sna poems #123: oakfield ledge

August 27, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

oakfield ledge is a section of the niagra escarpment of dolostone that ranges from new york up thru canada down into wisconsin a bit west of where i live in milwaukee. here the outcroppings are not as dramatic as door county’s shoreline cliffs, but they’re quieter and more heavily colonized by life given that they’re surrounded by woods.

at this site in fond du lac county (not manitowoc like i put on twitter a few times!), deep fissures have formed in the dolostone’s fractures. b/c of this, we were able to get down into the escarpment, a first for me. usually the ledge is the side of a hill or a dropoff into water, so one can see it or walk on top of it, but not thru it. we spent a good amount of time down in the canyon. lots of life all over though, in the wood and in the little oak savanna on the edge of the site. late summer in the midwest.

the wdnr site says that a diverse snail fauna lives at the cliff base, but we sadly didn’t find any…

first id’s of white baneberry and pale-flowered leaf cup!

eastern wood pewee’s

two-tone call,

serenading oaks

red fungal body

on the ledge

going back to soil

in the niagra

escarpment:

stone and wet and fern

on the savanna—

chip-chip-chip—

we hear the redstart

sna poems #122: oakfield railroad prairie

August 24, 2022August 24, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

first intimate stop of the day. a former railroad, this sna is 10 acres in a straight line. lined with shrubs and trees, but still a surprisingly diverse prairie flora all along the way.

i’m grateful folks have activated these old rail lines so we can get to meet plants we might not elsewhere in human-shaped habitats. beautiful start to the day.

first id’s of four o’clock, meadowsweet, giant ragweed, wild cucumber, and tick-trefoil.

straight-line habitat

all decked out:

white, purple, yellow

where boxcars once hauled,

st. john’s wort

nestles in the grass

little downy one,

now it’s just

you and four o’clocks

if you made it this far… caterpillars on toadflax! (plus a couple more plants)

sna poems #121: mullet creek white cedar wetland

August 22, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

this sna is a wet-mesic forest and wetland complex in a larger wildlife area, dominated by white cedar and surrounded by farmland. the wetland areas have indicator species for calcium-rich water.

it’s the end of summer, so plant growth is at its peak. this, combined with the navigability of the saturated soils, the lack of paths, and the disturbing sound of what we can only assume was a hog-slaughtering occurring on a farm in an adjacent valley, precluded us from getting deep into the forest. but on a stretch of road away from that valley i was able to get in a bit and nose around, to the less bone-chilling sound of sandhill cranes in the fields across the street.

a less immersive and interactive stop than those later in the day.

the shrieking of pigs

and swamp mud

stop us in our tracks

freely downloadable microchap _begalende_ out from ghost city press

August 10, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

the little chapbook i never thought would see the light of day has indeed done it. begalende (old english for “singing/chanting ’round”) is a small digital chapbook of my verse translations of “charms” or “spells” found in old english, old high german, and old saxon manuscripts.

these texts (called “galdru” in old english) are strange ducks, landing somewhere between story, prayer, and recipe, what we now call—with little precision—magic. but they were also passed down (almost surely in each case) by christian monastics. the apparent paradox may not really be such, given the time period. that is, the strangeness, i conjecture, is more about these being “pre-modern” than being “pagan.” (if you want a good study of this basic view, see here.) they reflect a time when human minds and bodies were understood to be much more “porous” to their environments—things like “elf shot” could get you on any day of the week!

the texts translated here are a fun and bizarre time capsule of human experience, and you can download the book free from ghost city press right here. (tho’ any funds you may want to donate come straight to me, which is kind of them.)

happy reading!

selections from my long narrative poem out from _adversus press_

July 24, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

in january of 2021 i was holed up in my bedroom in our flat for about a week w/ boxes of genealogy materials (courtesy of my mom), old books (digital and paper) on nineteenth-century mining and geology, old plat maps, and books on the blackhawk war and on woodland effigy mounds, concocting a long narrative poem in segments. the effort’s purpose was to forge in the imagination a commingling of my own family lives, my ancestral family’s history, our inhabiting of particular locales (esp’ly milwaukee, janesville (wi), vinegar hill (il), cornwall, and the black forest), and the geological forces that bequeathed the rock, hydrology, and plant life that we’ve all shared. all thru the master trope of mining, since my mom’s earliest family in the area came here as lead miners. it’s set primarily in a middle cornish meter of randomly alternating 7- and 4-syllable lines.

it was a task a long time in the making.

anyhow, it’s called leads and diggings: a conglomerated family history, and the new adversus press was kind enough to publish five sections of the longer work. you can read them here if you have an interest, and the full work will be featured in my new collection, be radiant: a sonata pome, coming out in jan 2024 (more on that soon…). (there will be images from those old books in the full version)

new paternal poem in _wild roof journal_

July 23, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

the kind folks at wild roof journal have published a poem of mine, “for my father,” in their fifteenth issue. this came out a bit ago, but things have been busy. all good, but very little slack time for posting things.

anyhow, i made this poem when i was hiding in the shade of some cypress trees from the midday sun on the shore of lake michigan in door county. i was daydreaming and suddenly my childhood saturday morning walks with my dad to stop-n-go (our local convenience store) for a newspaper and coffee came hurtling into my brain. had to write it down.

thanks, wild roof!

(pictures from “the old water quarry” gestured toward near the end of the poem)

sna poems, series supplementum #34: new camaldoli fence loop trail

July 23, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

new camaldoli hermitage, founded in 1959 by camaldolese monks based in italy, sits on a mountain in the santa lucia range overlooking the pacific ocean in big sur, california. it is a vibrant contemplative community of monks with daughter houses in berkeley and san luis obispo.

i have a particular affection for the camaldolese since my spiritual mother‘s teacher was bede griffiths, an english benedictine monk who ended up as superior at saccidananda ashram in tamil nadu, india, which ended up incorporated into the camaldolese order. plus, i’m very keen on the works of one of new camaldoli’s original monks, fr. bruno barnhart, and of the current prior, cyprian consiglio. the hermitage is well worth checking out if you’re in the area or looking for a spectacular place for a retreat.

the fence loop trail winds up beyond the hermitage, and we hadn’t climbed it before our visit a couple weeks ago. a beautiful walk with views of canyon and mountain and ocean and sky. redwoods and granitic rock.

first id of vetchling.

carboniferous

but standing:

a scorched redwood grove

purple pincushions

underfoot—

all god’s creatures hum

clouds rolling below

limbs weary

but the soul refreshed

sna poems, series supplementum # 34: garrapata state park

July 22, 2022July 22, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

beside hwy 1 in california, just as one descends on big sur from the north, lies garrapata state park and its bluff trail. we went up and down the mazey path along the bluff, enjoying the persuasive breeze and bare sun on the bluffside. and the flowers! clinging to the rock and sand for dear life all around.

in addition, one of the strangest sights i’ve ever come across: on the initial passage out to the bluff side, one comes upon a cove, and as i walked out to the overlook on a dusty path to spy the cove in more detail a massive corpse met my eyes, a whale deceased in the surf, gently tossing. i hesitated to take pictures, but didn’t want to hide the encounter and fall prey to the temptation to romanticize the natural world. it was a pity to see, but the vultures were already getting ready to eat for days, and many other creatures were surely going to be fed for longer. so it’s here, as the last set of pictures at the bottom; don’t scroll all the way down if you’d rather not see, please.

on brighter notes, first id’s of clawberry, sticky monkey flower, scarlet pimpernel, woolly sunflower (“seaside” methinks), and false bindweed (calystegia).

clawberry fingers,

ocean breeze:

spiked fields to the sky

woolly sunflowers

look and see

oiled mammal barges

over ropey roots

false bindweed

curls in the seabreeze

rock in your cove crypt,

deep cut wales

exposed to air and light

sna poems, series anthropocenum #20: san antonio mission

July 20, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

san antonio de padua mission is 86 acres of the valley of the oaks in california’s central coast, a mission founded by the spanish in 1771. it’s off the beaten path, moreso than the other ca missions at least, and is inside a military base perimeter. very hot and the hills looked over a pretty harsh landscape. beautiful though, and the smell! very different for old wisconsinites from the southeast glacial plains.

had a good self-guided tour. a solid community of devoted parishioners out there, but also realizing they’re all getting older and the young are moving away. who knows? difficult history, but the land held its own and continues. first id’s of spanish clover and a pincushionplant (naverretia, not sure what species).

the spanish clover

is thriving

in anthony’s sun

the steep rounded hills

hard on sky—

sweet scents from garden

sna poems, series anthropocenum #19 (late entry): bender park

July 19, 2022 / jriyeff / Leave a comment

bender park is an apparently fairly developed and now returning to a rewilded state piece of land on lake michigan in oak creek. it abuts the oak creek power plant and there are some precipitous drops down to the lake.

this was a “let’s not go to work just yet” walk from last december. but i lost the pomes i had written shortly thereafter, so i bagged this entry. this morning i went to open up a book i hadn’t looked at since last december and—what do you know—there were the pomes tucked inside marking my page from late last year. so, i thought i’d pull the photos back up and give bender park its due. here we go.

siren call across

the prairie

the asci don’t mind