Although it was rightly eclipsed in the national news by the monster tornado that destroyed so much of Joplin, Missouri, here in Minneapolis we also suffered a serious tornado on Sunday, May 22.  It hit one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, the North Side, where many blacks live, and where hundreds of folks are now homeless.  More than 5,000 people were affected by major damage to their dwellings, many of them renters with little or no insurance.  As of late Tuesday, 7,000 homes and business were still without power.  The storm was responsible for two deaths and forty-eight injuries, and while it seems minor in light of Joplin, for those involved, it is major.

A sidebar to the human catastrophe was the destruction of a heron rookery on an island in the Mississippi River.  According to the Star Tribune, the island had been home to three dozen heron nests, each with possibly three eggs or hatchlings, and tended by a pair of adult herons.  All those nests were destroyed by the storm, and only a few of the estimated 50 trees remain standing on the island.  Now all that is left are a few adult herons flying circles around the mangled island or perched on splintered remains of trees.  It is estimated that many as 180 great blue herons were killed, injured or are missing.

When I read about the birds, I thought of Robert Bly’s poem that I had read recently in his new book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey.  I was seeking some solace in poetry, and I thought I remembered a heron poem by Mary Oliver.  That led me to a website billed (no pun intended…) as “Cool Bird Poems: An E-Anthology of Avian Poetry,” which quickly provided me with several heron poems.  Here’s the link: http://incolor.inetnebr.com/tgannon/bird.html  It is really cool, in part because it has the poetry alphabetized by bird initials; thus H, Heron.

Here in memory of the lost herons is the Bly poem; a lovely poem by Mary Oliver; and one I especially like by Polly Brown.  I read them differently now than I would have before Sunday’s storms.

WANTING SUMPTUOUS HEAVENS

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

By Robert Bly, from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

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I have a mighty crush on Robert Bly.

The crush had been pushed to the back burner for a number of years (what with so many others to have crushes on) but it came rushing to the forefront again the other night when I heard him read at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis.

I can’t remember exactly when the crush began.  It must have been when I first moved to Minnesota, though I knew his poetry before then.  But now, having moved from the diversity of people and geography in the Bay area,  I was living in Minnesota, a flat, bland place as far as I could tell, and it seemed mind-boggling to me that Robert Bly, a great American poet, was from Western Minnesota. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t add up.  But great poets have to come from somewhere, and actually, they can come from anywhere.  Even Western Minnesota.  Even from Norwegian immigrant farmers (and who knows, maybe especially so).

So there I was in Minnesota and I knew nothing about hockey.  I don’t think I had even heard of hockey before moving to Minnesota.  You cannot live in Minnesota and not know something about hockey, such as what a hat trick is. It isn’t some amazing thing you do with your hat, like pulling a rabbit from it.  I could not “get” hockey and then I read Robert Bly’s prose poem “The Hockey Poem.”  Suddenly my eyes were opened.  Suddenly I saw hockey for the poetry in motion it is, when before I had found it fast, boring, and confusing.

Here are some excerpts from “The Hockey Poem”:

How weird the goalies look with their African masks!  The goalie is so lonely anyway, guarding a basket with nothing in it, his wide lower legs wide as ducks’….No matter what gift he is given, he always rejects it….He has a number like 1, a name like Mrazek, sometimes wobbling his legs waiting for the puck, or curling up like a baby in the womb to hold it, staying a second too long on the ice…

The goalie has gone out to mid-ice, and now he sails sadly back to his own box, slowly, he looks prehistoric with his rhinoceros legs, he looks as if he’s going to become extinct, and he’s just taking his time….

Suddenly they all come hurrying back, toward us, knees dipping, like oil wells, they rush toward us wildly, fins waving, they are pike swimming toward us, their gill fins expanding like the breasts of opera singers, no, they are twelve hands practicing penmanship on the same piece of paper….

And this man with his peaked mask, with slits, how fantastic he is, like a white insect, who has given up on evolution in this life, his family hopes to evolve after death…in the grave.   He’s as ominous as a Middle Ages Knight, the Black Prince…his enemies defeated him in daylight, but every one of them died in their beds that night…At his father’s funeral, he carried his own head under his arm….

You betcha!!!

Oh Robert Bly.  Where did that mind come from?  Western Minnesota.

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I went to a reading by the poet Gary Snyder last night at Plymouth Congregational Church, one of Minneapolis’s great liberal churches.  It was standing room only, and I was one of those standing.

Imagine your platonic ideal of a beloved, revered, erudite but approachable (male) professor of literature and that is what Gary Snyder, white hair and beard, a white shirt, tie and dark coat, looks like.  Born in 1930, he seemed hardy and vital, and cast a warm, benevolent spell over the audience, some of whom in the packed sanctuary were sitting in the choir loft, though they were not required to sing.  (Poetry Reading Alert: Robert Bly is reading at Plymouth on May 9^th. I plan to camp out the night before to make sure I get a seat).

He started with older poems, some written when he worked in Yosemite and the high Sierras in the mid-fifties.  After reading “Piute Creek,” with the lines “A clear attentive mind/has no meaning but that/which sees is truly seen. No one loves rock, yet we are here.” he commented that the line about rock was not true, that many people love rock, including him, so “Why did I say that? — Ah, rhetoric.”  When he paused to make sure that people in the balcony could hear, he acknowledged that churches were not designed to be really audible—they could get in trouble if they were.  He had a gentle humor, reminding the audience that Basho distilled many hundreds of pages for his haiku, so “All you journal writers don’t have to publish everything…cut it all down…save us all a lot of trouble.”  I should take that advice with my blog…

He read several of the Cold Mountain poems, his translations of an 8^th century Chinese poet, Han Shan, who may not have been just one person—no one knows for sure who wrote the original poems.  Snyder’s comment to this was, “If Homer didn’t write the Iliad, someone named Homer did.”  The Cold Mountain poems are beautiful, metaphoric, and have been used as koans.  Here’s one he read:

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders
The wide creek,
The mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though
There’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

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