Accounts Of Summer,2016

(1) Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to a lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate. Sonnet 29, Shakespeare Is it my place to criticize the way the lark, flying high, sings at dawn, and render Shakespeare moot? Is the road open for my journeying among my peers, or does my path lead to wilderness? Shall I adopt a foolish wit to hide my essential caution in humor, or shall I swell my frame as if in armor and bluster my way to some absolute power? Shall I dispose of all this poetic stuff, call it nonsense, and adopt a prosaic posture? I could become a reader of popular novels, the more current the better for me. Plot will preoccupy my thoughts as never before, characterization will shrink from its lofty heights to just a list of names - Dramatis Personae. And setting, that soil out of which characters and events flower, will be just places? (2) How many creatures who share with us Earth as home stop and ponder their immediate condition, rapt into stillness and silence by a thing of beauty? What other creatures can afford to sacrifice everything for a moment of supreme appreciation, a temporary joy in some eternally renewed beautiful thing? I sense both naturalist and hunter shake their heads. Such are my thoughts on an ordinary evening in midsummer, two days into a heat wave, after two weeks of hot rains have made grass and leaf and flower lush and shining with green brilliance, as if summer's account were swollen with promises of an extended season. But who am I but a man among men, assaulted by grief if I sense how fragile are our fondest joy? (3) I am awake early on this first day of a new season in southern Minnesota. I am delighted by this greenest air filtered inside by my unforced breathing. The male cardinal flies over my reverie and deposits his song in my heart the way his female deposits eggs in their nest and broods over them, as I brood over the vexed affairs of humanity. The cardinal pair will hatch fledglings from their brooding and launch them into flight. What will my brooding hatch and nurture? Perhaps it is enough to realize my actions parallel theirs as the season swells. At very least we both weave a fabric that will cover our nakedness in the winter looming ahead.