Touching grass, catching bass

June sundries & a poem.

Dear Friends,

June flew, huh? All my summer travel plans happened to coalesce in the last 30 days. During that time, I’ve hiked the Black Hills, fished the Glacial Lakes of northeastern South Dakota, swam the gulf coast of Florida, and watched live jazz at a Minneapolis dive. Although I don’t have much writing to show for it (yet), I do have photos. Below is a selection of favorites from each stop, followed by miscellaneous updates and a poem from yours truly. Look forward to a longer essay next month, if you look forward to that sort of thing. As always, thanks for being here.

Warm regards,

Cameron

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Zach from Black Elk Peak

A croppin’ bison outside the Badlands

I do believe I caught this Walleye, but Dad gets the pic. We also caught bass, crappie, and northern.

The Great Plains

“Crazy Horse was not unaware of the mountains…”

He knew the Bighorns and the Black Hills, was born near and died not far from Bear Butte. But for most of his life he was a man of the Great Plains. His rivers were the Platte, the Niobrara, the Powder, the Yellowstone, the Tongue, the Little Missouri. He lived under one of the most generous skies in the world. Again, many commentators have recognized that such skies, hovering over the rolling land, with the horizons a mystery, with mirages frequent, make the plains a place that calls forth imaginings. Those long vistas, those splendid clouds tempt the imagination as the plains of Castile tempted Don Quixote. When Plains people die, white or Indian, they speak of a going up, for where would the spirit go except into that sky? It is easy on the plains to imagine things not seen, worlds not known.

—Larry McMurtry, Crazy Horse (1999)

Intermezzo coffee in St. Pete

The Sea

Downtown Minneapolis

Don’t zoom in to the black plaque on the wall. Don’t.

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Coming to Terms

The Poet only had so much to say
     till he set out to say more than he knew,
the textbook definition of a fool,

it’s true, yet this he likewise realized
     was not far from the point: to reach for words
and into words whose latitudes can’t but

betray the sheer enormity of things.
     Yes, words of scandalous particularity,
like tokens of an order infinite

as stars. When God told Abraham to count them—
     this was no lesson in arithmetic.
The deathless promise is what shook the old

man’s heart, a vision like a fisher’s net
     cast wide across the desert sky, cool night-
winds crooning in a tamarisk, the thought

that from a distant time or point of view,
     even these constellations might prove a speck
in some still greater harmony of stars.

According to my notes, I completed this poem one year ago, last June. It was the final poem that made Forbearance, and it might be my favorite of the bunch. I wanted to convey something of the grandeur of the poetic task, its eternal aspect—which, if you ask me, is not an aspect at all but the whole shebang.

Many thanks to those of you who’ve read the book. For the rest of you, it’s never too late. I’ll even toss you the Amazon link.

Here’s a keen new review from one Sarah Sims:

Forbearance is the book you want in your saddlebags for the journey. It’s the grit and wit you’ll need when the winds pick up, because you know they will. And it’s the softness and elegance that reminds you there’s a whole heaven—yes, up there, and all around, beckoning you to witness and bear with it.

The Good Stuff

Listening

• “Rituals” by Watchhouse (LP)

• “I CARE” from the new Turnstile album, “NEVER ENOUGH”

• The Earth Is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation, Mark Lee Gardner (Audiobook)

Reading

• Crazy Horse in Stillness, William Heyen¹

• Warlock, Oakley Hall

• The World-Ending Fire, Wendell Berry

Sipping

• Colombia Agua Blanca, Wonderstate Coffee

Pondering

• “Holy and weird things are blooming” by Carolyn Morris-Collier — Puts a finger of some significant socio-cultural-religious developments across the globe. That sounds abstract but it’s not.

• “In Defense of Pint and Pipe” by Malcolm Guite — A fun essay on the limits of ‘optimizing’ bodily health at the expense of holistic communal and spiritual wellbeing.

1. Yes, this has become the summer of Crazy Horse. A fuse blew in my brain or heart and suddenly I need to read everything on the mysterious Lakota warrior, about whom I knew precious little before. I expect to write about this soon.