"COUNTRY'LL GROW" ~
( NOT )

"The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's signature domestic policy achievement, would extend health coverage to millions of uninsured people, establish new consumer protections and seek to reorganize the delivery of care with the intent of lowering costs and boosting efficiency.

But 26 U.S. states have asked the high court to overturn the measure, saying it exceeds the federal government's constitutional authority.

Polls show the law, dubbed "Obamacare" by critics, is unpopular with most Americans. Republicans have vowed to repeal anything the Supreme Court leaves standing."

NYTimes 22 June 2012

Way to go, Americans!

___________________

"country'll grow" Bob Dylan


"I Shall Be Free"

Well, I took me a woman late last night
I's three-fourths drunk she looked all right
'Til she started peelin' off her onion gook
She took off her wig, said, "How do I look" ?
I's high flyin', bare naked ...Out the window.

Well, sometimes I might get drunk
Walk like a duck and smell like a skunk
Don't hurt me none, don't hurt my pride
'Cause I got my little lady right by my side
(She's a tryin' a hide pretendin'
She don't know me).

I's out there paintin' on the old wood shed
When a can a black paint it fell on my head
I went down to scrub and rub
But I had to sit in back of the tub
(Cost a quarter
Half price).

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It's President Kennedy callin' me up
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow" ?
I said, "My friend, John, "Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren"
Country'll grow.

Well, I got a woman five feet short
She yells and hollers and squeals and snorts
She tickles my nose pats me on the head
Blows me over and kicks me out of bed
(She's a man eater
Meat grinder
Bad loser).

Oh, there ain't no use in me workin' alla time
I got a woman who works herself blind
Works up to her britches, up to her neck
Write me letters and sends me checks
(She's a humdinger
Folk singer).

Late one day in the middle of the week
Eyes were closed I was half asleep
I chased me a woman up the hill
Right in the middle of an air drill
(I jumped a fallout shelter
I jumped the string bean
I jumped the TV dinner
I jumped the shot gun).

Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote
He's a-runnin' for office on the ballot note
He's out there preachin' in front of the steeple
Tellin' me he loves all kinds-a people
(He's eatin' bagels
He's eatin' pizza
He's eatin' chitlins).

Oh, set me down on a television floor
I'll flip the channel to number four
Out of the shower comes a football man
With a bottle of oil in his hand
(Greasy kid stuff
What I want to know, Mr. Football Man, is
What do you do about Willy Mays
Martin Luther King
Olatunji).

Well, the funniest woman I ever seen
Was the great-granddaughter of Mr. Clean
She takes about fifteen baths a day
Wants me to grow a moustache on my face
(She's insane).

Well, ask me why I'm drunk alla time
It levels my head and eases my mind
I just walk along and stroll and sing
I see better days and I do better things
(I catch dinosaurs
I make love to Elizabeth Taylor ...
Catch hell from Richard Burton !).

BRAVE ONE ~

Ali Farzat



Ali Farzat (born 22 June 1951, Hama, Syria), is a renowned Syrian political cartoonist.


Happy Birthday !






UK: the Guardian

BOOK LOVERS ~

a French country house library

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/books/french-bookstores-are-still-prospering.html?hp










ny times

EARTH ~

Amazon rainforest activists José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo, who were murdered last year.
Photograph: Reuters

Environmental activists 'being killed at rate of one a week'



Death toll of campaigners involved in protection of forests, rivers and land has almost doubled in three years

The struggle for the world's remaining natural resources is becoming more murderous, according to a new report that reveals that environmental activists were killed at the rate of one a week in 2011.

The death toll of campaigners, community leaders and journalists involved in the protection of forests, rivers and land has risen dramatically in the past three years, said Global Witness.

Brazil – the host of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development – has the worst record for danger in a decade that has seen the deaths of more than 365 defenders, said the briefing, which was released on the eve of the high-level segment of the Earth Summit.

The group called on the leaders at Rio to set up systems to monitor and counter the rising violence, which in many cases involves governments and foreign corporations, and to reduce the consumption pressures that are driving development into remote areas.

"This trend points to the increasingly fierce global battle for resources, and represents the sharpest of wake-up calls for delegates in Rio," said Billy Kyte, campaigner at Global Witness.

The group acknowledges that their results are incomplete and skewed towards certain countries because information is fragmented and often missing. This means the toll is likely to be higher than their findings, which did not include deaths related to cross-border conflicts prompted by competition for natural resources, and fighting over gas and oil.

Brazil recorded almost half of the killings worldwide, the majority of which were connected to illegal forest clearance by loggers and farmers in the Amazon and other remote areas, often described as the "wild west".

Among the recent high-profile cases were the murders last year of two high-profile Amazon activists, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo. Such are the risks that dozens of other activists and informers are now under state protection.

Unlike most countries on the list, however, the number of killings in Brazil declined slightly last year, perhaps because the government is making a greater effort to intervene in deforestation cases.

The reverse trend is apparent in the Philippines, where four activists were killed last month, prompting the Kalikasan People's Network for Environment to talk of "bloody May".

Though Brazil, Peru and Colombia have reported high rates of killing in the past 10 years, this is partly because they are relatively transparent about the problem thanks to strong civil society groups, media organisations and church groups – notably the Catholic Land Commission in Brazil – which can monitor such crimes. Under-reporting is thought likely in China and Central Asia, which have more closed systems, said the report. The full picture has still to emerge.

Last December, the UN special rapporteur on human rights noted: "Defenders working on land and environmental issues in connection with extractive industries and construction and development projects in the Americas … face the highest risk of death as result of their human rights activities."

• 19 June 2012 update: The number of deaths in Brazil was wrongly cited as 737 – this has been corrected to 365. The headline and opening line of this story have been changed to reflect that.

Jonathan Watts in Rio de Janeiro

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/19/environment-activist-deaths

guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 June 2012 20.54 EDT

ONE PAGE PATRIOT ~

please click onto image to enlarge

Harper's Magazine July 2012

RULES OF THE GAME ~

“If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.”—Marcus Aurelius

True — they have to hit their free throws, and they're a great free throwing team — the Oklahoma City Thunder are — but they're missing their free throws, and they're missing them when it really counts, like an NBA Finals Championship against the Miami Heat. Just ask clutch players like Larry Bird and Reggie Miller about what a free throw can do in a tight game.


But there's something else going on. Games two and three, one in Oklahoma City and one in Miami, have been very close down the stretch in both games, and in both games the officials have done what I call the Strange Days Phenomenon (SDP) right before our eyes. The Strange Days Phenomenon can be anything from war criminals like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld being let off the hook for their crimes by the Justice Department of the Obama Administration; to Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan — the latest crook in the long and disgusting legacy from Wall Street coming to Washington, D.C. and sitting before Congress in a soft and cuddly catbird seat and actually being praised. Do keep in mind, these men and women in Congress are being elected into office by the people amongst ourselves. It isn't finger-pointing time, it's Strange Days Phenomenon time. You go and have another drink with this stuff, or another puff, or throw the tv out for good, or look across the mainly empty restaurant from your table at the early bird special hour and see a family of four dressed in summer-relax, three adults and an older teenage girl, waiting for a meal (like I am) that isn't coming anytime soon because the restaurant is "under staffed," and we adults are waiting and talking and waiting and finally complaining and waiting with Strange Days Phenomenon, while the teenager is plugged the entire time into ear plugs and a cell phone held up to her face. Texting. Never utters a word. For well over a half hour of waiting the cell phone is never lowered from her gaze. It could have been a book. It isn't a book.


Strange Days Phenomenon has the world economy by the short hairs. It has your paycheck (if you have one), your plumber, carpenter, electrician, auto mechanic, even health food store, fruit stand, crummy tag sale event by those same short hairs: it's all unaffordable.


I just went to a lumberyard to look over new window prices — casements or lone sashes, even double-hung windows with or without the full unit, it didn't matter, just to find something possibly affordable. I'll take a unit, or windows loose, and I'll build my own frames. Can I get out of there with my shirt on. My pants. My boots? Will I be able to buy gas to get home afterwards? Will I be able to afford my pickup truck, 23 years old and still running (thanks to Japan), parked out in a mainly empty business lot? I can sense in my bones why the lot is almost empty and the big building houses lots of good stuff. The windows I want could cost up to $600, insulated glass, each. I want three windows, maybe four. I have opened up a side exterior wall back home just begging for three windows, maybe four. I'm still allowed to dream, right?


Wrong. The three windows can cost you upwards to $2000. Don't even think of a fourth window. The sales clerk is a nice enough fellow but he gets SDP when you veer your dream talk into the land of buying the windows out of their package (unit) to save money; and he'll admit to you that if you even dare to think of buying separate sashes, uninsulated glass, and you'll build your own storm windows to complete the job, well the sashes may say $95 per but because it's such "trouble" (meaning you are too), it'll cost you over $200 for that one sash. Meaning don't buy the sash. Forget that road of dreams and making-do, and come along with us and pay through the nose. It's good for you.


My dream partner and I leave the place on very good terms. We even take all the pertinent information, prices and email addresses to write our friendly sales clerk back and forth a few times — just to see even away from the diamond-studded lumberyard, the email information is just as frightening. Screw up a 3/8 sheet of plywood over the hole in the house wall for the time being since it's going to rain and you have to pull down tighter that dreamer cap you insist on wearing. Call around all the lumberyards still alive in your region. It's all the same. SDP. Prices are out of this world.


It's nighttime, sit down with the basketball game. Everyone, except maybe a speck of person here or there, is either in blue (if were in Oklahoma), or white (Miami). I mean 10s-of-thousands, all dressed in the same color, cheering madly. What's wrong with team-spirit and cheering? Nothing. Except it now looks and feels Orwellian.


Thank goodness for the mute button.

In game one Oklahoma beats Miami in Oklahoma City, and it puts the media glitz favorite Miami team back on their heels. What in the world is going on here with this whipper-snapper young Oklahoma dream-along-with-me squad? They've won everything and everywhere and brought down giants, like a very disciplined and talented San Antonio Spurs team. I hated to see that and I love San Antonio, but I'm loving, like the good dreamer that I am, the Oklahoma City Thunder even more. We've won game one.


By game two, SDP will hit us right between the eyes, when at the close of a very tight game, and the Thunder are roaring from behind from a deficit only kids and dreamers will play at, and they're doing it well: a minute left, two points down, and our dreamer of dreamers Kevin Durant runs the baseline against star power LeBron James for Miami, and is clearly fouled, deserves two shots at the free throw line to even the score and possibly pushing the game into OT with a zillion blue jersey fans going bonkers. And the foul isn't called!? The windows cost what?! The ref is standing right there; the announcers are standing right there; the New York Times is standing right there; the UK Guardian is standing right there; I'm standing right there, and we can all see the clear foul to be called and properly register the flow of the game, and it isn't called. Stop your whining, it's SDP. Don't you know SDP when you see it?


You don't? Well, wait for game three because it showed up again even more blatantly for that game on Sunday night. We're now in Miami, white jersey crowd, remaining Orwellian, though not as cheerful and hopeful as the blue jersey folks back in Oklahoma City. Don't ask me what it is, I just hear something promising and less moneyed and less entitled about the OKC folks. We probably aren't ever going to see them again (but prove me wrong, please) if SDP is allowed to take full effect. In the third quarter (better known as OKC's quarter) with Kevin Durant coming on with superman powers — I don't think I've ever seen anyone ever throw in a three pointer with such ease, nonchalance, or Taoist charm — not Bird, not Miller, not Ray Allen, not Jordan, or Kobe. SDP sees that, sees a comeback roaring into focus, sees a young team about to take command, hears a crowd raising high the roof beams carpenter, senses way way way too much natural phenomenon and we've got zillions of dollars invested by all sorts of creepy crawlers into this thing, and SDP refs charge Durant with another foul (the guy looks like a gazelle, plays like a gazelle, may touch you like a gazelle) and this sits him down on the bench and so goodbye OKC rhythm, captain, and heart. This never would have happened to Michael Jordan, trust me, not in a playoff game.


In times like these, go back to your window job. Luckily you live in Vermont, luckily there are scrappers like yourself everywhere, you see each other, you nod to each other. I found a salvage lumberyard after writing my last email to nowhere (new lumberyard) about window prices and possibilities. Since I grew up in a lumberyard in the Berkshire hills with five lumberyards to the family name, I feel at home walking through this salvage yard's side gate and not the front door, which really looks like the lumberyards of old, my style. Open racks of pine lumber, spruce lumber, stacks of framed screens, old storm windows, someone's left off a huge stack of pine clapboards painted on one side and all still pretty much in fine shape. Out back are two or three buildings stuffed with stuff, think dreams. In the main building are enough old windows, old doors and old hardware and trim and accessories to build a Trump Tower. My kind of Trump Tower — built like a wood haven castle, windows fluent through all the rooms, floors laid down like a Viking ship, four coats of paint on the woodwork. Affordable. Doable. My windows have got to be hidden here. I can feel it. They are. And Sweetheart finds them, while I'm up in the rafters digging through barn sashes and thinking it's still the 1970s, I hear my name called (and that's sweet enough in these times) and right on the floor, waiting for me, Sweetheart looks befuddled and overwhelmed because what I asked her to keep an eye out for seems to be right before her eyes. The exact windows. The exact size. Insulated glass. Out of their old units. Just the casements. All primed. Some silly hardware to remove, so what, the three windows side by side will match right down to the inch what I have planned back home and the hole in the wall. Plus there is some room left over for the transom (7 lights) I find leaning by the door we entered. Bought new, all of this would cost around $2500.


Hang onto your blue and white jerseys because the manager of the place I found looks like Steve Earle and he isn't at all against talking prices for things and being fair. So we're taking the three windows you bet, the transom, and let's go out into the yard and dig around for awhile and fill the rest of the pickup truck with T & G pine (a small pallet in short lengths) and while we're at it, all the beaded pine boards we can find, even the ones with the nails still in them, doesn't matter, and we don't want the beaded side, so we'll flip it over and use the flat stock pine and this will go perfectly for any trim work and fill. Go ahead, fill the truck: insulated glass windows, old style transom, all the pine lumber, toss in the extra panel of luan, and what did you say the price was? don't gloat because SDP is watching with a sneer right over yonder, it would be a little higher but with the 40% off sale (O lucky days!) the whole truckload comes to something like $100.


Back at the lumberyard, the two gallons of paint you'll need to finish the job up will cost you more than that whole truckload of pure and beautiful and practical gimme.


What's "gimme"? Go ask SDP. He doesn't know.

see ya at tonight's game, be there or be square

LORINE NIEDECKER ~

It's ready!



"The idea for this chapbook, a facsimile edition of the handmade book Lorine Niedecker sent to Cid Corman in 1964, cropped up several years ago."



Homemade PoemsLorine Niedecker
John Harkey, Editor
Series 3, Number 2, Spring 2012
The Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York

Limited edition.

Use Paypal? Total including s/h for U.S. orders $33.95

Or, this may be purchased from Longhouse
inquire here ~

poetry@sover.net



Visit my previous "Homemade Poems" posting & film





Lorine with her father Henry Niedecker

PEACE ~

Aung San Suu Kyi greeted in Oslo by Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
On 16 June 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi was finally able to deliver her Nobel acceptance speech at Oslo's City Hall, two decades after being awarded the peace prize.

photo :Daniel Sannum Lauten/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

ART OF SCIENCE ~
( Earth )

Bacteria biofilm
Fernan Federici, Tim Rudge, PJ Steiner and Jim Haseloff
Scale: *******
This is Bacillus subtilis, a rod-shaped bacterium commonly found in soil. Distinct lineages of bacteria expressing different fluorescent proteins were initially mixed randomly on a petri dish. As bacteria grow, they organise themselves into reproducible patterns and shapes that can be predicted with mathematical models. The researchers took this image as part of a project designing artificial genetic circuits for pattern formation in bacterial colonies and plant tissuesPhotograph: Wellcome Images

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2012/jun/17/art-science-wellcome-image-awards#/?picture=391555368&index=0





The Guardian (uk)

EARTH ~

We've climbed Sugarloaf Mountain over a half dozen times this spring and summer is ahead! Even with a bum leg for a few weeks, Sweetheart insisted on joining me. We took every trail there is on the easeful mountain, including the steep trail straight up the nose, up and back. Watch your footing on the loose stone when returning. The traffic below barely is ever lost to you but we don't care, neither is two youthful baseball teams and their cheerleaders off to one side of the mountain base. We're in a town where Drums Along the Mohawk roamed. There's a wide plank door in the town where an Indian hatchet once was embedded. I put my hand to the blade mark left in the door once upon a time. Despite a road all the way to the top of the summit this mountain absorbs sounds and disturbance quite well, and the road has a gentle carriage to it. Many like to use this route to climb to the top. We go up the steepest trail, then sometimes use a back woodlot trail that meets the roadway halfway down. This way all routes are made as one. Often we find a marauding raven back there telling us he sees us and do we see him! The photographs are from the top of the mountain looking down and focusing in.

Roam

Question Mark

Pioneer farm

Neighborhood






Funeral Home

After Rain

Spring field

Softwoods Crest

Deerfield

Barn Shine

Connecticut River

A sweet for your hike

photos © bob arnold

SECRETS & LIES ~

Nat Hentoff (b. 1925)

activist, historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media and writes regularly on jazz and country music for The Wall Street Journal.
Formerly a columnist for Down Beat, The Village Voice, JazzTimes, Legal Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Progressive, Editor & Publisher and Free Inquiry. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his writing has also been published in The New York Times, Jewish World Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Commonweal and at age 87 can be said to be unstoppable.

40 YEARS OF GROWING SURVEILLANCE

_______________________________

June 13, 2012

The Watergate legacy of disabling opponents by wiretaps and other suspensions of the Bill of Rights has since been protected by the current administration in federal court. The attorney general, Eric Holder, opposed a history professor’s attempt to secure records about the wiretap that cost Nixon his presidency.

But ceaseless advances in government privacy-invading technology have made the Nixon-era suspensions of individual constitutional liberties appear amateurish.

Room 723 in the Premier Hotel, across the street from the Watergate,
was the listening post for operatives spying on the Democratic National Committee.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.

For an example that far exceeds the once-fearsome vision of George Orwell’s “1984,” the National Security Agency — with the support of President Obama, who was elected in part for pledging the most transparent administration in American history — is erecting a data tracking center in Bluffdale, Utah, that as of September 2013 will be storing and distributing to other intelligence agencies “all forms of communications, including the contents of private emails, cellphone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases.” (Including, I’m sure, e-books, to be up to date.) In view of the Obama administration’s strange definition of its transparency, I give you my source: James Bamford, a historian who, more successfully than any investigative reporter, has become familiar with the inner workings of the N.S.A.

It was Senator Frank Church of Idaho who, investigating the state of our privacy in 1975, warned that as the N.S.A. kept evolving without accountability, for Americans “there would be no place to hide.”

Meanwhile, the F.B.I.’s domestic surveillance powers allow it to open a warrantless “threat assessment” against any American or organization without going to court and without any articulable evidence of imminent or actual criminal behavior.

Turning America into a society under surveillance was never remotely conceived by the Founders, however conflicted they sometimes were. Nor does it seem likely that our resemblance to Iran in this context will be an issue of any consequence in the 2012 elections. The incumbent is, of course, immovable in his definition of national security as it frees him from fealty to the Constitution. Mitt Romney has so far not given any indication that he is in the least troubled by the National Security Agency. And most of the rest of us are concerned with our survival in this perilous economy.

Is this still America?

http://www.stardem.com/opinion/article_57630da5-5773-5965-84b6-b457903837a7.html

Nat Hentoff has been writing about civil liberties for more than 50 years. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

ANTHEM ~
( tonight's game )

James Harden ~ sixth man supreme for The Oklahoma City Thunder

Tired of the National Anthem being sung by amateurs with way too much sickly patriotism and less soul? Try Marvin Gaye on for size, when artists dressed the part and walked in with quiet dignity and remade a lousy slave state song an almost beautiful song.

Here's to the spirit of the young Oklahoma City Thunder team. In my book they have already won the NBA Finals — no matter what the Miami Heat, hype and the glitzed media does — by their exuberance, team play, and unshaking confidence.

update:
LeBron James fouls Keven Durant in the last minute of the game tonight, OKC down by 2, but of course James gets away with it. The foul would have put excellent free throw shooter Durant on the foul line to even the score. It's just one of those things. Miami is the money organization, money town, money players, money media, and naturally I'm for the underdog.

EARTH ~

A Poem, from Grain of Rice Mountain,
for Tu Fu


Here, on top of a grain of rice (or of a mountain
----so named),
I've run into you, Tu Fu, again!
And you in a hat as big as a plate, big enough to
----keep off the whole noonday sun.
All I can say is it looks like you're losing weight.
Is poetry so bitter, so bitter, my friend?






Question and Answer in the Mountains


Ask me how it is I've come to perch in these
----blue-green hills,
and I'll smile with no answer; I'm happiest with
----heart-and-mind just so, may be. . .
Peach blossom float by here, gone into the
----quite definite shadows.
There is another world, other than this one we
----choose to live in.





I Banish Me


Face to face with the wine:
eyes shut, or shutting, unconscious
of darkness,


while the falling petals filled the bowl,
the lap of my gown. . .

Still drunk, I got up, to walk on the moon
in the water. . .


The birds had all gone to nest;
humans, also, had grown few.






Thoughts of a Quiet Night


Before the bed, bright moon light.
I took it for frost on the ground.
I raised my head to think of the moon,
then bowed my head to dream of home.






Egret


The white bird settles on the Autumn waters,
flies alone, settles like a snowflake.
Heart, mind, set. ready: won't go yet.
We stand alone beside the sandy islet.






Summit Temple


This night, in Summit Temple,
I raise my hand and touch the stars.
I wouldn't dare to raise my voice,
for fear I'd wake them, up in Heaven.






Alone, I Pour at Clear Creek River — Rock,
and Write to Send to Ch'uan Chao-yi


Bottle in hand,
I climb out on this great rock.
Since Heaven and Earth began
it's stood a thousand feet above the water.
I raise my cup and smile at the sky,
and the Heavens whirl until the sun shines out
----of the West!
I could sit here on this rock forever!
hanging my hook like the wise men of old.
At least I'll send this to those who came before
----me here:
may the music I make, make harmony with
----yours.






Overnight with a Friend


To bathe, to let float away the griefs of a
----thousand ages,
and then to drown
in a hundred jugs of wine.
A pretty night, perfect for talk, for philosophy
and a moon so bright. What sort of man could
----sleep?
Finally, finally really drunk, we slept
in the open, on the mountainside,
Heaven and Earth, our covers, our pillows.






Thoughts of a Quiet Night, Version 2


Pool of cold, pure light, bright on the floor
before the bed. "Can it be frost," I shivered.
----"already?"
Before I realized, twice bright as frost, it was the
----moon's
own light come streaming through the window
made the window's image purest white of
----moonlight
on my floor. I raised up, to regard the moon, to
----see it, sure, and
read its meaning: this too will slip away. And
----then I bowed,
I bowed my head, my heart hope filled again,
----full of the bright moonlight
on the green, green grass of home.

please click on image to enlarge






Bright Moon, White Clouds
selected poems of Li Po
edited and translated by
J.P. Seaton
Shambhala 2012

NEW FROM LONGHOUSE! ~

please click on image




Ed Markowski ~ Storefront Church




The master slight of hand from Detroit is brought together here in a selection of poems and photographs selected & edited by Bob Arnold




Storefront Church ~ Longhouse, 2012. First edition. New and limited. A signed edition is available upon request.
$8, unsigned


Buy now (U.S. addresses with $2 s/h) with Paypal:

BARR ~

Just back from the daily woodlot hike with Bob as scout and Sweetheart and Kokomo slowly making their way on the path at cat~power speed, meaning the kitten could bolt at any minute, or grapple twenty feet up a preferred ash tree (not cherry, don't like), but most days it's a meander for the two, now with Kokomo off blue leash it was trained on for a year. Some days when he wants to be a scamp Sweetheart latches him back onto the leash to hold him close. Most days he's sauntering and stopping at every grass blade to chew, like goat.


Halfway through the hike, coming over the rise, I see Janine's stone cairn I built a year ago, just pieces of a fading early sunshine on it as it is at this early hour, the rainclouds and all, but what's that black and large and wasn't there yesterday? Why, black bear. We saw one another at exactly the same moment, eye to eye, his snout and my taller-than-him. So what am I, he seems to wonder. 'Oh yeah, one of those two-legged-creeps I heard about'. I'm saying to myself, 'Black bear. . . been awhile.' I think it best to step backwards ten paces and lean against a tall pine tree, watching him. He or she thinks it best to swing its head down like a pony and skedaddle about twenty feet up the slope to a pair of sugar maples, then stop, turn and watch me awhile. We're both watching. I start a squirrel call chortle to keep the bear's attention on me, or the sound, so Sweetheart and Kokomo can catch up and Sweetheart grabs kitten into her arms and cautiously walks toward me knowing from my standingstill something is present with us. She can't see it until she sees it, then her face widens and glows.


"Hi, Janine," is what she says.

photo : black bear claws
J picked up her mail in bearsville, ny


http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/2011_10_15_archive.html