March 11: Misheard

Going out the door,

Look at the full moon!

Him: I love you too.

Posted with Blogsy

January 14: Thaw

January thaw--

titmouse shares his love songs,

I can't help but listen.

Posted with Blogsy

March 1: After the concert

Long walk back to the hotel

holding hands

the city lit like Christmas

Posted with Blogsy

June 2: The great romance novel that is this green world

rain still falling

one mayfly rising

ache of unrequited love

May 9: Love songs

While I fill my tank

two chickadees singing--

nature's radio.

Posted with Blogsy

December 29: Amaryllis

Amaryllis bud
swelling, straining sunward--
so this is love.

July 18: Domestic dispute

Late night, back road,

woman blocking a stopped car--

we've all been there.

Posted with Blogsy

February 13: Day before Valentine's Day

Snow falls all day
but still the titmice
sing their love songs.

February 11: Finding love in strange places

Dirty tire tracks
on the snowy driveway
trace twin hearts.

November 20: Goddess of Love

Above the twilight horizon:
bright Venus
setting slowly.

July 17: True love

At the lecture

elderly couple holds hands

the entire hour.

Posted with Blogsy

March 1: Details

Watching a female cardinal at my feeder, admiring her big, seed-chomping, bright orange bill and how it contrasts so prettily against her black face. So near, I notice details I never picked up on before. For example, her crest is tipped in red, as if rouged with lipstick. It almost glows against her smooth brown nape. Each time she dips her head for another seed, that red crest flickers like a little flame.

Familiar detail
of a loved one's face
rediscovered.

January 29: Micro-moments

I read this at Atlantic.com today:

"In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love.
Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
Rather, it is what she calls a 'micro-moment of positivity resonance.' She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in 'It's a Wonderful World' when he sang, 'I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"

You can read the whole article here. I'm not sure I agree with the overall premise of the piece--especially as I see further down my Facebook stream a photo of a couple I know who were childhood sweethearts and still going strong, celebrating their 47th anniversary today. But the concept of a "micro-moment of positivity resonance" struck me as a real experience, akin to the moment that often inspires haiku--that ephemeral burst of perception and mood the poem tries to capture. So as I look back on my day, I'm trying to think of a moment when I felt something like this "micro-moment of positivity resonance." This is what I came up with.

Back to work after a sick day.

A co-worker tells me

he missed me. 

January 16: Snow falls all day

Quietly but without stop the snow fell, a constant backdrop all day long through my office windows as I assiduously typed away at some grant applications. The dreaminess of the scene--the pure white flakes once again restoring the beauty of winter, mesmerizing in their continuous falling, falling--lulled me into memories of younger days when walking hand-in-hand on a snowy night was romantic, and winter camping was a regular weekend activity.

I don't remember cold.
Back then, I think snow sizzled
on my bare skin.

July 26: Wherever love is...

While we were driving home tonight from my husband's reading in Castine, me half asleep in the passenger seat, I couldn't help but notice a young couple perched very close to one another on a guardrail along the side of the road. This wasn't a scenic country road with a view of a field glittering with fireflies. It was Route 1A, and we'd just crossed the bridge from Bucksport to Verona Island. But they couldn't see the river from where they were perched, or even the lit-up riverside walls of historic Fort Knox. On this foggy, chilly evening, not even stars were visible. Just cars moving quickly past on their way to someplace else. But who needs someplace else when you have each other? 

A guardrail in fog--

comfortable seat for two

if they are in love.

Interestingly, around the corner about half a mile down the road we came upon the romantic sight of the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, its funky array of cables lit up in the night fog, the red lights shining beacons atop the two bridge towers. Imagine this image shrouded in fog:

from Wikimedia Commons

February 14: Love Is in the Air

Today you might well ask, Who is St. Valentine and why has "his" day become a romantic holiday? Valentine's Day, drily described by Wikipedia as: "traditionally a day on which lovers express their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards," doesn't really seem like a holiday that would receive traditional Christian support. No one seems really sure exactly who Valentine was beyond his being a Roman Christian who may or may not have performed what were then illegal Christian marriages. There's the tenuous connection, I guess. Apparently Geoffrey Chaucer was the first one to reference St. Valentine's Day in English in his poem Parlement of Foules, which I mentioned yesterday. An excellent prose translation of this poem by Gerald NeCastro of the University of Maine footnotes this fact. So perhaps we have Chaucer to thank for the romantic tradition, which later bloomed more fully with the exchange of greeting cards in the Victorian era and has now become an excuse for couples to go out to dinner and buy each other sweets and florid cards with messages made up by a bunch of people in cubicles in Kansas City. (For sweets, I highly recommend Maine-made chocolates by Black Dinah Chocolatiers.)


In his poem, Chaucer defined Valentine's Day as the day when birds choose their mates. The poem itself is an entertaining discourse on love, in which the narrator falls asleep and is taken in a dream to the halls of Venus, where all the birds are gathered around waiting to pair up. You can imagine the noise level and sexual tension. The day's proceedings get off to a bad start when three eagles get into an argument over who gets to choose the comely female eagle perched on Venus's arm. The day drags on as other birds, anxious to find their mates, debate in parliamentary fashion how this decision should be made. The goose thinks the female should only go with a mate she really loves; the dove believes in being true to his mate until he dies, etc. Finally the female eagle asks if she can wait till next year to decide. All that debating apparently gave her a headache. I'm not sure if I would recommend this as a romantic poem to share with your lover today (Pablo Neruda and e.e. cummings, for example, have better love offerings), but it's a fun read--keeping in mind that I was an English major and "fun" might be a relative term.


Chaucer or not, just looking out my window I see signs that love is in the air. Squirrels spiral after each other around trunks, bushy tails waving enticements. The insistent "peter, peter" song of the titmice rings out through the trees. The male downy woodpecker knocks on the old birch tree, an early territorial announcement. And owl courtship season is fully underway--friends report that they've been hearing great horned owls this week in the woods around their house, and others have been seeing barred owls on the move. That restlessness that leads us slowly and agonizingly into spring has begun to stir in the woods as surely as the still-chilly breeze. Brace yourselves, everyone. This isn't an easy season.


Husband who chose me,
may our bond be as solid
as that of ravens.

November 11: Necklace

My husband is away again this week, and while I like the time alone, I miss coming home from work and having someone there other than the cat with whom to share my day. And of course I miss his physical presence, that comforting power of touch.

A brief digression: A couple of summers ago I spent a week at an artist/writer retreat on Great Spruce Head Island, an island in eastern Penobscot Bay that has been owned for several generations by the Porter family (as in, photographer Eliot and painter Fairfield). We stayed in Fairfield Porter's house, ate gourmet, organic food, and did whatever we wanted with our time. I napped, read, and roamed the island, watching birds and writing notes and some mediocre poems about the incredible landscape: fog, sea birds, stony beaches, dense spruce forests carpeted with moss and lichen, the sound of the waves, sunny meadows where deer graze. But in the end what I felt really inspired to write were haiku. And interestingly, some of my most successful ones were sensual "love notes" to my husband, whom I was missing. For our last night's "show," while all the artists (there were nine artists and two writers) arranged and hung their paintings, pastels and drawings for display, I paired some of the haiku I had written with appropriate natural objects and created a tactile poetry/object to create an interactive exhibit of sorts. This is one of the haiku I wrote for my husband, written on a piece of paper roughly torn into the shape of a heart and stuck to a heart-shaped stone I found on one of the island beaches:

If I were going to similarly display the following haiku with an object, it would be the necklace I was wearing of big, chunky green and yellow stones interspersed with carved wooden beads. When I got undressed last night, I was surprised to feel how hot the beads were from being in contact all day with my skin. The sensuality of that realization made me miss my husband.

Home alone tonight.

Unclasped necklace in my hand,

wooden beads still warm.