Vagabond Poet

Of Snowbirds and Icebergs

2011-11-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

It’s November 2, which is hard to believe. Harder to believe is that it’s currently 61 degrees outside and a cabbage white butterfly just fluttered past my library window, looking a bit like a miniature version of the great egret in the above photo.

But just because it’s a balmy day in Western New York doesn’t mean this snowbird and her husband aren’t ready to head to the sunny, warmer climes of Florida (80 degrees in North Fort Myers as I write) where our condo on the Caloosahatchee awaits. A week from today, we’ll have turned south for a leisurely 1400-mile drive to our subtropical home, stopping along the way to visit friends in West Virginia and in Georgia. I’m packed, ready to go. Roger will get there by the time we’re due to pull out of the driveway.

But meanwhile, we’re busy saying goodbye to friends and neighbors, running a few errands (get those Rx’s filled!), and walking the roads along farm fields now shorn of cornstalks and soybeans. The fields look naked, even more so since the last of the Canada geese have departed for fresh fields, warmer waters.

But right now, my mind’s eye turns even farther south…

…to Antarctica!

That’s because it’s time for me to invite you to order a copy of my new book, The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica from Finishing Line Press.

Now, you can travel with me on a journey to the ends of the earth and partake in our many beautiful discoveries in Antarctica.

Maybe you’ve been there and long to see it again (and smell the penguin rookeries). Or maybe it’s on your bucket list and you are scrimping and saving for the expensive expedition. Or maybe you’re an armchair traveler who relishes others’ adventures to the Earth’s far-flung places. Or maybe (except for the movie Happy Feet) Antarctica isn’t even on your mental map, merely a word that means “cold.”

Whatever your outlook, now’s the time to (re)discover the magic of Antarctica – for only $14 (plus shipping). Just order your copy (or copies) of my newest book The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica, from Finishing Line Press.

As award-winning poet Beau Cutts points out: “You have never before read a collection of poems about the coldest-highest-windiest place on planet Earth!” But now you can, in this unique collection.

You’ll meet those whimsical (and smelly) penguins and other arctic birds. You’ll chase whales across rough seas. You’ll come to understand that Antarctica is far more “The Blue Continent” than “The White Continent” as you face icebergs the size of city blocks. You’ll even encounter the enchanting green of the island continent – its 500-year-old mosses. And you’ll watch as global warming tightens its grip on the great storehouses of ice.

I hope you’ll want to travel with us across the famed Drake Passage to a land of “beauty, terror, silence,/ the blue awe of Antarctica.”

To entice you, I’ll share one of my favorite poems from the collection:

Penguinissimo

Lo! I’m awake, I think, and blinking.
Because what to my wondering eye
has appeared this bright morning
right outside my cabin porthole?
Penguins! Batches of chinstraps,
gaggles of plump toddling birds
in black berets, black capes,
white bibs and—pink sneakers!
Waddle, hop, waddle, waddle, hop, hop,
sli-i-i-i-ide to the fast-ice edge
for an early hour’s frigid dive.
Make way for pudgy, hungry,
flipper-flapping penguins
and penguins tooting their kazoo voices:
Krill, krill, krill, we’ll get our fill!
And off the briny brink they go—
plop, plop, plop, plop, splash—
into the deep blue smorgasbord,
into the rich Antarctic seas.
Another fine day gets under way
in penguin paradise. Ah, penguin glory!

***

Please order a copy now.

I’ll be frank: Orders placed now will determine how many copies FLP prints—of if they print the book at all. (I need to help FLP sell a minimum 50 books from now through the pre-sale period ending Nov. 23; such are the vicissitudes of small-press publishing these days.)

It’s easy. To order your copy/copies of The Ice Decides, go to this FLP direct link http://www.finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=134

I thank you, the penguins thank you and you’ll thank yourself for voyaging with me to “The White Continent.”

And I thank those faithful “fans” who’ve already ordered copies!

Meanwhile, you can enjoy the many pleasures of the new issue of The Centrifugal Eye where I work as assistant editor and book review columnist. You’ll discover a chorus of eloquent poetic voices (including yours truly, if I may be so immodest), book reviews (don’t miss the one for my previous book, The Urn; writer Danielle Blasko does a boffo job of tackling the book) and an interview with and essay by poet Maureen Kingston. Just hop over to http://centrifugaleye.com/ and click on the “New Issue” tab! Plunge into the beauty.

Happy November. See you next time from Florida.

Belated Equinox Reflections

2011-09-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

***

Entomologically Correct

Last night the wind
in a rush shifted
south to north swish
goodly wind, tail wind
wing wind,great wind of insects
seeking passage out of Canada
by the legions while there's time
dragonfliers in formation
sporting their dozen spots
monarch butterfliers willy-nilly
dabbing sunlight orange
for crossing Erie’s open waters
in buzz, in flutter
with faith in the genes
of their tiny bodies
today they leap
Point Pelee to Sandusky
Ontario to Ohio
nation to nation

as they depart we marvel
small wonders of evolution
small wonders of migration
so small, so far, this autumn

***

Greetings, friends. Roger and I have returned home from a fifth summer odyssey into Canada replenished from our time at Point Pelee National Park and nearby Wheatley Provincial Park on the north shore of Lake Erie. Hiking, birdwatching (a bald eagle! a black-throated blue warbler!), smooshing around our campsite overlooking a creek and its marsh. And the beautiful insects you see here. We all recognize the monarch but I wonder how many of us have seen one that's tagged as pictured above. Yes, that white dot is a researcher's tag identifying the individual for the record books of monarch migrations. I'd never seen such a thing. Imagine affixing it to that delicate wing.

The other fellow is a twelve-spotted dragonfly. He was a new one on me; I had to look him up in my Audubon Field Guide to Insects & Spiders. He too was heading south.

We watched hundreds of monarchs and thousands of dragonflies of several species wing south over Erie's open waters--a two-hour journey for them. We marveled.

Then we cursed, driven out of camp by driving rain. But, we returned home sated on the beauties of these bugs and their pursuit of their evolutionary imperative.

Small wonders, indeed. An autumn blessing.

And another:

Live from the Third Coast

2011-08-24T09:45:00.001-07:00

As I write, a tang of autumn nips the air above Lake Ontario, breezing lightly out of the north carrying scudding gray clouds. A change in the season may be threatening but so hurricanes forecast, no earthquake warnings unsettle my inner landscape. I’m at home.

This vagabond poet has been a homebody this summer, sticking around Ed Rose Shores and venturing out only on short trips to the North Country to work on the cabin where my brother once lived, another beautiful spot on Lake O. Roger and I have made four trips there in recent months and depart tomorrow for three more days of reclamation as we try to return the property to its iconic status: “Rainbow’s End.”

This summer Canada also has beckoned, with three forays into the province of Ontario and one more in the offing in September.

And we’ve shared the power that is Niagara Falls with good, good friends visiting with us from West Virginia. We had a beautiful day to which this photo attests. That’s purple loosestrife in the foreground, an invasive plant we are not supposed to admire. I can’t help myself. The color is so fine. What you can’t see for all the spray below the mighty, roaring falls is The Maid of the Mist, a motorcraft that takes tourists – like the two of us – into the whirlpool maelstrom within yards of the Canadian side of the cascade. (No, we didn’t need passports!) Do it sometime. Thrills guaranteed.

Staying close to home has made me reflect on how much a citizen I am of “The Third Coast” as the Great Lakes are often referred to, a befitting moniker for bodies of water that are truly inland seas. Instead of traipsing off to the American Southwest or up into the Maritimes as in summers past, we stayed home. Home. As Martha would say, “It’s a good thing.”

Still, I turn my sights toward other horizons. First, that return camping expedition to the Canadian Lake Erie Shores, this time with new eyes, Roger’s that is. His two cataract surgeries were successful and his vision immensely improved. (And the reason we didn't travel far this season.) This time around as we watches the birds who will be heading south during this visit, he’ll be able to see them clearly. Anticipated joy!

Then, in early November, we’ll head south ourselves, imitating the warblers and geese. The snowbirds will alight for our second winter in our second home-sweet-home on the Caloosahatchee River of Florida.

But I’ve two-plus months to celebrate life as a Third Coaster and watch the waves roll in on autumn days. That life, today at least, goes something like this:

Third Coast Scherzi Suite,
West to East

I. Gordon Lightfoot’s Lake Superior’s
Superior Prayer for the Sailors
Lost in Geologic Depths

Say Gitchee-Goomee,
say Edmund Fitzgerald, amen.

II. The Great Lakes’ Prettiest Stones
Come from Michigan Shores

Smooth, coraled Petoskey stones
to pocket—rock art, rock-old.

III. On Huron’s Northern Shore,
Granite Underfoot

From native waters
the Canadian Shield rises.

IV. Pelee (ONT, CAN) and Kelley’s (OH, USA),
Limestone Islands in Lake Erie

Migrations o’er glacial
grooves below the shallow sea.

V. Close Range at Dawn, Lit Stem
to Stern on Lake Ontario

Laker, St. Lawrence-bound,
in her holds: iron cargo.

KLM

P.S. Check out my latest online poem at http://qarrtsiluni.com/tag/karla-linn-merrifield/. You can both read the poem and listen to me recite it.

Oh, what a garden of delights

2011-07-03T06:13:00.001-07:00

Happy 4th of July (a day early). While not a holiday my husband Roger and I go out of our way to celebrate, especially these days with the idiots in Washington (most of you know whom I mean) playing games with our nation's debt limit, we do enjoy seeing others celebrating at family picnics and town fireworks displays. And we're glad for those who are employed that the federal holiday gives them a day off from the grind of "do more with less."

My 4th of July celebration has always been a very personal one: My maternal grandmother Amelia was born on July 4th some time back in the 19th Century, probably in the 1880s. She was an Austrian immigrant who became a naturalized citizen as quickly as she could and to her dying day was proud of her adopted country. While I don't know her birth date, I know of her pride because my mother always reminded me of her mother's pride on July 4th, adding that "Mimi" as she was called by her American friends and family or "Mutzel" as she was called by her Austrian friends, "was a real firecracker."

So the day has arrived when I honor my Austrian-American grandmother who was a formidable gardener.

Already I've been out in my garden this morning to water, weed and spread mulch around the west-facing garden that I restored earlier this summer.

Restored? Yes. After 10 years of traveling during the summer months, Roger and I are staying home for the most part, taking only a couple short camping trips instead of our season-long journeys to the Canadian Maritimes, the American Southwest, Pacific Northwest....

And because we're staying put, I've had the pleasure to rediscover my inner gardener who's been long neglected along with the flowers and shrubs.

What a joy! One I'd almost forgotten. Planning, nursery shopping, digging, planting, even weeding has been pleasurable -- and then to see my new hosta lilies (four varieties) and blue hydrangea come into bloom. Ahhhh! Grossmutter Mimi's genetic legacy is alive and well. You can take the girl out of the garden, but you can't take the garden out of the girl.

Reclaiming my flower beds has been a healing ritual, too. Aching muscles and dirt beneath my fingernails are small dues to pay for the modicum of peace I've felt working in the earth, making things grow out of the grief I've felt at the loss of my brother in March. As I've turned over the soil, carved out holes in which to settle a lilac bush or a pair of columbines, nestled their roots in the ground, and tamped them securely in their new homes, I've laid to rest some of the anger and pain of having lost my brother to alcoholism at such a young age (63). Following in my grandmother's (and mother's!) footsteps, I turn the trowel to wedge out a stone from my heart so that love for the dead has more room to grow.

***

Preparing Jimmy’s Resting Place

Spring leaps toward summer
and this year after so many
years, I am domesticating
my west-facing garden again,
taming it with hosta lilies,
lilacs, hydrangea, datura.
I perform a cleansing ritual
after one death, hopefully well before
the next deadly inevitability. I dig
in warm earth, drop nasturtium seeds
to give me my season
to accomplish grief
the same way I harvest
misplaced thistles, errant ferns
to reinvent a bed for flowers;
the same way I remove the weeds:
one at a time over time.
Thus, one man gone at a time,
one floral elegy at a time.

First, let me plant my brother’s song
by the arborvitae in the Poet’s Corner
paved with limestone lakestones,
that polished dolomite might anchor ghosts.
Let me perch a plaster boy atop the rocks,
its faux verdigris chipped,
its cupid’s wings and toes missing.
This June may I be his little sister again,
a gardener of brotherly love, but this time
I come to pray for broken garden gnomes
one day at a time, every, every, every
miraculously verdant day at a time.

***

Let the fireworks begin! I'll be my own self-made firecracker, sizling with delight in an explosion of blooms.

Revising the Survey Map of Grief

2011-05-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

***

You are looking at a picture of an asset: a shorewell. This one is located on my property on Barracks Lane in Cape Vincent, the place we used to call Rainbow's End that, as of today, is up for sale, flaws and all. Some items will be repaired, some we'll leave for the next owners, but, by all means, the worst will be cleaned up well before it changes hands..

So, at this juncture in my life, what I find I'm doing is preparing to part with a huge chunk of my life, one that dates back to 1981, when my brother and I bought the parcel together. Egad, thirty years of history there between my brother and me! I say farewell to this stretch along Lake Ontario just as I’m saying goodbye to Jimmy: sadly.

You can gather from the photograph that it's a rocky landscape. Literally, figuratively. My brother's death in March still leaves me, heading into late May, with more clean-up work -- a considerable amount.

That's why I need a break. My beloved husband Roger (whose born a great burden too) and I are skipping town, leaving the country for seven days, six nights. On Sunday morning after seven weeks of what feels like constant "estate caca," we're going camping in Ontario, along the northern, provincial Lake Erie shoreline.

Beach walks, woodsy hikes, a lighthouse or two, campsite chats and "library hour," poems—and sleep. No computer. No Internet. No cell phone. I'm aiming to be blissfully disconnected from that sorrowful world we've been contending with.

This morning before I got going on the details of carpenters and carpeters, I fingered through old files in search of an old poem, one that's never been keyboarded into my laptop. I found it.

It concerns the erstwhile Rainbow’s End. It's from a happier time at the waterfront land my brother and I once owned together. It’s proof: Once there was magic there.

***

Rainbow’s End

Come to this land for moonrising
Come when leaves in their first week of life
and birds on their first day of flight
listen to dusk then last light of day
Behold! Witches’ hair floats in the misty cove
Herb-Roberts and silverweed grow at shoreline
They shall be as omens
portending unto Ontario this hour
You will heal me, Sisater Water
You will hear me, Mother Earth
and I too will listen to darkness
Now I speak night hawk
I speak snowy owl.
I am the voice wavelapping
for now is the time for answering
now when thoughts follow the Milky Way
and ideas with the Northern Lights glimmer
our tellings in the stars

Out there is the Universe where I am here

***

Let there be some joy this rainy spring.

Karla

Goodbye Caloosahatchee River, Hello Lake Ontario

2011-03-23T05:33:00.001-07:00

Our days in Florida wind down as we prepare to depart on Sunday for our home in the north. I'm reluctant to pack up and head out, but know it's part of our cycle as it is the flocks of birds we see heading north, including a flock of sandhill cranes yesterday we heard but could not see upriver just a short stretch. Spring, of course, has long come to Florida. It did not take the Vernal Equinox this week to make its presence known.

Springtime along the Caloosahatchee

Two male cardinals call out
from adjacent territories in the palmettos
earnest, persistently cheering.
The subtropical forests sirs
with the crimson song of Floridian dawn.
Their scarlet duet summons
the sun into my eyes.
I see red; I blush.

***

In an hour or so, Roger and I will head out on the river in our kayaks for a final paddle into the oxbow among the mangroves. As always, it will be interesting to see what birds appear along the edges and milling about in the shallow, quiet waters.

That sleepy neck of the river -- too shallow for speed boats, but ideal for kayaks -- reminds me, as if I needed any reminder, that my brother, James Karl Merrifield, is at peace.

I flew home to the Rochester area earlier this month, word having come from Jimmy's ex-girlfriend who was his health-care proxy, that my brother was literally on his death bed and I'd better come quickly. I did. And was with him alongside faithful Patti when my brother died...and went on to the great Whatever. The peace like a river he could not find in his shortish life (he was 63) surely he has now. And that thought helps me maintain my own peace.

***

Wishing all of you the joys of spring. The sprouting daffodils, the raucous voices of Canada geese plying the skies in wavering vees over the fields, the hint of warmth in the air.... All are reason for hope.

Springing to Life

2011-02-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

Unrest in the Middle East. Unrest in the Midwest. And even some unrest on the family front that reminds me of what poet Robert Bly said several years ago at a reading in Brockport, "All families are dysfunctional." I sigh deeply.

Yet I'm buoyed by signs of spring.

Days are getting perceptibly longer. This morning twilight arrived at 6:15 a.m., easily a half-hour earlier than in January.

Everywhere the bald cypress trees, a deciduous conifer, are beginning to sport a fringe of fine green needles.

In the Everglades, where Roger and I camped for a couple days last week, anhinga chicks were preparing to fledge (above).

But to me the most dramatic sign of spring was one I'd never witnessed before. I was sitting on the shores of the small lake that flanks Long Pine Key campground in Everglades National Park. I had just settled in for a spell of writing when a swarm of barn swallows shadowed my page as they swept over the lake to feed. The birds swirled in the pellucid afternoon air in ever-shifting fractals of hungry birds numbering in the thousands. Then it dawned on me: The swallows were strategically joining ranks -- safety in numbers -- to begin their migration north into their breeding grounds where I will see them in late April or early May, albeit in far fewer numbers, nesting beneath Ontario Parkway bridges near our home in Western New York. I watched the great swarm in wonder at the spectacle: One species among so many are answering the spring call of Nature.

As has happened to me so often in the past when in the Everglades, my favorite place on the planet, my Holy Land, I became one with the Universe. And it is a Universe of Hope.

***

Happenstance: The Swallowing

On the day of the Everglades dew,
which is every day,
I awake to realize I’ve been
swallowed alive.
The Universe, having chased down
half-moon shadows,
consumes me whole
like a python swallows his prey:
entire.
This is the same Universe,
the Everywhere, which my husband
reminds me – this day
of dew swallowed by crows –

is expanding. We swallow hard.
Then a minion of alligators,
a court of vultures in their black
robes, featherless gray wigs,
cloud swallow,
sun bitterns,
gallinules of the dew
swallow the sky.
And the Universe as it is
in the Everglades bedewed
swallows me with the morning stars.
I am the turtle taken by surprise,
plastron, carapace, soul and all.

for Roger

***

Another uplifting note: The Urn, my chapbook chronicling the power of love to conquer cancer, is arriving in mailboxes as I write. I'm thrilled, as is Roger to whom the book is dedicated and whose photograph graces the book's cover. I congratulate Finishing Line Press for the fine production; it's also a joy to behold and to hold.

For those of you interested in ordering a copy (or a second copy), it's now available either from me directly (just write klmerrifield@yahoo.com) or through Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1599247011

If you've read the book and would like to comment, please post a review on Amazon! I'd really, really appreciate it!

Thank you again to all who have purchased a copy. May you find hope in its pages.

Happiest of springs!

Winter Reflections

2011-01-17T07:44:00.000-08:00

The stillness of this great egret poised for fishing in Big Cypress National Preserve about 70 miles south of our condo has proven good medicine for this snowbird...who happens to be a news junkie and rather overwhelmed lately from the reports and commentaries still being published about the horrific massacre in Tuscon over a week ago by a young man unhinged in mind and spirit.

Do egrets go mad? Wonder off course of their migration route into strange habitats? Forsake eggs in the nest to incubate a heron's brood instead? Not likely.

Do they hate their fellow birds, shunning the white ibis for having long bills and pink eyes? Or are wood storks with their "bald" black heads much like a vultures the targets of egret bigotry? Not likely.

Although the Arizona shooting has been on my mind often in days past,I think about all this again on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And then I focus on the serenity of Aldea alba and think instead of Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo,,,Burmese opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi...Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina...her fellow Russian Nikolai Alekseev, prominent gay rights activist...Denis Mugwege, Congolese physician has treated hundreds of women subjected to gang rapes... Afghan women's rights activist Sima Samar...Aminatou Haidar and Ali Salem Tamek, leading activists for the independence of Western Sahara...Isabel Miranda de Wallace, Mexico's National Human Rights Award 2010 recipient...Viktoria Mohacsi, a Hungarian woman who has fought passionately to abolish discrimination and hate crimes against Roma "Gypsy" communities... and Julius Kaggwa, best known for his devotion to defeating the proposed Anti-Homosexual Bill in Uganda.

Those humanitarians -- and birds of all feathers -- give me hope.

I hope they will you too.

Love,

Karla

***

P.S. My new book, The Urn, will be arriving any day now from the publisher and those of you who ordered copies (THANK YOU!) should soon be receiving your copies. In the meantime, five of the poems therein have just appeared in the literary journal miller's pond. To read them, just click on http://www.millerspondpoetry.com/index.php/issues/index.php?page=vol-14-1web#Karla%20Linn%20Merrifield

A Solstice in the Sun

2010-12-20T07:10:00.000-08:00

Hanukkah is past and Christmas a few days away, but at the new Merrifield & Weir household in North Fort Myers, Florida, we’re poised to celebrate the Winter Solstice and watch the sun wheel toward New Year’s, bringing more light into our lives day by day as it rises over the Caloosahatchee River flowing past our condo.

It is two weeks today since we arrived for our first winter in our new home. Though we’ve been Florida snowbirds for 10 years, itinerant campers in the state’s marvelous parks, now we’re nesting. What was bare just 14 days ago is now handsomely furnished, comfortable, homey. We are delighted; it was the right decision, the right place and time to settle down.

That doesn’t mean we won’t be exploring, following vagabond trails into the neotropical forests and along white-sand beaches, neither of which are far away. In fact, a few days ago, I took a break from shopping the rounds of consignment shops for “recycled” furniture to explore Caloosahatchee Regional Park, just 9.4 miles upstream from the condo.

With dozens of miles of trails, a quiet campground for tenters only and the most amiable park hosts, this Lee County park – one of several dozen – is a gem. And an inspiration. I put up my new tent, “Bukowski,” and settled under the warm sun into my poetry safari (as we call them) for “a good write” with hours upon hours to myself to hear myself think…and noodle in my journal those sorted thoughts. Except for an armadillo foraging noisily outside Bukowski later in the evening, I was undisturbed to write, write, write. There was peace on Earth. And, the next morning when I Roger welcomed me home, I had drafted six new poems and felt restored, rebalanced. My Florida muse had returned.

The following are three of a sequence of 13 scherzi (13-syllable poems) called “Homecoming Scherzi” I wrote to honor my newly-discovered, nearby retreat center.

I may have become a Sunshine State homebody, but my vagabond spirit continues to roam among the natural wonders of Florida, my Florida.

I salute you, hardwood hammock,
bow to palmettos.

Epiphytes and live oaks fringe
my bower, shade my way.

Lo and behold! Spanish moss!
I’m draped in the South.

***

My very best to all who visit these pages as the sun regains its strength and the days grow longer.

Eternal Egypt

2010-10-28T04:50:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe we are back from our Egyptian odyssey, even have our bodies back on Eastern Daylight Savings time, although it took awhile. And we've managed to get over "Pharaoh's revenge." However, the colds we caught linger, no doubt due to the pollution and dust we breathed in our two weeks in the desert. I can still see grains of that dust of the ancients caught in the weaving of my wristwatch band! A souvenir I didn't realize I brought home with me.

More than 2000 photos still await sorting and editing, but all in good time. And we're still sorting out what our adventure meant to us, which we're working on in leisurely conversation between ourselves and with friends who ask about the trip.

One thing was clear: All civilizations are fleeting. Even ours.

Most memorable for me were A) I "met" Sheshat, the ancient goddess of writing; the old Egyptians believed she invented writing. So seeing the reliefs on the sides of two temples of her image was quite moving. (She's pictured in the photo above.)

And we saw the broken colossal statue of Ramses II that inspired Shelley to write "Ozymandias." One of our guides read part of the poem aloud as we stood looked at the tumbled behemoth of carved granite. Chilling. Choked me up.

As for Roger, being an atheist, all the visits to old mosques, old Coptic churches and the babble about a pantheon of old god/desses was a bit much so he's decided the best part were the donkeys! Farming is still almost totally manual there and the donkeys are the main beast of burden -- everywhere, even on the busy city streets of Cairo!

Before we left I wrote the following poem. And now, upon our return, I can still say Roger has made my dreams come true (and is willing to play a Nubian slave!). He's MY pharaoh!

I hope you enjoy.

***

Self-Portrait on the Nile

I joke about cavorting
as pharaah’s consort.
Tut would do.
I tease about kissing
a nimble Nubian slave
beneath plume fans.
If Nefertiti reddens,
if Isis casts her holy blush
upon us, don’t be shocked.
Osiris rises, Horus rallies, Thoth flies.
But I turn my back on Anubis.
Tomorrow we’ll frolic in Egyptian tombs.
We’ve earned eternity.
The mythical has already come true.

***

Passion from Prison

2010-10-28T04:44:00.000-07:00

In the past two years or so, my life has been greatly enriched by corresponding with poet Michael Rhynes, author of Guerillas in the Mist and Other Poems, which I reviewed for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com; search archives).

Michael is incarcerated in Auburn Correctional Facility in New York, about 2.5 hours from where I live. We've never met, except through the U.S. Mail. He recently sent me a new poem, asking if I would somehow get it onto the Internet.

With this posting, I'm honoring his request. Michael's body may be imprisoned, but his spirit burns with passion. Thus:

Burn Man, Burn Man, Burn

We all gather without Abraham for self-sacrifice. On Nevada’s
Black Rock Desert. In our beautiful nudity, we lay spread-eagled
where Isaac laid.

We offer up our tender, most sensitive parts to this world
without shame, hatred, inhibitions, regret, or censorship.

We burn our Victoria Secrets bras and Jordan underwear because we
no longer belong in the killing fields of the Middle East.

We burn our Nikes, Jordans and Adidas
because we will no longer run in political races we can’t win.

We will not run for pink elephants, jack asses, or tea totalers who
sip at parties funded by the Mad Hatter.

We burn our credit cards, mortgages, car notes, tax forms,
and the letter of democracy.

We will no long be indentured servants behind a Walled-in
Street in the land of the free.

Burn men, burn women, burn children, in the spirit of democracy.
Burn man, burn man.

Written by Michael Rhynes
October 2, 2010

A new book of poetry to celebrate marriage, fight cancer

2010-10-01T12:24:00.001-07:00

Many of you have already heard something about my new book of poetry, but in case you haven't here's what you can expect from, The Urn, which has at its heart a very serious topic:

Cancer.

We hate to think about it, but most of us have to because we know someone who’s struggling with it, maybe someone we love, or we’ve been the ones to suffer—and have been fortunate to survive. Or we’ve already lost someone dear. Or perhaps it’s been another life-threatening disease whose specter lurks. Parkinson’s disease. Lou Gehrig’s. MS….

As some of you know, my beloved husband Roger Weir has prostate cancer…now in Stage IV, the final stage. There’s no curing it at this point, but, thankfully, his current treatment regimen is holding the monster at bay for a while longer.

As his wife, I’ve stood by his side, struggling with him, always celebrating our marriage as I’ve pondered the future of a life without him. And, as a poet, I’ve explored the idea of widowhood in words. My poems have taught me this: The most powerful cancer-fighting drug known to humankind is: Love.

Those poems have now become my new chapbook, The Urn from Finishing Line Press (FLP). It’s a book both somber and joyous. It’s my gift to Roger – my “pre-elegy” poems as friend and fellow poet William Heyen calls them – a memoriam to Roger that he can cherish before his ashes return to the Earth.

And I hope it’s a book you’ll want to read, even if you don’t know Roger (or me!). Maybe even share with those loved ones whom you treasure and are struggling and surviving, or grieving—or celebrating each day that’s given us.

If so, please order a copy now.

I’ll be frank: Orders placed now will determine how many copies FLP prints—of if they print the book at all. (I need to help FLP sell a minimum 50 books from now through the pre-sale period ending Nov. 18; such are the vicissitudes of small-press publishing these days.)

Here’s how to order your copy/copies of The Urn:

Go to this FLP direct link http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm Scroll down the alphabetical list to The Urn by Karla Linn Merrifield. Click the “Buy Now” button and invest $15 in this celebration—and triumph—of love over cancer. (That’s $14, plus $1 shipping; after Nov. 18, shipping costs will increase.) The book will be delivered to your mailbox shortly after Jan. 15, 2011.

Or go to www.finishinglinepress.com and click on the “New Releases and Forthcoming Title” link. This will take you directly to the page as well.

Or, use the handy order form below. And I've also included below a sample poem from the book. It isn't as dark as you might think!

If you haven't ordered a copy yet, I hope you will.

And I thank you in advance for supporting us. I promise you a fulfilling read. Roger, too, as humble as he is, will be grateful as well.

***

The Calling

The dapper clan of backyard avians
comes calling to celebrate
with me your cancer’s remission.

Chickadee, titmouse, junco, downy—
quartet in a spectrum of grays-to-black—
feather the sun this mild November morning.

Capped and cloaked, turned out
as if in petite tuxedos, they chirp
in unison my relief.

For the first time in many ruffled months
I am able to watch their lightness
in light of being with pizzicato heartbeats.

You, my rara avis nonpareil, are reprieved;
and in this autumn of your life are whistling again
on jaunty wings to my feeder.

***

The Urn, a chapbook by Karla Linn Merrifield, will be published by Finishing Line Press Jan. 2011. This is a limited-edition collection, and pre-publication sales will determine the press run, so please reserve your copy now. To order, mail this completed form, along with payment, to Finishing Line Press at P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, KY 40324. Or visit www.finishinglinepress.com and click on “New Releases.”

Please send me ______ copy/copies of The Urn by Karla Linn Merrifield, at $14 each, plus $1 shipping per copy.

Name ____________________________________________________________________

Address ______________________________ City, State, Zip Code _____________________

____ Enclosed is my check, payable to Finishing Line Press, for $__________.
____ Please charge my credit card $ __________. ____Visa ____Mastercard
Name as if appears on the card _____________________________________________________

Credit card number __________________Expiration date __________

Card verification number (3-digit number on back of card, far right) _____

***

And if you have a couple more minutes to spare, check out my newest poems to hit the Web in online journals:

http://www.skylinereview.com/hudson/HudsonViewOnline2010/KarlaLinnMerrifieldHudsonOnline.htm

http://web.mac.com/tomkoontz/Site_30/Merrifield.html

The best of autumn to you all.

From the Amazon to the Nile

2010-10-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

There's a snap in the air today along the south shore of Lake Ontario that shouts the arrival of autumn.

And that makes it all the more hard to believe that 11 days ago I was sweltering in the Amazonian jungle where this photo was taken during one of many hikes into the rainforest.

But with half a dozen new poems in hand and nearly 2,500 photos downloaded to my laptop, I know for sure I was really there...watching myriad tropical birds like white-throated toucans sweep over the canopy...gorging on the freshest fruits as well as sampling piranha for dinner, which tastes a lot better than it looks staring up at you from a platter with those saw teeth...meeting native children in their outback village smile back from the school window...touring the famous opera house in Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas...keeping eyes out for pink dolphins, gray dolphins...relaxing on board the quaint MV Tucano...and NOT touching anything as I tramped through the forest to avoid stings and stabs.

Roger and I agree it's one of the top expeditions of our many, many. I put it as a tie for #2 with our voyage to Antarctica. Really hard to capture the AMAZing AMAZon in words. Or photos for that matter.

But here's a humorous poem for you! Like I said, it was hot. And steamy!

***

Defeat of the Amazon

I met the sauna primeval:
95 hot degrees of it,
95 degrees humidity,
clothes sodden from step one,
each footfall farther
a conscious caution
against the poison promises
of wasps, bees, those inch-
long bullet ants.
I tramped a mere two miles
but imagine mine
more Bataan Death March,
Brazilian-style, on a trail
of sweat, near tears, worn down
by a misery of fear
amid the fecund trees of thorns.

***

And come Tuesday, Roger and I head off to Cairo, where we'll spend three days before flying south to Luxor to board the MV Salacia for 12 days of cruising downstream on the Nile, stopping at many of the grand ancient wonders of the ancient Egyptian world.

More to come when we return on October 23.

Meanwhile...happy trails to all.

All Aboard for the Amazon

2010-09-05T05:59:00.001-07:00

Greetings, readers!

This post finds me at home -- momentarily -- perched over my library table with a view of my neighbor's Rose of Sharon tree in bloom, a sure sign of early autumn in Western New York. This morning's clear, crisp air is another reminder that the season is changing.

Roger and I returned from our Western journey in mid-August, eager to settle in for a few weeks of life by Lake Ontario. We were more than ready to be home, especially after two flat tires on the trailer en route home. But, my, what a great trip. The following statistics don't begin to tell the whole story, but they will give you a sense of the scope of our trip.

Summer ’10 “Wild West” Fact Sheet

2,700 miles
12 states (NY, PA, OH, IN, ILL, KS, CO, NM, AZ, UT, NV, CA)
9 National Parks (Chaco Cultural Historic, Zion, Joshua Tree, Sequoia, King’s Canyon, Yosemite Great Basin, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands)
101.15 hiking miles
80 days
91 bird species
14 bird firsts

24 poems
170 journal pages
129 postcards
2,300 photographs (saved)
1 earthquake (5.4 magnitude, near Joshua Tree Nat’l Park)

***

Of course, like rolling stones, we're gathering no moss this autumn. On September 9, we depart for a 10-day journey that will take us to Brazil's Amazonian rainforests along the Rio Negro to its confluence with the mighty Amazon River. We'll eat, sleep and relax aboard the Tucano (shown above), spending our days tramping through the jungle in search of three-toed sloths, capybaras (the world's largest rodents), leafcutter ants and birds such as the board-billed heron and colorful macaw.

Packing is well under way, a task complicated by the need to spray all our outer clothing with a powerful insect repellent that will help us ward off malaria- and yellow fever-carrying mosquitoes, which give one great pause. Yellow fever inoculations and anti-malarial drugs, plus lots of DEET, should help us avoid any tropical plague carried by the vile mosquitoes!

Expect an update upon our return from the jungle wilds when we'll unpack from our Amazonian adventure -- and begin the process anew as we prepare for the desert reaches of Egypt and a cruise on its Nile River in October!

Happy autumn!

2010-07-25T20:01:00.000-07:00

Not the usual image you find on these pages, but I couldn't resist. It was just one of the special moments we enjoyed a couple days ago. In fact...

We had the most wonderful drive across US 50, dubbed "The Loneliest Road in America," and for good reason. Not many vehicles on the road (saw, we think, more cyclists on some kind of cross-Nevada rally) than cars/trucks/campers. No billboards. Well, one as you come into Ely, NV (McDonalds). Just a fabulous, well-paved road up and over 8 of the 12 summits (did 2 yesterday; 2 to come on Monday) of the state's basin-and-range land. Utterly exhilarating. We stopped in one of the very few towns for gas then a cup o' java to go with Roger's favorite treat: a cinnamon bun, this one 1.5 inches high and the size of a salad plate. It was so sticky I feed it to him (and had some nibbles myself) bite by bite. So, definitely heavenly. I got choked up three times by the landscape, open and wide across the alkali basins, and climbing into and coming down out of the mountains. Delicious driving. One of the best drives EVER!

And tomorrow, we complete the basin-and-range journey as we head into Great Basin National Park, one where neither of us has been. It's its own geological wonder, called a basin because there is no drainage from the park to the sea -- and we talking thousands of acres. The park, at elevations exceeding 10,000 feet above sea level, is home to bristlecone pine trees, the oldest living organisms on earth. I "met" some a few years ago at Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah and when I did, I cried. They are the only trees that have ever made me weep. So to see them a second time will be a most joyous reunion.

After four days in Great Basin, we boogie into Utah to Capitol Reef National Park for more geological glory. This will be a third visit there. Hoping to see some bighorn sheep as we did last time...and perhaps receive the same kind of inspiration that led to my poem, "Under the Sleeping Rainbow," which I just learned has received an Honorable Mention Award from New Millennium Writings (issue due out in December).

And following Capitol Reef, on to Canyonlands National Park for a couple days of hiking on the Colorado Plateau.

Looking forward to being off the grid for nine days! No cell, no email, no computer (we won't even have electricity for our trailer). Yay!

May this blog find you all well, keeping cool, enjoying the warmth of summer.

Desert Days

2010-06-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

Moonlit Feast at Chaco Canyon

Coyote leap—
Jackrabbit scream—
Bones snap as fur flies.

***

A month ago today, Roger and I pulled out of our driveway at home, so it's not all that hard to believe we've made it as far as Arizona with many memorable stops along the way.

The coyote in the photograph was trotting along the loop road at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in central New Mexico, a two-day visit that astounded us with its lush green oasis along the Rio Grande River. The scherzo (short poem of 13 syllables) reflects a moment in time at Chaco Canyon National Historic Park in northwest New Mexico where we spent three magical days exploring the ruins and petroglyphs of this erstwhile capital of the ancient Anasazi, a puebloan people whose descendants we know today as the Hopi, Zuni, Laguna and several other pueblo-dwelling tribes of the Four Corners region (NM, AZ, UT, CO).

The road to Chaco is 21 miles of dirt with several washboard sections. Not one to take our trailer down. So we tented in Chaco for the first time in many,many years. Days were boiling hot, the nights ch-ch-chilly (down to mid-40s), but one of the joys is that you can easily hear the night sounds. While no Anasazi ghosts haunted us, we did hear the sounds that gave rise to the scherzo. And when we stepped outside at 4 a.m., the stars were thick from horizon to horizon, the creamy rich band of the Milky Way vivid in the sky.

Since, we've had several days at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona to hike and commune with other Anasazi ancestors and watch the cottonwood trees along Chinle Wash blow their snow of seeds across the canyon floor.

We've also had some time in civilization with several days in Taos and several more in Santa Fe, where the big attraction was the new Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit at her museum there, a fabulous, inspiring selection of her abstract work. And we took a day trip from Santa Fe up to Abiquiu to take a tour of O'Keeffe's home there. Many moments of tears as I tried to grasp that I was in her kitchen, her garden and peering into the room where she slept and dreamed for so many years.

Tomorrow it's into Utah for a return visit (third time!) to Zion National Park for more canyon bliss, this time along the Virgin River beneath the towering redrock walls.

All is well in the West for the two of us.

Wishing you all visions of hope.

On a Sunnier Note

2010-05-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

Even while the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico plays itself out, I remain a happy wife and poet.

The picture here was taken from the lanai of the condo that Roger and I bought this month where we'll be living during the winter beginning this December. It's about seven water miles upstream from the Gulf on the north banks of the Caloosahatchee River. A quiet place and one we're looking forward to furnishing and settling into: our snowbird abode. It is a dream come true we didn't know he had until a few months ago. And now it has happened: we have a Florida home in North Fort Myers.

We've also had good fortune with Roger's health. His hormone therapy continues to work and his new PSA results reached an all-time low-low of 0.05 this month. The cancer is under control for a while longer and he's doing quite well with it. A bit chubby now around the middle and subject to -- ohmigosh -- hot flashes, but all in all quite well.

We have an energetic summer ahead. On Monday next we depart for the Wild West into the desert southwest and then onto the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Be prepared for images and poems from across the country in the three months ahead of travel for us with trusty Alis Elizabeth Trailer behind the van and the two of us singing along (if you can call it that) to "Here Comes the Sun."

On the literary front, I am pleased to report that Salmon Poetry has taken my full-length book, Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North for publication in mid-2012. I'm on Cloud 999. It's quite a breakthrough for me and I'm pleased that the collection has a home...only 10+ years in the making...and another two before it's born. Lots of time to enjoy anticipating.

For more about Salmon Poetry, go to http://www.salmonpoetry.com/

Spring has been not only the most pleasant one I can remember -- came early, came warm -- it's been otherwise fertile for my poetry. I've seen many poems appear on the Web and in print journals, among which is River Poets Journal where I'll be featured poet this spring (coming soon to http://www.riverpoetsjournal.com/RiverPoetsJournal-Links.html).

Here are a few more links you can check out now if you're curious:

http://wildgoosepoetryreview.wordpress.com/ (two poems)

http://www.deadmule.com/poetry/2010/04/karla-linn-merrifield-%E2%80%93-four-poems/ (four poems)

http://wildamorris.blogspot.com/ (poem + analysis)

http://home.earthlink.net/~tinyviolet/thecentrifugaleyepoetryjournal/id1.html (two poems and my latest regular book review column)

I hope you enjoy. Remember: Poetry heals. And celebrates. And furthers the sacred.

Love,

Karla

Kiss of Death

2010-05-28T07:49:00.001-07:00

I pause this morning to try to grasp the magnitude of the Gulf oil spill. As far as I know the fish in this photograph, taken on a Florida Gulf beach last winter, probably a victim of the frost kill, died of natural causes. It's one of the lucky ones. I just can't comprehend how many fellow fish and countless sea turtles and cormorants and pelicans are going to die a slimy, suffocating death because of the arrogance and greed of the robber baron BP. Never before in human history -- a short one in the scheme of things -- have we seen such devastation, and it's only just begun.

I hate to put a damper on your day. But it's good, I think, to pause before this holiday weekend and honor the newly dead and dying. And to have faith in our president who's got a mighty grasp on the situation and is doing right by us. Barack Obama has the wisdom to do the right things. And he is. The job is Herculean but this is one man who's up to it. We must do our part and stand by him even as we grieve.

Blessings to Earth this Memorial Day Weekend,

Karla

Spring Is Sprung

2010-03-26T08:07:00.001-07:00

Forsythia and Bradford pears, daffodils and wood violets -- all abloom as we make our way north from the Okefenokee Swamp where we spent a weekend, the warmest in many southern weeks. Now in North Carolina for a few days with our family, we look back on that idyllic weekend in the great wetlands of Georgia, remembering our kayak outing on Billy's Lake (lower photo) and walks on the boardwalk through the swamp where I took the upper photo of Red Blanket Lichen (an endemic species) and Old Man's Beard (an epiphyte aka "air plant") growing on a smooth-barked Dahoon Holly Tree.

Like the Everglades, the Okefenokee is to me a sacred place, and both are mercifully preserved thanks to the National Park Service in the case of the 'Glades and the National Wildlife Refuge System in the case of the Oke'. Both places have been muses to me over the years.

So as we turn our eyes toward the warming sun and bask in its rays, enjoying the blossoming of trees and flowers, I'll leave you with this poem about the Okefenokee, written several years ago and still applicable.

Happy spring...and see you from the home front where we are due to arrive on April 3.

***

The Epiphyte on Plato’s Trees

by Karla Linn Merrifield

What it is to capture
the imagination
of a poet to go with her
into longleaf pine flatwoods
or follow her into the heart
of the Okefenokee Swamp
to be in southern Georgia
beneath its maritime
or its vast half-land inland
island canopy to be held
in its sway:

chiggers snagged in a swag
of Spanish moss itself
caught in the snarl
of live oak on twisted limb

saw palmettos netted
in thorny catbriers climbing

partly on terra firma
partly in tannic water
a black gum, a tupolo
in a coppice
in the understory
in the hardened grasp of
a strangling vine

it is a great entanglement
this forest of words
that has arisen with
some million gripping tendrils
a composition in green
profligate enchantment
where you are meant to be
one standing still

Winter Reflection

2010-02-24T06:25:00.000-08:00

I'll say one thing about this winter: The cold -- yes, even in Florida -- has given me much time to reflect. What with three frosts (to date!) and a hailstorm earlier this week, it hasn't been kayaking weather. And the cold has taken a toll on this plein air poet who's so fond of sitting in the great outdoors to pen her verse. Still, hiking and thinking go together nicely and, with added layers to keep the brain warm, I've enjoyed letting both poetic and prosaic ideas float into my head and away with no intentions other than to listen to the ideas and let them evaporate on another gust of north wind.

One thought that did take root is that beauty survives regardless of the weather forecast. Sounds rather mundane doesn't it?! But true. So, on a chill morning along the Ochlockonee River on the Forgotten Coast of Florida's eastern panhandle, I watched the sun rise in puissant splendor, warming the North American continent toward spring, if not firing up the day much above 50 degrees.

A poet friend of mine, Tom Holmes, always urges readers at the end of his e-mails to "Find beauty." To which I will add: Let beauty find you.

Here's to the coming of spring but with joy in the grip of winter.

Island New Year's Greetings

2010-01-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

New Year's Is for the (Tropical) Birds

Frigatebirds wheel fractals
in infinite turquoise skies.

***

Roger and I spent New Year's Day on Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park, a constellation of small tropical isles 70 miles west of Key West and actually closer to Cuba than the Keys!

After a tour of Fort Jefferson (once a prison for Confederacy soldiers during the Civil War) and some snorkeling (notherin to write home about, alas, but the water was soothingly warm), I stretched out on my back on a beach blanket under the warm subtropical blue skies and watched some 50 magnificent frigatebirds wheel effortlessly across the blue. It was a half-hour of pure bliss.

We also had a close encounter with a burrowing owl who was not burrowing but rather perched in a niche in the brick walls of the ammunition repository at the fort. Who, who, who knows what he was doing 70 miles at sea on a small Gulf island!

Tomorrow we'll be back in the Everglades for a week of hiking and kayaking in my favorite place on Earth! And, as 2009 National Park Artist-in-Residence, I'll have a return engagement with a poetry reading on the 9th at the Coe Visitors Center.

From there we'll be settling down in the Western Everglades' Ten Thousand Island area for a month on Chokoloskee Island. More to come from the Gulf Coast!

Happy New Year to All!

Wood, Sand, Water

2009-12-14T03:44:00.000-08:00

Visual Aid

Complexity is underrated,
the trees teach us.

***

My snowbird sojourn is well under way. I write this morning from Jekyll Island, GA. However, the adjacent image, "Uprooted," was taken a few days ago at Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina, my favorite state park in all the land where we always stop en route south. In recalling that memorable visit (several beach walks!), I wrote the above poem. It's a scherzo, a form developed by friend and poet William Heyen and one restricted to 13 syllables, not including the title. Each scherzo must also include a rhyme as does "Visual Aid."

Hunting Island will recede further into the distance as we make our way later this morning to Georgia's lovely Crooked River State Park for three days beneath the rare long-leaf pines in the habitat of gopher tortoises. I will breathe the tidal rhythms of the St. Marys River and ponder further the miracle of diversity in Nature.

In Snowbird Season

2009-11-30T04:18:00.000-08:00

Today is our last day at home; we head for points south tomorrow morning at daybreak, a 294-mile run to Carlisle, PA.

But I take a few minutes' rest from the whirlwinds of packing van and trailer, savoring our home on a wintry, gray morning. Beloved husband Roger is off to nearby Albion to tend to repairs on the minivan. Seems after 132,000 miles -- most of it pulling Alis Elizabeth Trailer -- Bore the Van needs new struts and related suspension work. Unplanned, unexpected, this duty calls him off on one more last-minute mission. Men's work.

It gives me some time to bask in the glow of a candle, listening to Simon & Garfunkle's Concert in Central Park in the comfort of the library one last morning. I get to do poet's work. Drafting a sonnet, revising a poem I wrote last week.

And quietly reveling in this morning's good news: Literary House Review has nominated my poem, "According to Instinct" for a Pushcart Prize! A second nomination! Yehaw! Thank you, LHR!

Soon I will turn my thoughts to my winter to-do list. The mundane calls.

Be well, friends and visitors.

May you receive the many gifts of the Universe this holiday season. And fellow poets? Write on!

2009-11-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

Godwit: Poems of Canada Chosen for the University of Rochester's Andrew Eiseman Writers Award

On Thursday evening, November 5, I had the honor of receiving the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award at a ceremony at the University of Rochester's Rush-Rhees Library. I was thrilled to the point of tears, an upwelling of emotion that had nothing to do with the $1000 prize.

Poets really do suffer long and hard in the lonely world of words. We really do, I believe, write because we have to. A powerful internal impetus drives us to the blank page. And we write, write, write (and edit, edit, edit) because we feel we must. The spirit moves us; the muse moves us. Occasionally poems see the light of day and appear in journals. And, if we are lucky, the poems make their way into books, which a few people may actually end up reading.

So, to be honored in public with this distinguished award was breathtaking and tear-making.

Once again, I wish to thank many people: Andrea Weinstein of the University of Rochester for all her work in coordinating and planning the award process and Thursday's ceremony; the award judges for believing in my traitorous book; FootHills Publishing, a small press of 20+ successful years that has furthered the careers of poets and kept poetry alive in the world -- I owe so much to publisher Michael Czarnecki; and Bill Heyen, my mentor and friend…who stood at this podium a few years ago -- I was so very, very honored to follow in his footsteps. But most important of all, I offer here my undying gratitude and devotion and love to my husband, Roger Weir, who traipsed with me across Canada to every province and territory in that great country. We are proud to be south Canadians. And I am so very proud to be his wife.

For more details about the award, go to:

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3491

To order your copy, write me at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.

Let Your River Journey Begin

2009-10-07T05:46:00.000-07:00

A “quest for the center of poetry itself…” – FootHills Publishing Releases Karla Linn Merrifield’s Newest Poetry Collection

Etowah River Psalms is a chapbook that seeks the primal

Wheeler Hill, NY – “I focus and actually exult” is how poet Karla Linn Merrifield of Kent, NY, succinctly conveys the poetic process of exploring life’s timeless themes – eros, death, time, patience, longing –- in her new chapbook, Etowah River Psalms.

Merrifield’s is a deeply spiritual and sensual collection in which nature is worshiped and the human-as-animal is integrated into the web of life. Thus, in “The Beholder,” two lovers are united under “shimmering light… under the ancient stars above us. And in “Entering the Garden of the Universe,” what is human in the poem’s speaker is part of the fabric of nature in its entirety: “I now choose to live carnally. / Like the ocean, I have no other god / than gravity.”

“In psalm after riverine psalm here, whether her subject is tongue or Indian summer or the eye or box turtle and moon or mountain or love, Karla Linn Merrifield continues her quest for the center of poetry itself, the primal, and we are glad, by way of her voice, to hear and behold, to draw closer, says poet William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, and finalist for the National Book Award, about Etowah River Psalms.

The collection was inspired by Georgia poet Beau Cutts’s master poem, “The Etowah,” from which she drew lines that became the kernels for all of the poems in this chapbook. Thus, Cutts originally wrote of “cleansing the inner gray” and Merrifield, borrowing the line, created with it the poem “Darkroom Work,” the first stanza of which is:

Cleansing our inner gray,
we plunge first into black and white,
a glossy emotional tableau
of Ansel’s grandest views:
mountains, mesas, canyons, coulees.
He parses the territory
of our great hearts in full moonlight.

Thus, from one poem about a river flowed the many poems of Etowah River Psalms.

Etowah River Psalms (40 pages), with a cover photograph by the author,is available for $10from FootHills Publishing at http://foothillspublishing.com/2009/id63.htm or directly from the poet at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.

###

Far, Far Away

2009-09-08T03:13:00.000-07:00

I've only been home two weeks from our expedition to the Canadian high arctic and Greenland and already it seems as far away as it is on the map.

But when friends and famiiy ask me, "So, how was it" it's easy to recall. I say, "Bleak, desolate." And, even as I recall the welcoming smiles of so many Inuit in the three villages we visited, I also remark, "Sad."

Everywhere is evidence of global warming. I'd expected that but not the extent of the damage. Until we got far, far north in Baffin Bay, ice was hard to come by. As Jimmy, one of our two Inuit cultural guides on the expedition ship Akademik Ioffe, pointed out when we arrived in his home town of Grise Fjord on Ellesmere Island, the glaciers are decidedly retreating. The massive one behind his town used to come down to their backyards; we craned our necks to see its foot -- easily two miles up into the brown hills overlooking Grise Fjord. Seal hunting has become more difficult for Inuit and polar bear alike. The floes where they hunt are going, going, gone.

The arctic's is a sad history too. Inuit were relocated, their children sent off to "residential schools" far from their parents to be starved, beaten, raped. Whites stole their language by forbidding it. Anglican priests eradicated the First People's shamanic traditions. Thankfully, some restitution has been made; the Inuit are now celebrating the 10th anniversary of the creation of Nunavut, a vast northern territory of Canada that is theirs to govern. And parents and schools are now teaching Inuktitut. Children are learning to hunt; they're learning how to drum and dance and sing once again in their native tongue.

Although whites eventually conquered, theirs is a sad arctic history as well. Shipboard lectures and a subsequent visit to the graveyard on Beechey Island attest to the fatal follies of 19th-century arctic exploration. I've long been haunted by the saga of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845-47. Both of Sir John Franklin's ships went down; all of the 129 men died seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient. A 150 years later it's pretty much been proven that lead poisoning was the principle culprit -- lead in the solder of the tin cans of food they consumed, ingesting the metal with the meat -- and driven mad by it. Many, many contemporary searchers after Franklin met much the same fate. Their bones are scattered across the brownscape of the arctic and buried in the sands beneath the sea.

I spent considerable time contemplating the fate of Franklin and his men in a series of poems, including the one below in which I imagined what the the fate of the pet dog that accompanied the crew on their journey to an arctic death.

Unleashed, 1847

A frigid ocean away
from heathered highlands,
one border collie
with no sheep to herd
aboard the Erebus
trotted aimlessly among
scurvy-weak sailors,
lead-demented officers.
But when Jocko,
the ship’s pet monkey,
nipped her heels
and the boatswain’s
swift kick clipped her ribs,
Neptune let over the rail
and followed the trail
of arctic wolves
into the icy mists—
the Franklin Expedition’s
sole survivor.

***

P.S. Roger took this photo of me at Lemieux Point on Devon Island; the landscape is quintessential high arctic.

Into the Far Country

2009-08-11T07:56:00.001-07:00

Today, August 11, it is warm and sunny along the south shore of Lake Ontario, but the ice is not far away. Just a drive to Ottawa and a flight of several hundred miles north into Nunuvut in the Canadian High Arctic. I'll be there by Friday. On board a ship, the Academik Ioffe, a former Russian reserch vessel that will take me on a vagabond poet's expedition of the polar regions and Greenland--the Far Country

I imagine it, difficult to do with my neighbor's garden awash in floral beauty within eyeshot and the hummingbirds nipping in and out of the lush white Rose of Sharon. Hard to imagine the white of Baffin Bay. Perhaps it will look much like the wonderland in the photo here, one taken from aboard ship in Antarctica, the nether antipode I visited almost two years ago. How will the poles differ? What ice remains? How is the Arctic changing? How will I be changed?

To be continued upon my return from the world that swallowed Sir John Franklin and his crew and his two ships and the dog and the monkey that voyaged with them on that doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845.

Along the Third Coast

2009-07-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

As I've made my way eastward across Montana, through the badlands of North Dakota and into the verdant north woods of Minnesota, Wisconsin and now Michigan, I've spent considerably more time pondering the meaning of place.

Many years ago, in my first book, Midst, I mused on my vagabond life and observed:

"I hear voices. It's been happening over the past several years as I have traipsed up the backwaters & into the wilder regions of the North American continent. As I traveled, I left behind Ruskin's pathetic fallacy that had taught me to avoid imbuing the natural world with human feeling. I left behind the work of many modern poets who have used the pathetic fallacy to ironically emphasize the loss of communion between the individual & the natural world. But I stuffed into my backpack the belief that that communion could be regained & that the natural world could imbue me with its feelings. And it did."

By learning to speak cod and halibut, by learning the languages of mountain and glacier, I was able to immerse myself in place, whatever that place might be, whether badlands or Everglades or....

Recent discussions with backcountry ranger John Heiser in Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Unit), deepened my understanding of place and my place in it. He is a man who clearly knows his place, his home, having been born and raised in North Dakota and having served 26 years at the ND park where we met. "Where is your home?" he asked of me one day and again on a second day, along with a dozen fellow hikers, many of whom called that quarter of the state their "home." My answer to John came in the form of a poem (no surprise) with a refrain that hammers home my response:

I am where I am.

In the moment. In the place.

Somewhere in North America.

Since writing that poem, I've continued to ponder the meaning of place, realizing as I've returned to the Great Lakes region -- the Third Coast as it's often called -- that, while I'm at home wherever I roam, I'm most at home on North America's inland seas, if only from habit. After all, I've lived on the south coast of Lake Ontario going on 23 years -- half my life. No wonder it feels familiar, feels comfy.

I also realize now that not all places are equal. Lake Ontario is more home than other homes such as Teddy Roosevelt NP, which was my home this summer for five days for a return visit. The Everglades, where I was national park artist-in-residence last winter, is not so much a second home as it is my holy land, a place where I make an annual pilgrimage to refresh my spirit even while mourning the degradations it has suffered.

A place called Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is also a sacred place that beckons me. It is a place that gives birth naturally to poems as I describe in my essay, "Stanzas in the Stone," that was published this month in the Oregon Literary Review.

Having just spent several days on an island in Lake Superior (conveyed there by the ferry pictured above), today I'm a few miles from Lake Michigan; tomorrow I'll settle in to a campground on the shores of Lake Huron. In another week, I'll tent on an island in Lake Erie. In two weeks, I'll be back "home" on Lake Ontario, a Third Coaster at heart. But add to that tender heart a body and soul and I know I have many places, many homes. I am a creature of an entire continent; I am a being of North America.

Fewer, Smaller

2009-07-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Montana greetings from the Vagabond Poet who is just now resurfacing from immersion in mountains and valleys and more mountains and valleys in Glacier National Park. It's a spectacular corner of the country where grizzlies rule and campers are wise to be cautious. We didn't see any of the ursine family in our four days there, but reports came into the campground of encounters -- all of them ending happily for bear and hiker alike. Word from the rangers is that Ursus horribilis is doing well; it's the glaciers that are really suffering. You look out from an overlook at a glacier then down at the roadside exhibit showing what the glacier looked like 10 years ago, 30 years ago. Today's glacier is an icy ghost of its former self. It's in-your-face global warming. It's in-your-eyes cold tears.

***

Still, beauty remains, sometimes in the smallest things that often go overlooked. I found my solace in Glacier National Park thus:

***

In the Valley of the Shadows of High Mountains

The active ingredient

in spruce trees

is lichen.

***

From the Badlands Past the Bighorns

2009-06-15T06:04:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that three weeks have passed since we left home on our pilgrimage to the western mountains via the Badlands of South Dakota where this photograph was taken along a trail through the rugged landscape where the Earth shows her bones. We've since left the Great Plains behind and have made it safely through the Black Hills of western South Dakota with a stopover in Deadwood to relive the wild-west late 1800s in that national historic town, and then over our first mountain range, the Bighorns of eastern Wyoming. Soon, into Yellowstone National Park where it's impossible to ignore that the Earth is alive--and gasping, gushing, bubbling and heaving beneath your feet or several safe feet away.

For now, I leave you with a short poem that I hope will give you a sense of what it felt like to cross over the Bighorn Mountains at 9,000 feet above sea level on a chilly June morning.

Amid the Bighorns

snow swale

fog drift

stream rush

raven glide

If I am not crushed
by cliff slide
I will become
the summit

East Meets West

2009-05-23T06:49:00.000-07:00

At last spring has come to the south shore of Lake Ontario and our lilac bush is in bloom, two weeks behind those that graced nearby Rochester's annual Lilac Festival. I picked two bouquets to enjoy on my desk, in the kitchen--which will travel with us across the U.S. towards Montana. A gathering of blooms and aroma to remind us of home, at least for the few days they last.

We depart tomorrow, May 24, for a nine-week expedition-by-trailer to the Badlands of South Dakota, Black Hills, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park in Montana and then our return trip via the Badlands of North Dakota and along the Great Lakes shores from Minnesota to Ohio and home again on August 1. I promise updates from the blue highways of the plains and Rockies. Meanwhile, a tiny poem to celebrate Spring-at-Last:

May Star Date #4:
Lines Aligned in a Parallel Universe

Overhead after midnight,
a shining through—
new life.

***

Peace and health to all.

Kindly,

Karla

Not-Spring

2009-04-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

Where did the winter go since my last posting? In Western New York, the answer is: “Not away.” It’s been unseasonably cold since I returned north from Florida two weeks ago. A late-February expedition into the Baja of Mexico to see whales seems eons ago and my Artist-in-Residency program in the Everglades even deeper in time. While winter continues to have its grip on the shores of Lake Ontario, I try to hold on to the warmth of the south and of Mexico.

Photographs and poems of the Baja trip help me hold onto the magic of being among the great cetaceans – five whale species, including mating humpbacks with the randy males ramming each other to win breeding rights to the evasive female. This photograph of a humpback’s flukes is a clear reminder of the majesty of these mammals, our cousins who also remind me of how insignificant is humankind. And how fleeting is our time here on Earth.

That must have been on my mind when I wrote this poem.

The Price of Souvenirs

We leave something of our souls
in our footprints in foreign lands
and take only these photographs:

The one where I left a flicker of myself
reflected in a gray whale’s eye
in Magdalena Bay in the Baja of Mexico.

One where I left a scrap of being
in Los Islotes on those rocks
of seals and pelicans in the Sea of Cortez.

You saw me amid cardon cactus and elephant trees
leaving one last innocence aside
on Espiritu Santo like skin drying in desert air.

You have seen how I leave a dream behind
among Pacific turtle bones and sand dollars
on a bleached beach by an ocean of death.

***

Meanwhile, I’ve home and settling into a spring brightened by poetry readings and gatherings with friends. Snow may be yet on the ground, but the promise of spring’s renewal is kept by birds at the feeders and buds thick on the trees in the neighborhood. I feel the warmth within. I hope you do, too.

Morning in the Everglades

2009-02-18T09:02:00.000-08:00

Greetings, readers!

I have surfaced for a few days from my artist-in-residency in Everglades National Park...and will be heading soon to the Baja for a Lindblad expedition to see the gray whales in their nursing lagoons.

The Everglades residency experience was eye-opening in so many ways...through writing and editing poetry, a poetry reading, photography, botanizing, hiking, biking -- being. It will stay with me forever. That is the nature of the Everglades.

Among my accomplishments was a collection of 19 "cameos" -- miniature portraits of people in Everglades history dating from the 1500s to the present. Each one is 100 syllables long (or 200 if a double cameo) and is based on historical fact presented with mythic embellishments. The research for the poems was almost as fun doing as the poems themselves. So I will leave you with one in the series...about Guy Bradley, the future park's first game warden, one who was murdered by plume hunters at the beginning of the 20th century.

See you next time with tales and whales' tails from the Baja.

***

1905, Guy Bradley Cameo: Dead or Alive?

To St. Bradley,
patron of subtropical birds,
our latter-day Assisi,
our Everglades martyr
to its causes, I pray.

How unceremoniously they took aim
and shot you, those greedy hunters,
those ravaging devils, that plague
of egrets great and snowy,
of hierophantic great blue herons, too.
Those killers in the rookeries
are dead. But you live on
among the glossy ibis,
a feather spirit, listening.

Ever the Everglades

2009-01-29T04:44:00.000-08:00

Everglades Horizon #1

Limestone
sawgrass
panther
dew
If I do not evaporate
in winter’s drought,
I will become
the summer slough.

Everglades Horizon #2

Mangrove
osprey
hurricane
mosquito
If I am not lost
in the ten-thousand watery labyrinths,
I will become an island.

***

Greetings from Chokoloskee Island in the western Everglades where I've made a base for exploring both Big Cypress National Preserve to the northeast and the 10,000 Islands of the Gulf just beyond the small wharf at the campground. Some hiking, some kayaking, some lazing on the verandah watching the pelicans, spotted sandpipers (a bird-first) and terns while they watch for anglers to return with their catch and the detritus that will fall their way when cobia, snook, snapper and sheephead become filets.

On Sunday, February 1, I return to the eastern Everglades to commence my two-week artist-in-residency program where much inspiration awaits, including the splendor of purple gallinules like the handsome fellow in the above photo. In addition to giving a couple poetry readings, my goal is "to contemplate the Universe from the Holy Land of the Everglades." More specifically, I wish to complete a cycle of short poems -- "Cameos" -- that pay tribute to key figures in Everglades history. I'm sure other poems will arrive on the wings of birds to celebrate the flora and fauna of this unique place on Earth. The thought of unfettered hours to write (I'll be "off the grid!" and not much concerned about cooking and other quotidian tasks) is thrilling. Update to follow upon my return from the wild, the wonderful River of Grass.

A Beckoning Beacon

2009-01-09T04:54:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the Atlantic coast in Florida near Ponce Inlet where this 1887 lighthouse -- Florida's tallest -- guards the entrance from ocean to the Halifax River. The imposing tower, second highest brick lighthouse in the U.S. (only the Cape Hatteras lighthouse is taller), stands stately guard over the tricky inlet. While no longer operated by the U.S. Coast Guard, it still functions as a "private" lighthouse, lovingly restored and maintained by a non-profit foundation that has even restored the 1933 first-order Fresnel-lens light. On such a beautiful day as yesterday when I visited the handsome structure, it stood out for its rich brick-red color against a flawless blue sky. No, I did not climb to the top for a lighthouse keeper's view of the surrounding waters, but stood humbled beneath it with respect for its architect, masons and the generous people who restored it and the mryiad lenses and prisms in its lamp. Sometimes mankind gets things right. The Ponce Inlet Lighthouse is one of our more admirable achievements.

Everglades Bound

2008-12-12T09:42:00.000-08:00

Thick the limestone base
but porous; ancient raindrops
garnered quench all thirst.

This river of grass
harbors pineland keys – soughing
an ocean of wind.

***

Tomorrow (December 15), my husband Roger and I leave for the winter...heading south once again as snowbirds to warmer climes. As usual, we'll be playing "campground hobos," staying at a number of state and federal campgrounds in Georgia and in the Sunshine State.

But one change in our usual travel routine is in store: The Everglades National Park Artist in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) program has named me its resident artist for February 2009. The program, which provides an on-site apartment in the heart of the park, offers artists the opportunity to live and work in this unique environment. The poems I hope to complete under this program will contribute to the public understanding and appreciation of Everglades National Park. It is hoped that these works will characterize the Everglades for present and future generations, giving park visitors and the general public an opportunity to see our heritage through the eyes, and ears of the contributing artists. I will have the opportunity to interact with park rangers and give poetry readings during my stay. This is my favorite place on Earth. That I will have unfettered time to write, write, write about it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’m so grateful to be an AIRIE poet. I'm also grateful that Roger has been so obliging about my two-week disappearing act. He'll be tucked into a lovely little campground on Chokoloskee Island in the Western Everglades ... no doubt reading, reading, reading while I go about a quiet writer's life. Look for updates in future posts.

Meanwhile, it's time to hit the road.

Think Warm, Think Peace

2008-11-23T05:03:00.000-08:00

As we head into the holiday season with Thanksgiving just around the corner, arctic cold has settled over western New York, thanks to the gale-force winds called Alberta Clippers that have barreled south out of the high north. Even folks in the deep south are feeling the chill, so reports my friend and poet Beau Cutts from Georgia. Brrr!

So I'm trying to think warm thoughts and have been looking at photographs from trips to balmy Florida in winters past. I took this photo of coral reefs and mangrove islets in the Florida Keys from the front seat of an open-cockpit biplane last winter. I ponder the turquoise water and imagine snorkling off the bow of the fishing boat. My fingers and toes are still cold, but I'm warmer inside.

Among the many, many things for which I am thankful for this season, not the least of which are my husband, family, friends, and President-elect Barack Obama (!!!!!!), I'm grateful to a fellow named James Penha, editor of The New Verse News (http://newversenews.blogspot.com/), who nominated my poem "The Shells" for a Pushcart Prize, one of the more prestigious literary accolades. It was a first for me and I'm honored. It also came as quite a surprise. This poem is one of my few anti-war poems, kind of a black sheep in the body of my work. So to have it singled out for a Pushcart nomination was a most pleasant shock. The poem is a reminder that our country is still at war...these five-plus years later from the "eve of the war in Iraq" of which the poem speaks.

Now at least there's hope that the war will come to an end. I dedicate the poem today to Barack Obama, peacemaker.

The Shells

On the eve of the war in Iraq
she was contemplating opercula,
small doorways of protection for snails
—ocean’s moon snails, slipper snails, also
augers & whelks of more intricate shells.

On the eve of the war in Iraq
she reminisced about hermit crabs
that tuck their tender hind ends
into any abandoned shell that suits,
taking shelter from predators.

On the eve of the war in Iraq
loggerheads in their formidable shells
were yet far off shore, so she touched
instead six silver turtles pinned to her vest,
gesture to totems of spiritual safety.

On the eve of the war in Iraq
she was reminded that she is:
human, she has no shell –
only the simulacrum of the warriors’
so-called shells that were put to use
on the morning of the war in Iraq.

***

Happy holidays. Remember: Celebrate Earth!

Autumn Greetings from Home

2008-09-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

Corn Fantasy

Acres of August corn crowd
to the shoulders on four corners.
I creep through the intersection—
cautious, aware: I am in over my head
in fields to every horizon.
The corn hovers above like an army of green

seraphim protecting me as far as I can see.

I slow down driving between their handsome ranks.
But the stalks are restless, like me,
as if wrestling with competing personalities.
On the outside, the plant admits to chaos—
its tassle-do tossed by stiff mid-day breezes,
and, like my own gray hair, its silk tangles
But beneath the husk all is tidiness.
Each sweet ear I bite into this autumn
yields six hundred kernels, arranged in even bands.

So orderly, the kernels of corn I swallow.

I come to a full stop
thinking of Mayans, Huicholes, the Anasazi,
and other peoples of the corn.
I pull off to the side, park, get out, push into
the rows of corn near Peter-Smith and Lakeshore;
I join the spirits in the maize.

***

The Autumn Equinox occurs tomorrow at 11:44 EST...and the fields are full of the season's bouty--corn, pumpkins, cabbabes, beans, carrots, apples, pears... After a delicious summer (som much fresh seafood!) in the Canadian Maritimes (alas, without email most of the time and few opportunities to update my blog!), I've settled back into the routine of teaching freshman writing, visiting with friends and enjoying the beauty of Lake Ontario in my front yard. It is indeed a blessing to be home.

In the Poetic Forest

2008-06-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

The Bashō Trees of Acadia

Northern forests in the east
are littered with brief poems
written in white bark code
on curled scrolls peeled
from paper birches.
Each is a secret haiku
scripted in dashes to read
like Braille with your fingertips.
I retrieve one scrap hidden
in the duff by Jordan Pond,
ponder its lines embossed
on papyrus, deciphering:

Mist lifts. Loon surfaces.
Bold tremolos echo through
cold light of wildness.

***

While the above poem was written in Maine's Acadia National Park, I remain in Acadia -- up in the Canadian portion of that land once widely settled by the French who were later ousted from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia when the British took control. Many of the deported French ended up in Louisiana and became known as Cajuns and were immortalized in Longfellow's poem "Evangeline."

Acadia is a land of birches, firs and granite...a magical land. And today, a special treat: the ferry across the Bay of Fundy from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia. Fundy! Site of the world's greatest tides -- a shift from low to high (or high to low!) up to 48 feet. Such a tremendous tide that you can stand at water's edge and watch the water rise to your feet or ebb away minute by minute. But today, a different view: from atop the bay's great waters on the ferry boat Princess of Acadia.

Another Vagabond Summer

2008-06-05T03:40:00.000-07:00

On Sterling Pond

Who first called it fair?
Who first named it haven?
How long ago were the thoughts
first twinned in the minds of mapmakers?

I have it on good authority
from season’s first dragonfly
along Ontario: It was a pair of them.
The gander saw her fair;
the hen had found in him a haven
for seven goslings to be raised
on a sterling—his idea—pond,
her word for their home of reeds.
Since the end of the last Ice Age,
its great glacial retreat,
Canada geese have claimed
these south shore marshes.
Despite red-tailed hawk visions,
shadows of turkey vultures,
the arrival of man, me,
this species thrives.

Tonight I sleep in Fair Haven
on the bluff above Sterling Pond,
in the company of Branta canadensis.
Tonight I dream the voice of the goose
is yet heard in the wetlands
eight thousand generations later.
I dream the birds’ long aquatic history
and lore of this place on the charts. Again,
I make their fair, sterling acquaintance.
Tonight I swim in protected waters.

***

Summer season's greetings, friends and visitors.

With Fair Haven State Park in New York already a memory,

I head across Lake Champlain into Vermont today,

a green northern kingdom of rugged mountains.

Home, Sweet Home

2008-04-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

Spring hasn't quite arrived in Western New York, so I sure wish I could walk back into this beach scene in a photo taken on St. Joseph's Peninsula State Park a couple weeks ago.

Chilly and rainy and gray in Kent, N.Y. It's definitely not shorts and sunglasses weather. But it's good to be home...visiting friends...entertaining...sleeping in my own bed...and listening to the thousands of geese in the fields behind the house as they commute to and from Lake Ontario.

Reflections in the Longleaf Forest

2008-03-06T04:26:00.000-08:00

Ochlockonee River State Park on Florida's "Forgotten Coast" region of the panhandle is my favorite state park. There's a serenity there engendered by the tall soughing pines and the almost imperceptible hiss of the river as it slips across the sandy banks on its daily unhurried rise and fall with the tides. The longleaf pine, my favorite evergreen, is endangered; only remnants of the great forests that stretched from Virginia south and west into east Texas remain. One such pocket of sylvan glory is at Ochlockonee, where you can also, if you take a lesson from the river and move quietly, slowly, see a red-cockaded woodpecker, endemic to the longleafs and also endangered.

I saw the bird; I breathed the tangy trees; I reflected. There's still time to save them both.

More Florida Sunshine

2008-02-12T04:53:00.001-08:00

Sunset at Chokoloskee, a small, sleepy "old Florida" island on the edge of the Western Everglades, 10,000 Islands area.

Sunshine on My Shoulders

2008-02-11T06:13:00.000-08:00

Warm Florida greetings to all. It has been a busy time for this vagabond poet. Writing, of course, but also meandering bay and estuary by kayak and beach and forest on foot trails along the Atlantic coast, into the Keys, and now on the Gulf coast, where I'm making my way slowly northward as the days grow perceptibly longer.

One of the best days so far I spent alone on Cayo Costa, a small barrier isle on the Gulf coast accessible only by boat. I spent the day on the beach writing and bird watching, cloud watching with no one in sight despite the perfectly sunny, warm day. The solitude was refreshing...and inspirational. Hence:

In Order

It is not any memory
of the sea, but the eye—
the eye goes first.
So a sailor’s sailor,
one who has gone round the Horn,
will tell you: the eye goes first.
Where have gone my guiding stars?
Where my albatrosses?
In the footsteps of Darwin
go studious scholars of benthic depths,
of the great pelagic heave,
who report in scientific journals
the news on every shore:
how the eye goes first.
Where have gone my pristine waters?
Where my blue-footed booby?
And the ocean’s poets
from Antarctica to the Gulf of Alaska
as they stroll coast lines in their lines
espy the moon by ebb and neap,
and the next day, night’s dead on the beach.
We write that the eye goes first.
Where have gone my Neptune, my Poseidon?
Where my penguins and puffins?
Death surfs on crushing waves in our poetry;
first the going blind, then the fade of memory.

***

Antarctic Dreams

2007-12-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

The Vagabond Poet has landed on terra firma at home after a 28-hour journey from Ushuaia, Argentina -- the southernmost city on the planet -- to our driveway.

I'm finding it impossible to describe to people what it was like. No superlative I've come across does the continent justice.

However, I've made one discovery: It's not the "White Continent" as it's so often called. Antarctica is the "Blue Continent" to me. Sky, water, ice combine in remarkable ways in myriad hues of blue. Ahhhh.

2007-12-16T08:44:00.000-08:00

Greetings from below the Antarctic Circle! We crossed this line—660 33” 30’ south latitude—aboard the National Geographic Endeavour this morning at 8:30 and, as I write, are several degrees below it making passage to Marguerite Bay on the southern end of Adelaide Island off the Antarctic Peninsula.

It’s been a fantastic voyage so far…with humpback whales cavorting next to the ship in a quiet bay…crabeater and leopard seals hauled out on bergy bits…chinstrap as well as gentoo penguins waddling uphill from the shore or sliding downhill to it on their bellies…overhead a variety of petrels, terns, skuas and albatroses wheeling in the gray skies. In fact, I’ve counted 21 “bird firsts” so far in the expedition.

We’ve had our share of rough seas, winds (up to a full gale) and some snow, but the temperatures haven’t dropped much below freezing. And in the quieter waters of channels and straights, calmer waters and great masses of fantastically shaped blue icebergs drifting by.

I look at the sharp-ridged towering volcanic mountains sheathed in ice and at white caps torn off of wave crests as far as the eye can see and am reminded of Thoreau’s dictum: “We need the tonic of wildness.” In Antarctica on this journey I am getting the strongest dose of that elixir. The White Continent and its adjacent seas indeed belong to the penguins. Man may visit briefly, carefully, but in the end this is the kingdom of the gentoos and their ilk.

***

First Morning, Drake Passage

No reminder necessary, no other option:
Obey the sailors’ law: “One hand for the ship.”
I must get a grasp, hold fast to the Endeavour
to steady my wobbly landlubber’s legs.
I lurch along her decks, sidle corridors,
totter fore to aft above the heaving seas,
With an envy of cavorting albatrosses
and their various companion petrels,
I wish for wings with which to skim
these white caps, pray to relinquish
all my labored habits of terra firma
that I too may woo the watery churn
with unfettered spindrifted kisses.
As I bend at the knees, dip and lean
into ever steeper, steelier swells,
does this Southern Ocean recognize
my curtsies? Do waves witness how
I swoon? Will winds know when I let go?

Oh, Canada! Oh, a New Poetry Book!

2007-10-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Coastal Range

granite
spruce
mist
hawk
if I do not drown
in the snowmelt stream
I will become the mountain

***

My newest book of poetry has just been released from FootHills Publishing -- Godwit: Poems of Canada! With lots of poems and a few photos I take readers on a journey across the vast stretches of Canada. From Newfoundland and Labrador to the shores of British Columbia with many stops along the way, you'll travel out of the fog, onto the prairies and into the mountains, meeting up with wildlife and fascinating people of yore and of today.

Considering the cost of airfare and gasoline these days as well as border crossing hassles, Godwit is a sane solution for those seeking to explore the great northern frontier. The book is available from FootHills Publishing at www.foothillspublishing.com. Cover prices is $18 US.

Worth the read, eh?

On Wings of Hope

2007-08-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

My newest chapbook, Dawn of Migration, has arrived!

The chapbook, which is being issued in conjunction with my fist-ever one-woman photography exhibit as part of the 3rd annual RochesterInkPoetry in Fusion Festival in October, fuses 19 of my “best of” bird photographs with 18 poems about the Galapagos’ blue-footed booby, Florida’s roseate spoonbill, Canada’s white pelican, the ubiquitous great blue heron and more.

One critic, fine art photographer and author Laury A. Egan observed this about the Dawn of Migration collection: “In style, these poems are intensely feminine; in perspective, they are powered by the maternal, as if written by Mother Nature herself.”

I hope you'll want to take a closer look. No binoculars required!

The chapbook is available for $11.50 (including postage). Proceeds support RochesterInk, as will sales of the framed photographs (available November 1). To order the book or to find out more, write me at klmerrifield@yahoo.com

Kindly, from Kent, NY (aka Home),

Karla

Northern Bound

2007-08-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

The vagabond poet is aheadin' home...where, if all goes well, I will arrive on Wednesday, August 8, after eleven weeks of gallavanting. The penultimate adventure of this long journey to the Southwest and back took us along the Natchez Trace Parkway through Mississippi. Much to see along this lovely route that follows the old Indian-trail-cum-pioneer-pathway of the 1800s. Historic churches and moody cemetaries with worn tombstones and old trees draped with Spanish moss...ancient Indian burial mounds...creeks and delicate waterfalls...sites of now-defunct towns...and nature trails like the one that led through this cypress swamp one early morning.

One last stop along the way: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame/Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday. Then home, home at last.

Look for more postings this fall...beginning with a couple selections of photographs from my upcoming one-woman photography-poetry exhibit at High Falls Gallery in Rochester, NY. Dawn of Migration and Other Audubon Dreams is slated to open on October 3...with an accompanying chapbook of the 18 bird photos and poems in the show.

San Juan River Magic

2007-06-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

Shall We Gather at the River?

for the 2007 Wild Rivers Dory Expedition members

I am not the first
to have this strong sense
that canyons are not for people;
they’re for rivers. And rivers
are here for rocks, to receive
from limestone walls great corrugated slabs
and make of them these billion cobbles.

I am not the first:
Other passing Homo sapiens sapiens
who came long before me, long before
any of you, knew canyons
are not for us. They’re for lizards,
mule deer, desert mountain sheep,
cliff swallows, green-violet swallows,
martins and bats, always the bats.
Creatures of the evening primrose,
creatures of the cloudless morning-blue
vault of heaven we are not.

And I am not the first
to take home sand in my shoes,
pebbles in my pockets,
mementos of the San Juan Goosenecks,
testaments to Time’s endeavors
as I too pass through with you this hour,
floating this river’s ancient meander
beneath her crumbling canyon towers.

with a line from Ann Zwinger

2007-05-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

So this is what a vagabond poet looks like! At least I did last summer while exploring the base of Canyon de Chelly in northwest Arizona, one of my most favorite places on Earth, a sacred space for me as well as the Dine (Navajo) people. And one of the places my husband Roger and I will be returning to this summer.

Welcome to Vagabond Poet

2007-05-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

Friends, poets, family, thrillseekers, voyeurs, fellow travelers! Welcome to my blog.

Who'd have thunk it? Well, times change and even older humans can adapt to new environments. Besides, I'm being my old practical self. This is an easy way to keep up with me, my poetry and photography as I wind down the long and winding road.

I hope you'll visit my blog from time to time to see what's new in words and pictures.

Happy trails!