Pink Snow

How is it that snow, a poem by Robert Haight

American Life in Poetry: Column 193

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

The first two lines of this poem pose a question many of us may have thought about: how does snow make silence even more silent? And notice Robert Haight's deft use of color, only those few flecks of red, and the rest of the poem pure white. And silent, so silent. Haight lives in Michigan, where people know about snow.

How Is It That the Snow
By Robert Haight

How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?

Some deer have stood on their hind legs
to pull the berries down.
Now they are ghosts along the path,
snow flecked with red wine stains.

This silence in the timbers.
A woodpecker on one of the trees
taps out its story,
stopping now and then in the lapse
of one white moment into another.


American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2002 by Robert Haight from his most recent book of poetry, "Emergences and Spinner Falls," New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002. Reprinted by permission of Robert Haight. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Falling leaves; changing climate

Cool weather in the fall causes the witch hazel to blossom. Below is same tree a few days earlier.














November 13, 2008 Middle Tennessee, @ 2:45 p.m.

I have been thinking about this moment for many days. I've been waiting for all the leaves to fall so that I can rake them for compost and then mulch my gardens with pine straw for the winter. It's finally happened. Both my cherry tree and my witch hazel have shed all but a few of their leaves. Both trees are surrounded by garden plots and their leaves just keep building up in them. I have other trees which are still hanging on to their leaves: a young elm tree is as green as ever; a Japanese maple has changed colors but the leaves have not yet fallen. Another tree, a parrotia, is changing colors but holding fast to its leaves.

Other trees in our condominium neighborhood are doing their own thing. Most tulip trees are still full and golden; the Bradford pears are about half and half.

Have you ever noticed the fallen leaves of Bradford pears? Each one is an exquisite original design with prints of the leaves smaller and of different shades nesting one within it.

This has been a long and pleasant fall. Election day (Nov. 5) weather here was perfect. And in Chicago where President-elect Barack Obama gave his victory speech to huge crowds in Grant Park, the weather was unbelievably warm. Two or three days later a Chicago friend reported the temperature dropped 36 degrees. That's more like Chicago weather for this time of year.

Despite several very cold days here, the temperature is back up so that I was very comfortable outside wearing a light sweater. I keep thinking its too late to plant a crop of winter greens but maybe not if I hurry.

All this leads me to think about global warming. Albert Bates who teaches permaculture at the Ecovillage Training Center has said that warmer weather is moving further and further north. He thinks that planting trees and protecting those we have is a necessary strategy to reduce the impact of climate change. He is not alone in that theory. Albert also says that we need to start figuring out which trees (and other plants) will thrive in the changing weather conditions as warmer temperatures creep northward. Succession, in which different species take hold according to environmental changes, is usually a gradual process but since the earth is warming so fast, comparatively speaking, we need to help Nature adapt by purposefully planting adaptable species. One way we can figure this out is to look at ecosystems to the south of where we are.

We can also become more observant of the nature around us and take some notes. I think tulip trees which are well entrenched in this part of Middle Tennessee will be here for a while because they survive unpredictable late frosts well. How can I tell? Striplings killed by frost bounce back as trees with two or three main trunks.

Tomato season is almost over...but it was great!

This is October 13 and it's still warm during the day. The leaves are starting to fall here in Middle Tennessee but we haven't had a cold snap yet. I planted four tomato plants this growing season. One in the ground in our patio garden and three in big pots. The three in pots didn't grow at all, but the Early Girl I planted in the ground took over the entire plot, about 4 yards by 1 yard.

We've had just enough ripe tomatoes for a salad everyday since July. My husband Jimmy makes them with romaine, celery, carrots, radishes, cabbage, green peppers and tomatoes. Recently he has started adding fresh turnips, peeled and sliced. He makes the salad on a dinner plate and we divide it for our evening meal. Our tomatoes have been small or medium, never large, but always firm and juicy. Always delicious.

We still have some green ones on the vine and lots of yellow blossoms which probably won't fruit. I'll leave the plant go until the first frost. The night before I'll bring in the green tomatoes and let them ripen inside. Or maybe I'll cook 'em. I really feel bad about the potted tomato plants which included a Roma and cherry tomato. I think the soil was bad; it was mostly purchased top soil. Who knows what goes into those bags. The dirt is always black as oil.

I also planted several pepper plants none of which flourished. My jalapeno pepper plant produced two peppers. The rest just wilted and wilted. I researched this problem online and learned that pepper plants are often infected with a virus or other disease in nurseries. I could have returned them but had misplaced my receipt.

Despite my failures this summer, I think we saved enough money on tomatoes to cover my investment in plants. I used no garden fertilizer or insecticide, just watered the plants during the dry spells. I also saved two buckets of water each time I took a bath for the garden. I always add epsom salt to my baths and plants like it. My husband is not too happy about this bath water stuff. Our tub is upstairs and he's afraid I'll drop a bucket or something. It would be great if we could send our bath water (gray water) directly to the garden via the plumbing. I know this is being done but having researched the logistics of doing it here.

We all need to learn how to grow our some of our own food. And we also need to learn how to conserve water. My father's family had a rough time during the Depression but they gardened.
I guess that's how Daddy learned to eat peanut butter and tomato sandwiches: protein plus vitamin C! He taught Mama and us kids to eat them, too. We loved them.

Okra season and the financial crisis

In May when I was thinking about digging up the rose bushes in the side garden and planting okra seeds in their place, a gentleman named Ian Macwhirter wrote the following in the British newspaper The New Statesman:

This is the worst financial crisis in 60 years, and it has shaken the banking system to its foundations. Even the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has compared the crisis to the Great Depression and he is not given to overstatement. Banks are in the business of lending money they don't have - it is called "fractional reserve banking". But every so often the banks succumb to irrational exuberance, lend too much and find their reserves have been eaten up too fast, forcing them out of business. This is what happened to Northern Rock, and is now happening to all the big banks. That is why they had to be rescued to the tune of £50bn last month by the Bank of England - ie, us. They will be back for more.

This in answer to the question "How bad is it?" in a story headlined Everything you want to know about the bank crisis published on May 1st of this year. The next question MacWhirter set out to answer:

Do the banks know what they are doing? Well, they know now. During the house-price bubble, the banks were lending recklessly to people with no prospects. In the US it was called "sub-prime" lending, and amounted to organised fraud. Loans were knowingly given to "Ninjas" - people with "no income, no job or assets" - who could never hope to repay them. Britain too had sub-prime lending. At the peak of the boom UK banks offered "suicide loans" of up to 120 per cent of the value of the house with only self-certification of income. The mortgage holders were in negative equity as soon as they got the keys. These people are in real trouble as mortgage rates rise and house prices fall. Northern Rock lent out roughly 200,000 of these in the two years before it went bust and had to be nationalised. This makes the government the biggest holder of sub-prime mortgages in Britain.

The next question?

How could the banks be so stupid?
Partly this was down to the delusion that house prices could only ever go up. But the other reason was a practice called "securitisation". The banks packaged the dodgy loans into interest-bearing bonds and sold these to financial institutions across the world. This took the loans off the banks' balance sheets and allowed them to lend even more money they didn't have. The banks thought, wrongly, that they no longer bore the risk of default on these mortgages because they had been sold on to other people. This was a big mistake. The debts came winging back. Now the entire financial system is in cardiac arrest because banks no longer trust each other.

But you may ask and so does Macwhirter:

Didn't the regulators see this coming?
Regulators such as the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England were asleep at the wheel. The Treasury, Bank and FSA are run by relatively low-paid civil servants who are in awe of financiers and their lifestyles. They believed that the banks were run by masters of the universe who knew what they were doing, with their mathematical formulas and leveraged deals. In fact they were run by bonus-greedy wide boys, who gave no thought to the future and had no concept of social responsibility. The City bonus culture encourages short-termism and risk-taking. It was in these people's interest to pretend the credit boom could go on for ever, and that securitisation had taken the risk out of lending money. They thought they wouldn't be around to clear up the mess. In fact, even when the roof did fall in, those such as Adam Applegarth of Northern Rock still got their pay-offs and bonuses - in his case a "golden goodbye" of £750.000. Shareholders seem unwilling to curb the greed of the new generation of CEOs who run City firms. The regulators don't even try.

Back in May when I was just thinking about planting some four year old okra seeds in the side garden a British journalist was writing about a banking crisis in England. It is September now and my 10 okra plants are still producing more than enough okra for my husband and I to eat. But their growing season is nearing its end; the old leaves are turning yellow and rusty brown and the new leaves are small and thin.

It's September and the U.S. is in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Wall Street crash of 1929 which set off The Great Depression of the thirties. I have included excerpts from Macwhirter's story about the British banking crisis in May because I think it's instructive about our own. The entire story can be found here. In fact, his story gives us distance--real and emotional--which makes it easier to grasp what is going on here. He is also a bit more frank than I've found most American commentators to be. And less confused.

Lake Michigan, June 2008

My tree nursery

For several years I have been saving tree seedlings that pop up in my garden courtesy of friendly birds. Some have gotten rather big. Each summer it is a lot of work to keep them alive. Since they're in pots they must be watered faithfully. We have no outdoor water source in our condo so we must use pitchers. Another problem is that I'm running out of space and pots (and dirt!).

A while back I joined a local yahoo Freecycle group and I've been posting household items on it. Yesterday I decided to post bedding plants which are offshoots of my own perennials. Then I decided to post my trees.

Today, a woman took one of my oldest trees, a hackberry. It has survived so many summers and was such a pretty tree; I had trimmed it to look like trees in Japanese paintings. She also took a black locust which was about as old.

I'll miss them but now they will be able to grow freely.

This is a shot of my tree nursey right before she picked them up. The hackberry is at the left; the locust is sort of lost in the other trees at the right. Other trees include more hackberries, oaks, maples, river birches, elms, honey locusts and a black walnut. All courtesy of birds and squirrels.

This was a farewell party, I guess.

I will grow vegetables in the space they and the others occupied.