The Flannel Days of Fall...

Deep in the flannel days of fall

I’m sometimes taken by the call

of distant geese high in the night.

So faint the sound at first it seems it might

be in my head. Then, between the moon

and me, I see the teaming Vee, and soon

the sound’s a clamor of life on high

that shakes deaf heaven and the sky

‘til it fades again to thought. Come and gone

the chorus, like a ghost at break of dawn

of him who taught me of their flight

on a walk through the woods in the moonlight.


[An earlier version]

Deep in the flannel days of fall

I sometimes stop to hear the call

of unseen geese high in the night.

So faint the sound I think it might

be in my head, but then against the moon

I see the Vee of teaming wings, and soon

the sound’s a clamor of life on high

that wakes the earth and shakes the sky

‘til all is faint again. Come and gone

their chorus, like ghosts at distant dawn,
awakening that long-forgotten day

when I was told the footbridge washed away.
©Tom Kapanka circa 2015 / November 2018

These lines came to me some time ago. I have various drafts (like most things I write). I prefer the one posted on top, but wanted to include the one with the ending about the bridge. It ends oddly for a poem but is truer to what prompted its writing. The first ten lines paint common imagery that many have experienced and then the Bob Ross in me adds one too many happy cabins and it's like "What?" Where did that come from? I'll try to explain:

Perhaps the mention of the bridge serves as a reminder that physical objects can be so associated with a memory that they serve as "time machines." It can be a locket or a lock of hair. It can be an old toy in an antique shop that your recalling having as a child. In this case, the bridge is where I was standing with my father on a late autumn night when we saw the geese pass by the moon. It happened in the early 1970's. I wrote about it here nine years ago: 

Here is the backstory to the last two lines of the second posted version in this poem.

When we were helping Dad build the barn, we sometimes had "stand around" time where we weren't much help. One day, I was standing on the west side of the barn with a hammer in my hand, and for no particular reason, I bluntly tapped a big gray Beech tree beside me. It was not a particularly hard hit. I was not trying to damage the bark, but to my surprise the ashen bark turned green where the hammer struck. It was a contusion of sorts, that pressed the thin crust into the softer layers below. I did it again and it worked again.

"Hey, Dave, look what happens when I tap the bark with the hammer." And in a mindless, systematic experiment, I began tapping the tree as if to make it look like a Dalmatian. I thought nothing of it. This Beech was one of thousands of trees around me in the middle of a "forest." I wasn't thinking ahead to envision it someday in plain view across the way from the back door of a house that existed only in my father's head.

Dad climbed down from the barn rafters in time to see me putting the last licks on the tree, "What are you doing that for?" He asked, more puzzled than angry.
"I don't know," I mumbled, feeling a scolding on the way.
But instead he simply said, "You do realize that tree will live with those marks long after we're gone."
"Gone from here today?" I asked.
"No. Gone from this Earth," he said, not realizing the casual remark dropped in my mind like a slab of granite on soft ground.

At that age, I did not give much thought to the fact that Dad or Mom or any of us would ever be "gone from earth." The facts of death I understood, but the brevity of life in the context of things that go on living fell with a thud and sunk deep. I could not get my fingers under that thought, much less lift it into place. Gone from this Earth.

In time, the truth hits hard enough to gently leave its mark. It's been forty years since I tapped the gray bark of that Beech, but those words stayed with me. Like the many things he taught us while we worked, the quiet lessons learned from Dad outlived a hundred sermons I've forgotten.

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...In our first spring (1969), we noticed something we had not seen since purchasing the land. The little creek, called Fish Creek on the county maps, that separated the front nine acres from the back five, overflowed its banks and became about ten times wider than the brook we'd seen in the fall and winter. (That's me standing in the middle of the marshy spring overflow.)

Dad did not like the thought of a couple acres of land being under water each spring, so after the barn was done, he traded in the blue Ford tractor for an old two-cylinder John Deere that had both a front bucket and a back-hoe.

With that old yellow tractor, he dug out the creek, making the bed about five feet deeper with high clay walls from north to south border of our land. He was onfident that this much deeper creek bed with banks now two feet higher than the ground arond it would contain the next spring's high waters. In time the creek banks looked "normal" again.

Dredging the creek took every Saturday of June and July. But once it was done in August, Dad was free to take on the project that required a reliably narrow creek, his bridge to the back five acres. Now mind you, on the other side of the bridge was nothing. Not a road, not a path, just trees, but in order to blaze such a road, he needed to get the tractor across the creek, and that's just what he did.

By fall that year, the bridge was done. Made like the barn but with bigger timber from the land. One crisp October night, at the end of a long day, we all stood on the bridge in the glow of a harvest moon. In the distance, we heard the faint sound of southbound Canada Geese becoming gradually louder until the cacophony was just overhead. Looking up, we saw a long "V" of flapping silhouettes sweeping past the orange moon. No one said a word, but when they were gone, Dad told us of their amazing migration rituals, how they rotate leaders and rest and feed together. To this day, when I hear geese in the night sky, I think of that night on Dad's bridge.

Years later, from up in a tree, I took this picture of Dad crossing the bridge in the spring (some oak leaves never let go through the winter). As you can tell, the deeper creek worked until a particularly rainy spring about six years later, when gathering sticks and fallen limbs dammed up against the bridge in the night and washed it away.

That summer, Dad built a second bridge in its place. This time he used cement. Not poured cement. Oh, no, that would be too easy (and costly). It just so happened that thee miles away Interstate-94 was being torn up into strips of concrete about ten feet long and three feet wide. Driving by the slabs of concrete one Saturday, Dad got an idea, and he stopped to talk to the road construction crew. He asked them if, rather than going to the land fill, they'd mind dropping off a couple truckloads of those concrete slabs down by the creek on our land. (What he didn't use for the bridge he later used for the driveway.)

With his back hoe he then dug out the both banks and laid the slabs like Lego blocks cemented together in a multi-layered cantilever arch. It took several weekends, but Dad enjoyed it. This sort of work was his secret passion, and he loved telling people his land was connected by "I-94."

This quaint bridge was shade in the summer when we swam in the creek and our favorite resting place when we skated in the winter. The opening is narrower than his first bridge, but it's much higher and the ramps on either side (under the snow in the picture) held several tons of concrete slabs. The high water flowed through every spring with no problems... until 2004.

Dad's second bridge lasted over twenty-five years, and then in May of 2004, Macomb County was hit with some of the worst flooding in the Midwest. The 100-year flood levels were reached. (See video here. This was nine years after Dad passed away.) Like many of the bridges and roads built by the real engineers, by the time the rushing waters of 2004 subsided, the base of Dad's bridge (on the right side of that photo) eroded away and we had to remove the portion that remained. I have pictures of it somewhere as it last appeared after the damage, but I prefer to remember it as it was: the place we had to duck when skating through, where we sometimes swam or held a fishing pole, and where one night we stood with Dad and saw the geese against the moon.
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