Quartered Wing
I know his cry,
it splits the muted blue.
From beyond my window,
the Northern Harrier works the sky.
When November unveils,
and even the fields stop to shudder,
though the wood has lost its flame,
the Gray Ghost remains.
The future's past is summer's glory,
the bee, and I, forget and complain,
the hawk overwinters,
indulging the humdrum weather.
We are not captive,
one hundred words move
within the clouded moons,
as we point at remote skies together.
—G. Brunini
8 February 2021
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LEONARDO'S BICYCLE—a love letter to Da Vinci
We followed the old farm road past blue chicory,
and smiling queen Anne's lace,
to the gravel knoll, with tall grass between us.
Leonardo's bicycle was a two-tone Schwinn Phantom Deluxe,
the spring fork most-famous balloon model.
"Quite the exquisite Cantilever frame with tank and horn," he said. "Handsome whitewall tires and extra-wide chrome fenders."
I nodded, but saw only the broad reach of his face, and color rising on harvest grapes.
The leather saddle seat fit the man that examined the world.
"We'll take the turquoise streamers," he said. "I'll ride the green and black. And for my friend, the radiant-red model, more vermillion-black."
"A token gift," he insisted.
"Add one saddlebag for his vellum journal, charcoal, and looking glass."
"And rosemary focaccia," he smiled.
We pedaled faster to where birds perched on the high wire.
"Why the line of steel hung in the sky for miles running?" he asked.
"An equator divides the globe, and a lightning bolt carries the news of feast and famine."
"And god-wars that ruin the planet."
I went riding with Leonardo today.
He drew many spoked wheels and flying machines.
"Fly with me!" I said "It's not your volo strumentale, or divine engineering of human flight,
but with arms outstretched we can glide hands-free."
Paired hawks quartered the countryside.
"Isn't it marvelous not having anything to do but play?"
"Across the great divide..."
"Maestro, why does her free smile enchant you so?"
"She is my child, brother, mother, father, sister, lover, aunt, and uncle, too,
the Mary of many and the Mary of none,
and the geranium if a white flower wore a face.
Mona Lisa is the breadth of space remaining after we've each taken our share.
She is what moves sitting silent,
the bright prism held within the rainbow,
listening and the telling,
the seed of thought and action,
the unborn babe I sketched by candlelight, asleep in the womb,
and the edge of darkness where moonlight illumines.
She is youth and decay, love and abandonment.
If ere I dreamed and loved I do evermore.
She is the greater giving and the evil hoard.
She is warm and sweet and fragile.
And that is why I love her.
For her fears spring from the grotto birthing mine.
I've been robbed a few times—Mona Lisa stays with me."
I went riding with Leonardo today.
He drew many spoked wheels and flying machines.
—G. Brunini
1 February 2021
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I've just recently reread Elie Wiesel's Night and Aharon Apllefeld's To The Land Of The Cattails, prompted, I'm sad to say, by the unrelenting sense of dread and impending doom that I, like many others, I'm sure, feel these days.
Both books are wonderful in different and similar ways, and I whole heartedly recommend both to those readers who want to look a little bit through a Holocaust survivor's eyes and both remember and re-remember the horror and inhumanity that seems increasingly these days in danger of being forgotten. Both are slim volumes that pull no punches. Night follows a son and father as they catapult suddenly, before they know it almost, from happy family to ghetto to concentration camp. To The Land Of The Cattails moves far more slowly as it charts a mother and son on their inexorable, hypnotic in its pace, journey toward their own quicksand. Reading both, we readers, knowing of course what will happen, want to cry out, "Listen! Look out! Pay attention!"
Trump is not Hitler, to be sure, though he does scare me, and that some of his supporters are indeed nazis scares me even more. But what terrifies me and makes me lie awake sometimes at night is the quiet lining up of trusted friends and neighbors, ready, almost eager, it seems, to point a finger and simply turn away. This Jew, born in 1950, overreacts no doubt, but I still remember as a young boy not understanding any of it, anymore than I understand now. That the fingers point now at others only makes it worse. Have I not in my life stood up enough?
Probably not. Already, writing this, I have hesitated to be specific and have even excised a paragraph or two for fear of hurting or shaming a loved one or friend. The code words and phrases and the glibly alluded to conspiracies charge, and some groups are more or less targeted, but the machinations and economics of dismissal and hate are still much the same.
At a time when roughly one-quarter of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine believe that the Holocaust is some sort of fabrication, these two small volumes call out to us to listen to the brooding silence building around us and cry out.
At a time when police execute no-knock warrants not knowing who is within, when we argue whether shooting someone in the back seven times is a "good shoot" or not, when kneeling... At a time when citizens in the streets, in places of worship, in supermarkets are literally getting out their guns, hear and speak up we must! These two books remind us what might happen if we do not.
—Jonathan Tabakin
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The Pony in the West, 2020, by G. Brunini Congdon, oil on canvas, 24" x 28"
This piece pairs with Boy Posse, 2018. Both are inspired by time spent in my youth living in the Yucatan. Both compositions play tribute to the inner world of boyhood.
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"My dad always told me you couldn't push a river, and I found the analogy worked just as well with people."—M Jackson
Dr. M Jackson is a geographer and glaciologist, National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, veteran three-time U.S. Fulbright Scholar-National Science Foundation Arctic research grants, and the author of numerous titles, including The Secret Lives of Glaciers.
There are five dominant glaciers surrounding Höfn, Iceland, where M lived. Höfn is reached across the farthest tip of a narrow stretch of land, placing glaciers right up front and in your face. Just the way the locals like it. When the aurora borealis lights up a glacier in the blue-black Icelandic night, Jackson tells us that it's a sight to see, "like a candle-lit chandelier."
"The glaciers they are just a part of who I am."
—Sveiin—Höfn resident
"I want to bring meaning to why a quiet Icelandic man would knock on my door and take me several hours to his favorite place on the south coast in freezing temperatures to explain to me what he was fighting for—what to him was at stake as we hurdle forward into an unknown warming future."
—M Jackson
Red-headed Icelanders dressed in red, ice caves, glaciers turn blue when it rains, sometimes gray, almost black, more purple-black, more blue paint and less white on a canvas, late evening coffee, oceanic moisture, pervasive fog, milky light, ice-water slurry, things change, grow and shrink, naked-ice, denial, F-road, glacier guides, glacier jeeps, chattering glacier, happy glacier, flirtatious glacier, musing glacier, angry glacier, hungry glacier, listening glacier, seeing glacier, leave-me-alone glacier., one earth, everything is connected... Personally, I have no trouble believing that a glacier is a sentient being. I name my favorite pieces of furniture, along with my oak and apple trees.
"but glaciers dear friend—ice is only another form of terrestial love."—John Muir
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I invented this cake the afternoon of my youngest son's birth. It went in the oven, and two and a half hours later we had reason to celebrate. He was born at home, attended by two midwives. It's reminiscent of a coffee cake from childhood.
INGREDIENTS:
9 - 10" springform pan, the bottom lined with parchment paper and the sides oiled.
Fruit of choice in season: blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and in the fall, diced apple and pear.
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
3/4 cup maple syrup
2 free range eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup goat yogurt (or your choice)
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp. baking powder
dash of baking soda
dash of sea salt
TOPPING:
1/2 cup chopped walnut
1/2 tsp cardamon
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp olive oil
1/3 to 1/2 cup maple syrup
DIRECTIONS:
Mix in a mixer, or by hand, the wet ingredients. Add the dry, and continue mixing. Spoon cake in pan. Set fruit across the top. Spoon the nut and maple mixer the surface.
Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes or so until a knife inserted is dry. 350 degrees if in a convection oven.
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Protest peacefully, VOTE, fall in love, run for office, raise a family which respects each color, race, or religion, and change the world... Summer 1968 / Summer 2020
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"To the Great Spirit's day, to that day grown old and wise, I will make an offering."—Black Elk
Where can we look and not be reminded of our reach, our grab and take away, from those who took nothing. If ever there were a time for the "Daybreak Star"—"Behold the Star of Understanding." It is the moment at hand. I was always drawn to Native American lore and teachings, more so when I discovered my seventeenth century Montagnais ancestry from Quebec. The "Grandmother Land," Canada. The Montagnais wore wolves heads and skins on their heads that rolled down their backs.
"The beauty and strangeness of the earth."
"Every little thing is sent for something and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing their tender faces to each other."
His name was "Eagle Wing Stretches." Black Elk was born in 1863. The treaty the U.S. government made with the Lakota's stated: "it would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow." We know what happened with that piece of forked-tongue truth.
"They had forgotten that the earth was their mother."
"Hey-a-a-hey!" "Hey-a-a-hey!" "Hey-a-a-hey!" "Hey-a-a-hey!"
Another favorite of mine, Jospeh Campbell, loved Black Elk. Black Elk was nine years old when the grandfathers gave him his prophetic vision. "I saw myself on the central mountain of the world." "The central mountain is everywhere." "But anywhere is the center of the world." Campbell called it the "axis—mundi—polestar." The vision was so profound that Black Elk mentioned it to no one. It scared him so. "The real was yonder and the darkened dream it was here." He was eleven years old in 1874, and seventeen when he shared his vision. He had seen a "map of the universe," a shield, and his mind recorded the minute detail. After he revealed his vision to the tribe they reenacted it as he directed. It brought him satisfaction to have tried to warn his people of the barbarism and waste that lay ahead.
"I am a Lakota of the Oglala band. My father's name was Black Elk, and his father before him bore the name, and the father of his father, so that I am the fourth to bear it. He was a medicine man and so were several of his brothers. Also, he and the Great Crazy Horse's father were cousins, having the same grandfather. My mother's name was White Cow Sees: her father was called Refuse-to-Go, and her mother, Plenty Eagle Feathers. I can remember my mother's mother and father. ... I was born in the Moon of the Popping Trees (December) on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed (1863), and I was three years old when my father's right leg was broken in the Battle of the Hundred Slain. From that wound he limped until the day he died, which was about the time when Big Foot's band was butchered on Wounded Knee (1890). He is buried here in these hills." —Black Elk
In 1886, when he was twenty three years old, Black Elk joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He was curious. It played in Madison Square Garden. The hoop of his people was broken, maybe he could learn something from the Waschisus, that might save them. "All living in square gray houses..." He particularly liked meeting Queen Victoria who owned Grandmother's Land. He spent two winters in London, Paris, and Germany, fearing he might die there. Nearly three years in total.
"I am sixty-seven years old. All over the world I have seen all kinds of people; but today I have seen the best—looking people I know. If you belonged to me, I would not let them take you around in a show like this."—Queen Victoria
Go girl go, how I love the Queen Mum. Albert and John Brown loved her too.
Here is a list of the Lakota Moons, may they make you smile :
September: Moon When the Plums are Scarlet / Moon of the Black Calf / Moon When the Calves Grow Hair
October: Moon of the Changing Season
November: Moon of the Falling Leaves
December: Moon of the Popping Trees
January: Moon of Frost in the Teepee
February: Moon of the Dark Red Calves
March: Moon of the Snowblind
April: Moon of the Red Grass Appearing
May: Moon When the Ponies Shed
June: Moon of Making Fat (sun highest growing power and strongest)
July: Moon of Red Cherries
August: Moon When the Cherries Turn Black
Read Black Elk Speaks and think and wonder lost in his world, for it is our world, too.
Black Elk's vision, which I sketched in the front piece of my copy:
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IF SOUL WERE A COUNTRY
La bella Italia,
Land of cypress set in stone,
Jewel of the Mediterranean.
Before the shadows of night are gone,
Hold fast to the 'moon with a bite,'
For it will be made whole again.
Your spirit cannot be contained,
Come, walk into your garden,
We listen for your voice.
The evocative sequence of joy,
With the power of love's surprise,
So familiar, and treasured by all.
—G. B. Congdon, 22nd March 2020
The poem is dedicated with love to Bergamo, Italy where I have family. Prayers pour in from around the world during the pandemic, add mine. The kids play in Lucca's piazza in Tuscany, spring 2000. The "moon with a bite" is what Black Elk called the quarter moon.
Please watch Darika Montico's #ASCOLTA, #LISTEN:
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Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship earth" is in trouble. To the man who worried, correctly so, about nuclear destruction, and unbridled consumption, it would come as no surprise to be a proponent of "thinking like a planet." Buckminster wanted us to play the World Game: to be honest about earth's plight or we are nothing at all. We all win. We all lose. He had invented the Dymaxion map made of icosahedrons that unfolded to lay flat. "See, we're one world island and one world ocean, not many." He asked in 1967: "Does the universe need us any more?" The World's Fair Expo '67 introduced me to "Bucky"and his life work. I didn't know then at nine years old that I loved him, or his message. "Tiny Houses." He lived in a geodesic dome styled tent on his land his adult life long, when not in hotels three hundred nights a year covering his lecture and consulting route.
David Wallace-Wells wants us to be worried too, that in 2017 Napa's air quality index hit 486, on a day when Delhi's air quality index reached 999. Or that due to California's wildfires, the air in and around San Francisco in 2017 was worse than the same day in Beijing. Bernie Sanders was asked at a town hall meeting held by CNN, what book he was reading, at the same time I held my copy of The Uninhabitable Earth in hand. "It was scary," he said, and shrugged. If Vermont is the state that posits politicians with radical ideas, we also harbor environmentalists with unstoppable voices. Bill McKibben writes: "The decisions we make in 2075 won't matter." On page 138, of 231, Wallace-Wells tells his listeners: "If you made it this far, you are a brave reader."
So, what to do about three month old baby chicks with 225 pieces of plastic consuming ten percent of their body mass? Equivalent to a human carrying twenty to thirty pounds of plastic. Global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050; there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. 2018 was the summer that 99 guests in a Greece seaside resort were killed by the second-deadliest wildfire in the twenty-first century. Dozens died in each other's arms descending stairs to the Aegean sea. The world's poorest live in marshes, swamps, and flood plains, and at the same time, a Santa Barbara toddler was swept away by a mudslide and carried over a mountainside to the sea.
We have entered the Anthropcene: the end of nature, where four percent of mammals are wild. If you, like me, believe a "back-up ecosystem" exists for the wealthy only, and that the idea of "Transhumanism," or the futuristic ability to "upload your brain to the cloud," is not a feasible solution, let alone an acceptable one—then vote your consciousness, and commit to "thinking like a planet."
There is no time left for "possibly, perhaps, conceivablys." It's bigger than whether to carry a plastic bag home, or not, or to drive a Tesla.
Since 2006, one recent study of the annual bee death die-off, states that we have lost seventy-five percent of flying insects, taking us closer to a world without pollinators. Cheerios and Quaker Oats contain Roundup—despite the label "natural." If 4 degrees warming is reached, we may reduce grain yield by fifty percent.
"If we don't act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble." —Bill McKibben
As a baby boomer, the cosmology of my day included Enrico Fermi's paradox: If the universe is so big, then why haven't we encountered any other intelligent life in it? Wallace-Wells asks if climate might be the reason. No other planet is as suited to produce life as we know it. Fermi's "the Great Silence" is called "the great filter" by the iconoclastic economist Robin Hanson. His theory states that the filtering occurs when whole civilizations are enclosed by global warming like bugs in a net. Paleontologist Peter Ward, among those responsible for discovering that the planet's mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, told David: "The filtering we've had in the past has been in these mass extinctions." The present mass extinction has only just begun, sustained by the Anthropic Principle—"our grandly narcissistic view of the cosmos."
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