Life On a Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

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Practice calligraphy by yours truly
 

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A question is posed by a reader:

Okay. Here's a question: Issa cormorant in Nirvana?

What is the cry of
one cormorant in the dawn?
silence descending


Is there a Basho on tonight?

 KM 12/11/2004

Pretty punny, I respond..

Surely not cormorant scat?

Untitled Mark Tobey painting from the Tacoma Art Museum

361

And while we are on the subject of cormorants, this from Gary Snyder's new book, Danger On Peaks, just published by Shoemaker and Hoard,112 pages, $22:

"Dropping down rock ledges toward the breakers see a long flat/point spiked with upright black cormorants and a few gulls gray/and white. Rocks dabbed with threads and dribbles of bird-white, "White writing" like Mark Tobey did--drawn in loops and splatters/--lime-rich droppings point back to the fish waves."

and there is more, much more, to this poem.

Maybe later. . . .

ONE MORE TIME

360

Reading last night in one of my favorite books, The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, edited by Robert Hass, I came across the following cormorant poem by my favorite Zen Buddhist poet, Issa:

Children imitating cormorants

are even more wonderful

than cormorants.

WHAT ARE THE BIRDS OF WINTER?

Cormorant sitting on a snag, contemplating his next fish dive

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Well, the cormorant certainly is one of them. They arrive here at the lake as stragglers, but soon find others of their kin, perhaps in dumb obedience to the adage of birds of a feather, etc. And soon there is a pod of them, a flock in the center of the lake.

I always think of them as a snooty bird, with their nose (beak) tilted up in the air, in the manner of that old New Yorker cartoon of the pompous gentleman with the monocle, though I know, I know, that this is a biological trait, a physiological one, and to see anything else in it is carrying the pathetic fallacy to a pathetic level.

The cormorant is a fisher eater, plain and simple. Offer him or her anything else and the gift will be met with disdain. They swim along, looking heavenward, and suddenly one or the pod of them will quickly and neatly invert and be gone. One to two minutes later they will begin to pop to the surface like large corks.

Rarely do they seem to have caught a fish, however. Much as the neighborhood osprey emerges from his private quest with a live fish in his beak. So seldom is it, in the case of both cormorant and osprey, that it seems more of a diving game each plays that a dead-serious quest for food.

Meanwhile the cormorant cruises the center of the lake, looking a bit oblivious to us human occupants along the shoreline. Occasionally he (or she, as the case may be, since the cormorant doesn't have specific gender traits) rears back on his hind legs, as it were, and fluffs out his feathers, I suppose to dry them, or to arrange them more satisfactorily, more comfortably. He will do this once or several times until briefly satisfied with the arrangement, after which he will resume his snooty cruise.

Looking up like that, I ask, how can he see into the water where his next meal hopefully is coming from?

Well, he can't, and must depend on his underwater vision to find a fish and and snare it in that wicked beak, with its downward tweak that must be so helpfully deadly.

Well, not those trees, but stately trees just like them, just around the corner.

358

A drive circles the lake. During our past eight years here, we have seen lots developed, their tall firs and cedars whacked down. It is heart-wrenching to watch.

Some of the development is on lakefront lots; others on the far side of the circling drive. Right down from us a crew of pleasant young men is totally denuding a sixty-foot lot that is, oh, maybe three hundred feet deep. A few whips are left in front, and some fifteen year old conifers at the utmost rear of the deep lot. The rest have been cut down and hauled away. The stumps remain, but soon cats will come and dig them up. Then the foundation for the new home will be laid.

Today, grieving those trees, some of which are second-grown firs that are 70 years old, I came up with a personal maxim that i'd like to see made law. (Fat chance.) It goes:

Nobody can cut down a tree any older than he is.

There you go.

A tree's age can be determined by species, diameter at breast height (DBH), and climate. Here, trees grow to maturing fast, given half a chance.

Any state representatives or senators listening?

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor