Life in the Winter Limbs

Sequence 1




Sequence 2 (look carefully):



Did you see it? Way in the backgound?? Here's a close-up:



Seeing the bird and the plane "in" the tree of course reminds me of the Kingston Trio's joke: "It's a bird! It's a plane!! It's -- Super Skier!!!" (beat) "No, it's a bird."

In a different mood, signs of life in the leafless limbs remind me of Galway Kinnell's poem, "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone," exploring the bleak thoughts of an isolated man who is growing aware of his need for companionship and sex and love. The signs of life in nature around him seem to provide both solace and aching self-awareness. Perhaps the most poignant is Stanza 4, but this is a G-rated blog,* so I will quote only from Stanza 6:

When one has lived a long time alone
and listens at morning to the mourning doves
sound their kyrie eleison, or the small thing
spiritualized upon a twig cry, pewit-phoebe!
or at midday grasshoppers scratch the thighs'
needfire awake, or peabody birds send schoolboys'
whistlings across the field, and at dusk, undamped,
unforgiving chinks, as from marble cutters' chisels,
or at nightfall polliwogs just burst into frogs
raise their ave verum corpus... one hears them as inner voices,
when one has lived a long time alone.

(*Stanza 4 is rated PG-13.)