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A magazine of sound and fury Dana Wilde |
The Mind Errant |
All writings on this website Copyright 2008-2009 by Dana Wilde and Jack Wilde. Images Copyright Dana Wilde unless otherwise attributed. You may use what you find here for any noncommercial purpose as long as you give full credit to the authors, photographers and the website. For any purpose which involves the exchange of money, including postings to websites which host any kind of financial transactions, please contact us. |
Amateur Naturalist Short forays into nature Fires of the Sun Longer forays into outer space Critica Forays in Reading Fictions Nature Notes by Jack Wilde |
"Proprieties of space, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent." - Edgar Allan Poe |
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Other writings in other places: China Daze: American life there, 2000-2002 An Old-Fashioned American Revival: Henry Miller, the Beats, Philip K. Dick and M.C. Dalley Ride the Highway West, Baby: The Doors and the latte literati Nine Qazals of Mazun: Translations of a Sufi poet |
Maine: An Essay (1990) Observations on the difficulties of saying anything meaningful about observations on the difficulties of living here. An Essay Takes the Place of a Mountain (1989) A remembrance of things long past. Contraband: A Recollection (1996) Portland had a poetry and arts scene in the 1970s, before the fall. Awakening: Rimbaud (of long ago) Of adolescence and poetry. |
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from Drinking Wine Out of the Wind by Peter Kilgore open to ex- panse expend- able spend- thrift spin drift & wind fall golden apple of the sun |
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Responsibility & the News If you leave the reporting of the news to the internet people, you will never have any accurate idea of what is actually happening. |
Beyond the Bounds of Eye and Ear Listening for spirits. Deviant theory The world is not made of money. A Talk with a Monk West meets East. |
The White Goddess in Maine What we call "spring" really occurs in the latter part of May. Before that we endure winter and its vestiges, and after that come a fleeting few months when the weather prospers into maturity. But spring itself - for two or three weeks in Maine - jumps out suddenly like flowers on a shrub. In fact, May is almost literally a flower. Stems and buds redden, and then a sort of supernatural apparition materializes. Several whispering shades of green emerge in the woods, and for a couple of weeks those soft jades and olives flood hills and roadsides. Then, blossoms unfold. The directest sign that the world - at least the one I live in - is teetering into that perennial delirium is the appearance of shadbush blossoms. The trees are mostly gangly-branched creatures 8 or 10 feet high leaning after sunlight, and aren't really noticeable any other time of year. But their early leaves have a brick red fringe and an evening-yellow duskiness, and on that background appear star-shaped white flowers of five widely spaced petals each. It's called shadbush or shadblow because its blossom time is about the same as when the shad, of the herring family, run up rivers to spawn. It's also called juneberry or serviceberry, and is of the rose family. A rose by any other name - like wild strawberry which has been abundant this year at our house, or crabapple, hawthorn or chokecherry who are all throwing out flowers too - is equally sweet, but the shadbush blossoms in my lexicon stand for the first mid-May my wife and I coupled up. That was true madness, it seemed to me then and every spring since, because every pastel green place I looked, I thought I saw her face, especially in the shadblossoms. Once you know what to look for, it's suddenly everywhere. I still see it now. In spring everything young becomes oblivious to everything except the way it produces itself. Nature unfolds the life force into visible shapes. The flowers of shadbush, lilacs, rhododendrons, and then the honeysuckle and every other force, appear to be crystallizing out of something invisible, like drops of water taking form out of air on morning grass, or like time-lapse video of clouds boiling from empty sky. The unfoldment of May has a headlong momentum of its own that gives it the feel of a living, breathing being. In ages past in Europe the whole phenomenon of spring, and in turn the motion into summer, fall and the death and dormancy of winter, was understood to be a white goddess who each year revealed herself in blossoms, especially on trees and shrubs. Not a person but an overwhelming force that crystallized out of the green and the people and everything else. For a fleeting moment in May there was no difference between who they loved and spring herself, and out of it came May Day and poetry. The whole north slope of Mount Harris in Dixmont turned soft green a couple of weeks ago and then, when the shadbushes blossomed, unfolded into the air and sky and everywhere else. Or so it seemed to me. You live like who you are in this green. We call it simply "spring," but even when it had different names in eons past it was still the same headlong perfection of life run amok. The forces in the trees express themselves in flowers. The ancient ollaves and bards expressed the same forces in poetry, which (we might recall) Poe defined as "the rhythmical creation of beauty." A force that you become every time it dazzles you there in the green and you say so. dwilde@dwildepress.net |
Books, bits and pieces |
Recollections and other perceptions |
Hummingbird Bully by William Hathaway It seems the rescued eagles are now eating everyone else's chicks, just as that jeering mob of crows said so from the git-go. I know a widow who believes her husband's soul must've been embedded in a ruby-throat that hovered in poignant suspension before her screen door. So where's the bird's soul? I wondered but didn't ask. Also stuck in there, I guess, but as a willing or sullen host? Embedded perhaps like the reporters so honored to spit and smoke alongside soldiers on their missions. When Satan snugged into the snake, I suppose the assumption was snakes do without souls or other such inner resources. There was the eagle bedeviled by crows this morning as he perched on a furthermost snag over the cove waterfall, straight as a sentry in his white and brown puritan uniform. Stern as the icon he has to be. Imperturbable in the face of all that raucous hate. Franklin called them lazy, but stealing fish from osprey is no easy feat. Turkey season came and went here, and now only the female struts languidly across our wildflower field with eight fluffy chicks jittering after her. Maybe three will make it. Everyone hates us. Oderint dum metuant? But when I held the female hummingbird's tiny corpse betwixt thumb and forefinger this morning, gored through her heart, all iridescence fled, I admit I was perplexed. I'd thought it more a game, that darting and treading air against the sun. We, I'd thought, were the only ones who went that far. |
Shadbush, Troy, Maine |
Incarnate |