the North Country to make it whole once more.

It all comes back to mind, triggered by that moment—
bare feet on a warn steel grate, warm air billowing
up my bathrobe, looking out into the whiteness 
through hoar-frosted glass at the creaking tress.