In Writing: Dale Hobson

I profess to not be a fan of winter, dreading its coming all fall. But I forget its allure, its beguiling purity and clarity until one morning it suddenly transforms everything.

Epiphany Snow

The first real snow falls on Epiphany, late,
after a dry fall and cool December. Six inches,
no big deal, but an epiphany nonetheless.

Snow boots are still in the closet, the shovel 
and salt tucked behind stuff on the back porch.
The inevitable finds me unprepared as usual.

I purged from memory the scraping of the plow,
forgot the way snow shines on sagging cedars,
how all things dull and dim can now be shining.

Out of the old year’s ending, this new beginning,
when what could be wrestles with what will be. Who
can say what may befall once the snow begins to fall?

After 911, I remember a child psychologist stressing how important it was, when children were watching the Twin Towers fall over and over again in the media, to explain to them that it only happened once and was not still happening. In cyberspace, the towers are still falling and will always be falling, everywhere, and so too with every other trauma. This is what makes it such fertile ground for obsession.

An English Major Laments the Space-time Continuum

Science fiction writer Ray Cummings explained time
thus: “Time is what prevents everything from happening
at once.” Physicist John Wheeler added as a capper: 
“Space is what prevents everything from happening to me.”

This tidy structure we left behind, preferring one
where the old rules don’t apply–cyberspace. 
There, everything that ever happened happens now
and what happens anywhere, happens everywhere.

In the old world the body inhabits, this is insane,
but in the new world the mind has colonized,
this is the allure, to savor every blinking meme,
preferring pixels to food, water, love and nature.

All kinds of music gets stuck in the top of my mind: pop tunes, carols, hymns, blues. I walk to their refrain for half a day, then pass on to something else. But some music wraps around the brain stem, permeates the convolutions, gets in there for keeps. 

No Cure for Leonard Cohen

His songs dig hooks into memory–
deep, dark, rich, complex as chocolate,
but unsweetened by sentiment.

Transcendence and despair do duets,
celebration and regret. Beauty sheds
her merely pretty clothes; pain uplifts. 

Behind one devastating line, the heart
is hid. His half-destroyed voice demands it:
Chase the holy; seek it in the broken.

EarthSky News explains Genesis

In the beginning,
after the Big Bang,
stars in clusters
formed invisible
to one another through
dense hydrogen gas.
Space was opaque.
And darkness was upon
the face of the deep.

Starshine slowly ionized
the gas, turning it clear.
First one, then many
glimmers could be seen.

Bubbles of transparency
merged to encompass
whole galaxies until
a whole galaxy was
small as a pea inside 
a hot-air balloon
by comparison.

Later (a hundred million
years later) the bubbles
had all merged –the whole
universe transparent
to the light. Fiat lux.

After years of benign neglect, I’ve been spending time and money in the nurseries and garden tool departments of the hardware store. And I find that working in the garden feels satisfying solid in comparison to the airier pursuits of art.

Sun on the Garden

The part that makes poetry has lain sleeping, and now
(after COVID again) tumbleweeds blow through my brain.
So instead, I dig and plant and water and mulch and weed,
thinking of nothing much under the late spring sun, except
how the names of flora make their own kind of poetry:
lobelia and marigold, shrub rose and geranium, salvia.

That would make Adam the first poet, I suppose, sitting
in the Garden of Eden naming all the animals: “Platypus, 
I shall call you platypus.” — and all the others, an arkful
of the newly named for Noah to salvage from the flood.
I name them to myself as they come to check my work:
robin, rabbit, chipmunk, butterfly, black fly and whitetail.

This is the power of word. To name it is to see it, to bring
its smell to the nose, just as the mind mimes each story
even as it’s told, or as we twitch and mutter to dreams.
So small the difference between word and world, a thing
thin as the skin that separates me from thee, a mere tissue.
Yet call it what you will, flesh in fact is fact, and word is air.

I wave the hose head back and forth like a magic wand or
a maestro’s baton, calling up water from below the bedrock.
But one only tends a garden, encouraging life. The maestro
creates no symphony, no matter how dramatically he waves.
The flowers know what powers the upthrust of their lives.
They turn its way each day as it tracks across the skies.

Snowflakes are fallng
on seventeen daffodils
beside the old well