Little Wandering Snowflake
Ah, little wandering snowflakes are how I watch the day today, now ending March and the thin ice melting and refreezing each day on the pond in the back lot of the yard — ducks we found out there the other morning — a pair of mallards — just imagine the alert green head of the male, the brown muss of the hen hidden nearly in cattail stalks. Ted would. He would want to tramp out there with me to see, stay as long as he wanted, then perk a further walk off somewhere else. We did that one winter day when he visited from Maine. Maine is Ted’s home (largest of the New England states, occupied by more than 5000 rivers and streams, with a state motto Dirigo : I direct), so is New Mexico, Cape Cod, early spring in Philadelphia; early spring anywhere for that matter. Ted is a man at ground level, refurbished daily by the day, and it is clearly your own fortune to meet the man, find the poems and song that come forth from a living earned. Nothing special — and Ted wouldn’t want the undue excitement nor attention — but let’s not upset the magnificence of over one-hundred books of poetry, prose and literary chorales (ie., Forms, Synthesis, Ranger, Axis); and would it be unbelievable in this day and age of stroking champions and making such a fuss over some little big name in the poetry world that Ted would read his poetry across the United States in the old days traveling by bus, selling his books, making friends of dear strangers, recalling fondly those small mountain open towns in Nevada, then returning to his rural home and family, garden and woodcutting detail, tending to the cranberry and blueberry harvest, pressing apples, clamming, a supper table devoted from the land and the sea. The very utensil. It’d be easy to want to quote young Henry Thoreau when thinking of Ted — but why Henry, when we have Ted? —
And if he sings
with care,
he sings
a new song
made of old
flints struck.
O.K. He sings his source.
and then some. Do yourself a favor and say hello.
— Bob Arnold
Bob Arnold & Theodore Enslin
Fort Atkinson, WI., 2003
photo by Susan Arnold
L I N K T O T H E R E A D I N G:
https://mville-edu.zoom.us/j/81912000037
