Reason No. 2

Oh, my poor abandoned blog!

Well, no use lamenting the lost years. Here's a re-start:

Reason No. 2: Because context is everything.

A broken jar lying in leaf litter. What does it mean? Is it litter? Accident? Artifact? Here's a poem about just such a discovery.

Still

In Randolph’s machine shop
the stilled grey lathes and presses
glimmer here and there with slips
of oil. His floor is spotless

as his white shirt, worn
with cuffs snapped back from
wiry brown wrists. A yarn
spun with the lathe warms:

My daddy sometimes was known
to weld up a still, he grins.
He’d pretend and go along
with whatever wink and purpose was given.

Still and all, that was the way
the old-timers got around and along.
And it still is today.
Some things, over time, still strong

as double-run corn. Like
Randolph’s will, like love
for the burn, that likker-spike
beyond flavor. Granite, up the cove,

shelters places those old fellers
gathered fire and copper
between springs and laurel hell.
The still life we stumble over

lies broken in the loam
up in the forks of Blackbird
not far above the old home-
place, between the fords:

Two tubs, some pipe, a jar
shattered, half-buried, tipped over.
So still here. The road’s far
down the cove and across the river

The life of corn and fire
and defiance even farther.

Rust the distillation
of rain time and iron

Runs red into the red clay
of the creekbottom today.

Above the overthrown still,
how still the poplars. Still

And yet

Reason No. 1

You can only love things in particular, not as generalities.
A landscape that you don't know, in detail, and understand, in detail, is merely "scenery"--a green blur. The green blur of the Amazon, the green blur of the Everglades, the green blur of the Canadian Rockies ... you might be momentarily thrilled, but this is to love as a one-night stand is to a 50-year marriage.
The Dalai Lama once advised a woman who asked if she should go to India to seek enlightenment: "If you want to find water, it's better to dig one 60-foot well than ten six-foot ones. Start where you are and dig deeper."

1000 Reasons to Stay Where You Are

... That's the tentative title of my next book. It's in reaction to that title I see screaming from bookstore shelves in airports when I travel on business: 1000 Places to See Before You Die!
--well, not unless you are very wealthy and exceptionally long lived, of course. I calculate that if you start at age 18 and travel until you are 98, you'd need to have twelve vacations a year to fit them all in. Unless of course you engage in whirlwind tours--"If this is Tuesday, this must be Macchu Picchu."

Surely I'm not the only person who finds this kind of notch-on-the-belt travel offensive? What is the purpose of it, other than bragging rights, the accumulation of tchotchkes, the development of a worldview that is best expressed as "I consume the planet because I can!"