Table of contents for November / December 2011 in Orion

“i thank You God for most this amazing / day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky.” It’s hard to imagine a purer statement of gratefulness for the natural world than this passage from e. e. cummings. But the gratitude that cummings describes, and our despair over the degradation we know is around us, are inextricably connected. To be willing to feel deeply, to observe fully the beauty of the world, to give real thanks, also means to open ourselves to the thoughtlessness with which we treat the planet, and each other. That has never been truer than it is today. For those who care about nature, a meditation on cummings’s “blue true dream of sky” is inevitably buffeted by some kind…

M.G.H. Gilliam, who has been the guiding force at Orion and The Orion Society for almost thirty years and acted as chairperson of The Orion Society’s board of directors since its inception, has stepped down. Marion will continue to serve as Orion’s Publisher. Alison Hawthorne Deming, a former member of Orion’s board who is known to many Orion readers for her work as a writer and poet, has been elected to serve as The Orion Society’s new chairperson. We’re happy to announce that Miroslav Penkov’s story “East of the West” (May/June 2011) has been selected to appear in the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. Also, Amy Irvine’s “Spectral Light” and Terry Tempest Williams’s “The Gulf Between Us” have been named finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award…

Last night I saw the rings of Saturnfor the first time, that brilliant bandof icy crystals and dust. Mirrorsshepherded the light, collecting itlike pollen or mannaor pails of sweet clear water drawnfrom the depths of an ancient well.The gleam poured through my pupilsinto this small, temporary body,my wrinkled brain in its eggshell skull,my tunneling blood, breasts that rememberthe sting and flush of milk.Saturn, its frozen rings fire-white,reflecting the sun from a billion miles.Maybe there’s a word in another languagefor when distance dissolves into time.How are we changed when we stand outunder the fat stars of summer,our pores opening in the damp night?The earth from Saturn is a pale blue orb,smaller than the heart of whoever you love.You don’t forget the poles of the earthslowly turning to slush,you don’t forget the…

A FEW DAYS BEFORE Thanksgiving, my wife, Eryn, came home from town with our two young daughters, both of whom had been administered the traditional Thanksgiving myth at school that day. Three-year-old Caroline was as proud as could be of her paper turkey, made from a cut-out drawing of her own little hand. And Hannah Virginia, our loquacious six-year-old, began blurting out her holiday lecture the moment she came through the door: “Dad, I bet you didn’t know that Thanksgiving comes from the Pilgrims and the Indians helping each other a bunch and then having a peace party and eating a really big supper with crazy-colored corn and turkeys and those turkeys were wild!” With this she donned her construction-paper Pilgrim hat with its big, fake buckle and gave me…

A LOT OF BIG TREES were dislodged by the ice storm of 2009, but the biggest one waited until the spring rains of 2010 to topple across the path to the Spring Cave. This hickory came down with rock lodged between the roots, a formation typical of the Ozarks, leaving a big hollow where it pulled up. It took two days to chain-saw the branches covering the road, and two more days to slice the trunk into two moveable sections. I felt the city wimp leaching out of me. I was a giant! This would have been a good time for a bird to poop on my head. (There is a “hubris bird” that does just that, every time someone feels too full of himself.) Here I was, transposed to…

BYWORD FOR BOREDOM, grist in the mill of the old and dull, weather is the great unmentionable of good conversation. Tell us about your money, or your affinity for being spanked; just don’t ask if it’s hot enough for me. And yet weather has its own channel, its own science, its own page of the paper and up-to-the-minute updates. We are contemptuous of it even as we crave its constant mutter. Maybe it is gratifying to be informed that something unpleasant is coming that we have the means to mitigate: it will snow, and we can crank up the thermostat; or it will be hot, and we can slip from refrigerated house to refrigerated car and cruise icily around, flipping the sun the bird. Maybe it’s simply soothing to be…

Lisa Adams’s work is part of the collections of Eli Broad, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Edward Albee Foundation. Her monograph, Vicissitude of Circumstance, is forthcoming. Nico Alvarado’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Forklift, Thermos, Transom, and other publications. Ellen Bass is the author of The Human Line and Mules of Love, which won the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches at Pacific University in Oregon. Michael P. Branch lives with his family in the high desert of western Nevada. He has published five books and writes a monthly blog, Rants from the Hill, for High Country News. Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Transylvania, in Romania. He is the author of poetry, novels, and essays, and is a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.…

Linda M. Hasselstrom Hermosa, South Dakota BLIZZARD. Snow hisses through the buffalo grass. I can barely see the highway a half mile away. The highway patrol advises motorists to stay home. Four eighteen-wheelers rumble south, snow boiling around them. Four SUVs creep north: subdivision residents heading for work. Sunrise pinks storm clouds. The thermometer reads zero. The windchill factor, says the radio, is thirty degrees below zero; exposed flesh can freeze in seconds. The house moans as winds gust and twist. Vortices of snow spin, dancing on the rims of old snowdrifts like wraiths. Twelve whitetail deer lie among the windbreak’s junipers, does sheltering yearling fawns. Mice and voles nap in tunnels of bentgrass near seed-filled earthen pantries. Porcupines doze in cracks in the limestone cliffs, digesting dried buffalo berries.…

I want to go way out wherethe sky is green where I can tear up certainty and make irregularityout of string and strip the departed the muted the raregood primary labor the sort that does not leavespots or streaks or dust or bits of bone just the broken subtletyof found cloth hard to come by fields of yellow flower and wild thymeand salt and pepper ‘case the witches come where you can piece yourselfget the dust out and winter burn rise up in the morning timeevery stuff of your own all there no pattern just over the hills a scatteringof fog and white pine and the young mother singing to her babylulla lulla rain do come down my beautyit do come down—…

ORION FOR THE HOLIDAYS Forgive us for boasting, but a subscription to Orion makes a great gift. Get a head start this year by ordering gift subscriptions for friends, family, and colleagues at orionmagazine.org, and we’ll send a card to the recipients on your behalf. ATHENA THE OCTOPUS Join us for a live web event with Sy Montgomery, author of “Deep Intellect,” pages 64–71. She’ll talk about octopus hijinks and answer your questions on November 15th from 7 to 8 p.m. (EST). Go to orionmagazine.org/connect to register. SHARE ORION WITH A FRIEND Want to introduce Orion to a friend but feel loath to give away your own copy? Send an e-mail to marketing@orionmagazine.org with “Free Issue to a Friend” in the subject line and your friend’s name and address in…

Whether our terms come from farming or sailing or hunting, Bill McKibben’s July/August 2011 column, “A Little Leeway,” reminded me of the way we once adapted ourselves to the environment — trimming sails or heaving-to as necessary — rather than using brute force to overpower natural order. Dead metaphors today, maybe, but they remind us that there are other ways of being. VALERIE NIEMANGreensboro, North Carolina Perhaps we are born to care and empathize, but as Eric Wagner shows in “I, Turbo” (July/August 2011), to be in the field is to confront the natural order (and disorder) of things that our culture tends to sanitize. Thanks for sharing and giving me a hard dose of reality. SUSAN SANDERKerrville, Texas Eric Wagner’s “I, Turbo” reminds me of a few weeks my…

When I say my porch is lowand wide I mean it’s barely a porch, hacking outroses growing around it, say there’senough flush here for a vase,but you say wait until they’re the shade of redGauguin dreamed when he paintedchildren before smearingtheir faces, and I say what aboutthe two men in the rusted vantrolling this neighborhood for kids,and you say we need shocksof goldenrod, shocks of crow, and besidesit does no good to prayfor a gleaming day when a bird willland on you like a catkin, and thenyou remind me of the gloryof a city on a hill, which I’ve triedin eight different ways to refute,and you say we both want a hornet at the centerof a screen, and then I confess,as if you give a damn, that I lovein fact…