Spring Creek Prairie

I'm spending a few days before Christmas at National Audubon's Spring Creek Prairie located in Eastern Nebraska, near Lincoln, the state's capital. My friend A is the caretaker and she's graciously, generously opened her house to a weary traveller, me. It's glorious here. Last night it snowed a bit, but before flakes formed in the too warm air they fell as rain, then freezing rain the effect of which has encased little and big bluestem, switch grass, side oats, indian grass, and my favorite, needle-n-thread grass in sleeves of ice and tiny glassy droplets. Necklace, pearled-lace, these words blanch the beauty. The prairie luster has no comparison.

Michael Forsberg

The sofa is my bed and it's located just beyond a plate-glass window that opens onto rolling grasslands; that opens to the southeast; that opens to austere -- not simply austere the adjective -- but to austere itself. Muted hues bleed into one another as the sun rises, and a careful observer is able to see incremental changes as the light increases.

In my journey to discover what Gary Snyder has called no-self, I've been conceiving "nounless." More than discursive, prior to discursive and all encompassing, the no-self. Interconnectivity. Energy frequencies. Water.

The only thing a leaf eats is sunlight.


We place a log into the stove. It's a log. It is transformed. We accept its warmth.



Here's a poem I like by Robert Creeley

For Love,
By Robert Creeley

for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above   

the others to me

important because all

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.   

Today, what is it that   

is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own   

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but   

what would I not

do, what prevention, what   

thing so quickly stopped.   

That is love yesterday   

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must   

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also   

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and   

whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image   

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me   

because it is my own.

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,   

what have I made you into,

companion, good company,   

crossed legs with skirt, or   

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything   

but that which it wishes   

would come true, fears   

what else might happen in

some other place, some   

other time not this one.   

A voice in my place, an   

echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into

not the confession but   

the obsession I begin with   

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or   

place beyond time, no   

mind left to

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love   

it all returns.

From: Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. 1991