synch-ro-ni-zing

Poem: White plate

2012-02-01T08:55:00.001-05:00

White plate

The car on ice spins out at 70 miles an hour.
My sister throws herself over the banister
breaking both legs (but not her life,
which is what she wanted).
A wild man worries the locks
of the doors and windows
as I run just ahead with my little girl
to secure each one.

Just so, violence plays
in my dreams.

And in the light of day,
a tin can cuts my finger to the bone.
At work my ankle turns
above a wet shoe, and down I fall
flat on the linoleum
of the old department’s floor.
My anger at a co-worker’s refusals
throbs like my finger and hip.

We are torn, and we
tear; the throbbing vein
tells the truth. We wrap it
and unwrap it, and like the peels
and tendons of a pomegranate,
discard its stained residue
on a serene white plate.

February 2012

Painting "Dood snipje" by Jan Mankes, 1909

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Poem: A birth, and a death

2012-01-27T07:39:00.002-05:00

A birth, and a death
for Lister Matheson

No snow, and little
to speak of this warm winter;
ochre moss in laced stars
below small knobs of dried, dun
prairie fleabane,

planetary in death,
trembling in the circle of wind.

O my friend you are dead
and traveling
even while all for me is reborn

long before spring
in this non-winter of brown nothing
that is even so

beautiful, from the trodden meadow path
to the slim trees grown tall,
black, and sunlit by morning's horizon.

January 2012

Poetry should be heard.

Postscript: This small poem should be considered a momentary and brief snapshot in a series of poetic responses in these early days of my grandson's life. It cannot suffice as a fitting tribute or memorial to Lister, whose expanse of life, work and persona would need several volumes of momentary—and epic—responses. My thanks to Brendan for his comments, which helped me to realize that I needed to say this here in the post.

poem: little tree

2012-01-25T06:59:00.006-05:00

little tree
for my newborn grandson, James

(I cannot speak this directly to him.
It must be in the second person.
What would happen if I told him what is here?

I am not ready to break anything
that is not yet broken open.
The world has just begun.)

His head is in my hands, mouth open,
eyes half-stupored. He is breathing me,
as if I am winter, to warm in his mouth.
He exhales me back to me.
My voice is a silver blue bead he fingers
with a perfect tongue.

He has not learned to forget
that the earth always has her mouth open,
holding the sea and not swallowing,
nesting the trees for their nesting birds,
breathing the sky and not throwing anything away.

January 2012

Poetry should be heard. Perhaps listen to me read while playing a song for Egon Schiele, below.

Painting "Little Tree (Chestnut Tree at Lake Constance)" by Egon Schiele

Listen to Rachel's song Egon & Gertie. . . .

02.egon & gertie by Rachel's on Grooveshark

My new life

2012-01-23T09:43:00.003-05:00

I type this with one finger while James sleeps on my chest. We are at home in his apartment on his fifth day of life, with his mommy and daddy. Daddy goes back to teaching today. Mommy will have a visit from a nurse to check in.

I have been living in the organic multi-day emergence of a new human being. In some ways it is a blur of minutes, hours and days, without clear delineation of what happened when. Yet we are constantly counting, in the way of civilized humans. The number of hours in labor, of hours pushing, inventory of fingers and toes, how many minutes at the breast, how many poos and pees in 24 hours. Time with its quantities is our way of measuring health and wellbeing, and with the major systems of eating and digestion well established, and my daughter’s healing underway, we ease into the stream and rippling flow of the journey.

All this amid the unspeakable wonder of exquisitely intense intimacy. The now-ness of every second. His phenomenal beauty of face and body. His peaceful countenance. His downy and fragrant temple against my lips. The whisper of his breath, the snuffles and squeaks of his voice, and the quiet smacks of his lips. I have plenty of photos to take with me today when I leave him for home and work. But the feel of his weight on my chest, the sounds of his breath and sighing voice, the scent of his warm head—these will be swaddled in the memory of my senses for a few days, until I snuggle with him again.

I am saturated and unsatiated in love. Yet there is a growing awareness that time and work call me back to their necessities. Just as James will grow past these first days of utter dependence—so beautiful and desirable to me now—I, too, will grow into my life, with new tendrils sprouting from the grafted stem.

Announcing: my first grandchild

2012-01-19T22:52:00.003-05:00

name: James Lawrence

born: January 18, 2012 (his due date)
Time: 11:17pm

labor: 22 1/2 hours

health: excellent

weight: 6 lbs. 11 oz.

length: 18 inches

energy/personality: still, gentle, graceful

parents: strong, exhausted, besotted

grammy: in love, speechless, listening

New v@!ce re(0gn+ion $oƒtware

2012-01-14T14:29:00.002-05:00

screenshot of the PDF manual for Dragon dictate

and at the right, the Available Commands window,

which goes on and on into eternity

If you can't read the title of this blog post, or if you understand it after studying it for a minute, then you get an idea of what it's like to learn the commands of voice recognition software. Typing is pretty easy. But figuring out how to use the mouse, how to type diacritical's (letters with accents, etc.), how to open and close applications, how to send e-mail, and all the myriad of commands to do what I need to do on my laptop with minimal use of my hands, has presented a whole new set of challenges. I was relieved to get the Dragon dictate software in the mail at work. But in the hours since then, the reality of learning this and how far I have to go is overwhelming.

The time spent this weekend studying and practicing will hopefully pay off over the days and weeks ahead.

I “typed” everything in this post by dictating it. See that apostrophe in the word diacritical's above? It is driving me crazy! It doesn't need one. But it is too much work to get back there with voice commands and fix it (and I want to resist the urge to do it manually, which really messes everything up). Just when I was learning to relax my shoulders . . . Ha!

These changes mean that I will be back to visiting you at your place more regularly. I look forward to it.

Poem: Free

2012-01-12T08:13:00.005-05:00

free

In the mist

around the rising sun

a bird

also rises. The wood fire

clicks in the iron box.

Are the bird,

the sun,

and the fire

confined at all?

Or do they simply

move their breath

freely
for interpretation

within the medium

of each other’s worlds?

January 2012

Painting "Mist" by Nicholas Roerich

Poem: Cactus bloom . . .

2012-01-11T06:04:00.003-05:00

Cactus bloom picks up where the moon leaves off

Pink spark rising
after the sleepless Night
upheld the moon
(her shield d’amour).
Now, hold the field of day.

Then, at day's end,
dive like Joan with sword,
immanently mortal,
perpetually young,
softly arcing to earth
like the moon along her
battle for the night sky.

January 2012

My first blog friend, M.A. Rauf

2012-01-07T13:30:00.020-05:00

I am one who knows how this blogging experience can change a person, for I have been profoundly changed. Later this month it will be six years since I began synch-ro-ni-zing. While it is my spiritual practice to write, and my creative play to take photographs, is it also an act of rapt listening to sit in the blog "theater" where you, my blog friends, share your own explorations. I evolve, much as a result of our engagement with one another.

Within just a couple of months of starting synch-ro-ni-zing, my outlook was transformed by one blogger. When I had just a couple of family members reading my blog, including my sister Ginnie who explained to me the ways of blogs, having published at In Soul for a year already, M.A. Rauf stopped in from India for a warm and welcoming visit. Ginnie had taught me to reciprocate blog visits as part of bloggy etiquette, and so I visited Rauf's Daylight Again after that first greeting from him. ("Rauf" — or "rauf" as he prefers — is pronounced "rah-oof.")

There isn't a way to summarize Rauf, or his blog! But I can say that he is a stunning photographer with heart, a writer with compassion and deep respect for those who are "untouchable" or otherwise downtrodden (you will see this for women in his photography), a lover of science, and a fervent lover of his India, with all her complex layers and intricate arts. He opened my eyes to atrocities; he encouraged me to think for myself. His humor, honesty, irony and sometimes outrage over what humans do to each other—including at home in India, and in the U.S.— shook me out of comfort. His love and compassion taught me to see people differently. He took over where my big brother Bennett left off when he passed away, whose worldview had shaped my own, environmentally and politically. He teaches me tips about photography, too, like Bennett.

Rauf doesn't blog much now, a real loss to me and his many followers from all four corners of the world. But he still takes photographs on his travels around India, and he still rages against agri-businesses that threaten not only all of our health, but the very lives of farmers in India who literally cannot survive financially and consequently commit suicide as families. When you watch this YouTube slideshow I made of a sampling of Rauf's images (please watch, it's just six minutes), observe the faces of his subjects, who cannot resist his charm: even Mother Earth smiles when Rauf lifts his camera.

Today is Rauf's birthday (January 8; it's already the 8th in India). Even though he and I have never met in person, and may never meet (though I hope that one day Don and I will get to India to meet him!), he is my brother. Happy Birthday, Rauf! This is a small "thank you" for the gift you are to all who know you. Watch full screen to be wrapped in the photos, and listen to "Time Remembered" by the Bill Evans Trio.

Photos by Rauf

Poem: Winter blur

2012-01-04T08:14:00.004-05:00

Winter blur

I
How strange suddenly
to read the word ermine
and think of a
woman’s neck,

warmed, blurred
with white fur, and not
to see the long stoat’s
winter skin—alive, bounding;

II
O marquise winter moon,
rustle of skirt on the balcony,
and the agony to fly;

when a man feels your whiteness,
he soars; toward what, I wonder:
the sun’s reflection, or some
other light, conquering within?

January 2012

Poetry should be heard.

Notes:
stoat: mustela ermenia, or ermine
marquise: this shape, a cut of a diamond

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A new blog in a new year: sparks and mirrors

2012-01-02T14:24:00.001-05:00

for a -

“Go into yourself and see
how deep the place is from which your life flows.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Some of you found me, with Lorenzo (of The Alchemist's Pillow blog), at our year-long blog where we posted readings from the book A Year with Rilke in 2011. It feels impossible to summarize the year there, much as it did after I finished RUMI DAYS, another such blog of soul and spirit the year before. I know that I have been changed as a result of those daily readings, and the interactive commentary from readers. It was deep and wondrous, opening doors and windows onto light I had not imagined existed. Sometimes I think we created light, together, following Rilke on his path. And now, I can't recall what or who I was before these transformations.

In a letter to Witold Hulewicz Rilke wrote:

All the worlds of the universe plunge into the Invisible as into a yet deeper reality. Certain stars increase in intensity and extinguish themselves in the angels' endless awareness. Others move toward transformation slowly and with great effort, and their next self-realization occurs in fear and terror.

We are the transformers of Earth. Our whole being, and the flights and falls of our love, enable us to undertake this task.

Because of that power of transformation, and the joy of community Lorenzo and I found with our friends at AYWR, we have launched another such blog called sparks and mirrors. We didn't want it to end, that daily dive into waters of discovery, truth and beauty. We want the practice to continue. We will post at our new blog every few days, mostly passages from authors who have themselves opened windows onto the universe within and without, with a few words about how and why they have inspired us. We would love for you to dive in with us there, with a hearty and warmly welcoming splash. (Swimsuits optional.)

I will, of course, continue here with poems, photos, art, music, and whatever else wants to be shared. I am so very grateful that you are in my life, and how we learn from one another.

May the year ahead be awake and alive for you!

Poem: The intelligence of snow

2011-12-29T08:26:00.003-05:00

The intelligence of snow

To float

from the massive

cloud of unknowing

down

without hurry

or tension

into the amplitude open

above fields humped and blurry

and the gentle

geometry of roofs

falling

with no clear

apprehension

loose—adrift, or cast—

resting and feathering

across downy light,

or, becoming light

without edge

descending

and hovering

where buzzards meditate

a white spider

hanging and swinging

(without gossamer thread)

into the quietude

of outstretching spruces

tossed and bob-slipping

past treetops

beside

blue jays jerking

and nuthatches skipping

at last touching

into place

with soft pliancy

weightless wafer

on the bird feeder’s lip

onto one black seed

instantly scooped

The solitary

snow flake

dissolving

in the mitered beak

of the cardinal

in its ultimate

and particular

gesture of praise

December 2011

Christmas angels from the farm: photos and music

2011-12-23T05:29:00.004-05:00

To my friends near and far, I've put together some photos of Christmas on the farm and linked them with jazz singer Abbey Lincoln singing "Christmas Cheer." I wish you Merry Christmas, and as Abbey sings, Here's to love . . . now . . . and throughout the year.

You'll see a couple of angels given to me by my mom, the first at 0:28, a woodland musician I treasure. Another is the colorful grosgrain one at about minute 3:45, who looks a little worn, but still cheerful. Christmas and my mother are linked, with memories of sitting at the piano with her while she played carols from the big blue book, and I sang songs like "The Holly and the Ivy," "Go Tell it on the Mountain," and "Good King Wenceslas." Toward the end you'll see a portrait of my small mom with Matroyshka dolls. After the video, I'm sharing a new angel who flew in from my brother Nelson this week, too late to include in this slideshow. She is holding a red bird like the cardinals in the video and seems to have just alighted from the meadow, so beautiful.

Have a happy weekend, quiet or loud, at home or in someone else's, with all your angels large and small.

Dylan Thomas: A Child's Christmas in Wales

2011-12-20T13:47:00.010-05:00

Back in November I scanned a few of Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations of A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas to share with you, and I had already typed up the start of the story, and loaded the YouTube. Bear with me as I nurse my hands a little longer. On the horizon: voice recognition software for my computer. Merry Christmas to me!

This is a boy's adventure I post, in honor of my soon-to-be-born grandson. Dylan Thomas's fantastically and mythically detailed descriptions should prompt us all to get our own memories of Christmas down, and giggle again and again. OK, on with the master.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in my snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

Pull up a child, and continue reading here . . .

Listen to Dylan Thomas himself read the story in his lugubrious but simultaneously old-child-joyful voice below . . .

The audio recording of Dylan Thomas reading it, what a voice . . .

Poem: Beating flames

2011-12-18T09:44:00.003-05:00

Beating flames

Rain falls
in the rhythm
of a bird’s heartbeat;

but when the crow cries,
his raucous call
does not pierce
this thrumming trance.

Rather,
like the cast iron
of the wood stove—black body,
rising up—he carries
the beating flame, hungry
and consuming, crackling
the language of the heart.

Illustration by Ива́н Я́ковлевич Били́бин, aka Ivan Bilibin (thanks, Montag!), for Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin's poem "Two Crow." Unrelated to my poem, but interesting anyway, from wiki on "Twa corbies" (or "The Three Ravens): " . . . a 1828 partial translation of the French translation of Sir Walter Scott's Border Poems. It includes the poem entitled 'Шотландская песня' (Scottish Song), which has become known to almost every literate Russian-speaking person. Pushkin's translation contains only the first half of the poem, ending with 'and the mistress awaits for her lover, not the killed one, but the alive one', thus making a dark hint the central point of the story. Many composers of the time wrote musical interpretations of the poem."

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May heaven be hospitable to you, George Whitman

2011-12-15T06:39:00.001-05:00

“Be not inhospitable to strangers

lest they be angels in disguise”

I should not be typing up a blog post. Thanks to those of you who have been concerned about my hands, arm and shoulder, which are giving me grief from inflammation due to work on the computer. I am trying to be good and limit typing to university work. But I cannot neglect posting on the peaceful-in-his-sleep passing of American George Whitman, owner of the Shakespeare & Co bookstore in the Latin Quarter of Paris since 1951, at age 98. The quote above is painted above the lintel of a doorway in the happily disheveled shop, where books are roughly categorized by type, and you worry that you will topple a pile of them when you squeeze around a corner into the next room.

The first time I "met" Mr. Whitman was in 1997, one of the thousands (millions?) of strangers who have visited him there, caught in the above photo, taken by my sister Nancy. She and I spent two weeks in Paris after our mother died with Alzheimer's. Nancy had been Mom's primary caregiver for six months, and this was Nancy's much deserved vacation; she invited me along. Mr. Whitman stamped my Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin with this emblem of the shop (right). Read my first blog post at my Paris blog (Paris Deconstructed) in April 2006, about the time Mr. Whitman asked if I had a place to sleep, here.

I would love to type up more for you to read about George Whitman, but I must keep this short. You can read his story in this NYTimes article upon his death yesterday. He was a legend, and in case you're wondering, the NYTimes article seems to lay to rest the question about whether George was related to Walt Whitman. I will always think fondly of him, for the way he opened his arms to me one day in 2004 and asked if I had a place to sleep. Has anyone ever been sorry they had a place to sleep? I was that day, and I regretted saying, "yes."

My then sister-in-law Donica snapped this photo in 2004
of George Whitman while he was asking me
if I had a pillow for the night (fuller story here);

he invited writers and bibliophiles to sleep in his upstairs guest room,
as long as they agreed to sweep up and help around the shop;
but my sister Boots (Ginnie)
and her then wife Donica and I already had a place

an upstairs room before a poetry reading (not by me!) on my solo trip in 2006;
authors and poets like Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett,
James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg read in his bookshop

I love this board in front of the bookshop, with his brief but wonderful
autobio that ends with ". . . it is my daughter's turn" which refers to

Sylvia Beach Whitman, who now runs the store and was

named for Sylvia Beach, the woman
who owned the first Shakespeare & Co bookstore;
history of Shakespeare & Co at wiki here

me in front of the bookstore in 2004;

George Whitman was already old then,

and I wondered if he'd live to be 100

Oh, and in case you have never seen it,you can witness
the extraordinary wayMr. Whitman "cut" his hair in this video;
there is a bonus if you watch and listen.

Below is the view of the Notre Dame cathedral just across the Seine

from Shakespeare & Co, when Don and I

stepped out of the bookstore in 2003, and a storm was brewing.

-Here is

Poem: the turquoise sea for Christmas

2011-12-13T12:33:00.004-05:00

I read a billboard:
Gifting made easy.
I mourned suddenly
the loss of giving.

And I thought
of the green-glazed vase
curved like cupped hands
(or your opalescent cheek)
on top of the cabinet.

Or the perfect green field
and the turquoise sea.

I would like to give
them all to you.
But they
are already yours.

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Winter slideshow with the Esbjörn Svensson Trio

2011-12-10T12:55:00.006-05:00

It's been a busy and tiring week, but a good one. I have not been blogging today, but I will respond to comments and visit blogs soon. My mother-in-law is doing so well she won't need any more dialysis and may go home early next week!

This morning I felt the need to be quiet. So I spent some time gathering photos and making a slideshow. I've paired my winter photos with Esbjörn Svensson Trio's song "Winter in Venice." Wouldn't that be pretty, to walk in Venice in winter?

Starting at around minute 4:15 on, the photos are from today. I hope the images and music will help you feel peaceful. I am always drawn to solitary things in photographs, and while taking them.

Full screen with headphones is nice.

Poem: Dark winter morning with the dogs

2011-12-09T06:18:00.003-05:00

Dark winter morning with the dogs

Dog stars Sirius and Aludra gnaw
the bones of the black locust trees;
a rout of coyotes behind the woods
barks and sings a round for the chickens,
gone these three years from their shallow roosts;
a meteor falls like a seed of fire
into that sleeping corner of the barn
and lights up its empty boxes; see
the straw mixed with chicken guano
that remains after three summer gardens, ablaze
and still abundant on the floor; my sleeping husband
dreams of the next planting, starting with the shovel
and the shit, the wheel barrow, the eternal stew;
Murzim howls, Muliphen listens, and Aludra,
a virgin, hungers with everlasting heat.

Poetry should be heard.

Quite literally the other morning, a shooting star fell behind the barn, right there, while coyotes clamored, either after, or in preparation, for their early morning hunt.

Hubble image of Canis Major's "evil eyes" found here.
For information about Canis Major and the stars that shine in the constellation, go here.

Hot and Cold ruminations

2011-12-07T10:14:00.005-05:00

You’re getting warmer. Warmer. WARMER. You’re HOT! Oh you’re so HOT!

This was not the game of dating come-ons. It was the game of HOT and COLD, a hide-and-seek pastime. The person who is “it” goes out of the room while the others remain, and one person hides an object. When the It girl returns, she is coaxed along by clues of warm and cool, hot and cold, depending on her proximity to the hidden object. When she is across the room from it, she is cold. When she is close, she is warm. At times her fingers hover above the object, unbeknownst to her, and the others are screaming HOT HOT HOT—SO HOT YOU’RE BURNING UP HOT, incredulous that she could be missing the object, laughing in glee that she is!

Now I’m playing another game of hot and cold in my menopausal radiance. So hot in a flash that all the A/C in the car at fan speed FOUR does not cool enough. So hot that a walk in winter is the freshest and easiest to take: remove the moisture, let me swallow clear oxygen. I sit in the hot tub, half submerged in hot water (103°F, 39.5°C), half above water, exposed to the cold morning breeze. This is heavenly balance.

In legend, myth and poetry, winter is something to survive, with a sprinkling of Christmas in the middle to lighten its heavy load. I read Rumi and Rilke, and winter is the opposite of love; it is the time when the lover is absent; winter is longing without reward. Or in the Persephone myth, winter is Demeter’s time of grief, when she absents herself to seek her lost daughter in the Underworld.

I’ve always preferred cold to heat, putting a sweater on more than a bikini at the beach. I’d rather seek than find; stand in the corner removed, not in the center of the hot crowd. So what’s the matter with me, who loved winter long before I needed to plunge into ice to escape hot flashes? Maybe the matter is a binary, “fundamentalist” view. After writing these thoughts, I read this from Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul:

Often, when spirituality loses its soul it takes on the shadow-form of fundamentalism. I am not referring to any particular group or sects, but to a point of view that can seize any of us about anything. One way to describe the nature of fundamentalism is through a musical analogy. If you go to a piano and strike a low C rather hard, you will hear, whether you know it or not, a whole series of tones. You hear the “fundamental” note clearly, but it would sound very strange if it didn’t also include its overtones—C’s and G’s and E’s and even B-flat. I would define fundamentalism as a defense against the overtones of life, the richness and polytheism of imagination.

. . . The intellect wants a summary meaning . . . but the soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end, references and allusions and prefigurations.

(pp 235-6; my bold)

Maybe winter is not simply: cold. It is cold with overtones of cool, warm, and much that is not about temperature. I am a polytheistic lover of winter! And stay warm, because I'm going to keep writing about it.

Painting: Pablo Picasso's The Red Armchair
Photo: Bishop and me stepping through a winter nuance

Poem: Woman and cloud

2011-12-06T04:42:00.000-05:00

Woman and cloud

From her propped hospital bed
the old woman who nearly died
a few days ago now talks and
talks, while a continental drift of cloud
passes over the hospital and suburbs.
They are each unaware of the other,
the sheeted woman and the gray cloud;
both snowcapped, and round at the edges;
both moving in the minimal float
that seems a physical impossibility
when gravid with so much fluid;
there is much winter to come, and harshly;
they hold it up like a woman’s flounces.

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A home in winter

2011-12-04T03:58:00.007-05:00

I am not much use with my hands. I have bent them to work in an office on computers. They are weak, sore, pitiful. I hold a needle to a quilt a short while, the fabric and batting gathered and bunched in my left hand, the needle a steel splinter of my once-magic wand arm in my right; then my hands collapse, in pain or icy numbness, in the calico on my lap. The most basic tools have no moneyback guarantee.

But once, after the supremacy of Sunday morning church and dinner, these hands of mine built a home. I was five. I had three construction assistants in the yard between the house and the church — ages nine, eleven and thirteen; male; also inexperienced builders. It had snowed; the snow was deep. Then it snowed some more. It was January, the snows piled like ancient stone-dust cities of the Holy Land pilgrimage our parents showed us in slides. Then it rained on our cotton and wool hooded snow suits and on the snow; the rain froze. The black metal clasps of my red rubber galoshes froze shut. If we were very delicate, we could walk atop the crusted snow. With straight-edge machete fingertips, from the large age thirteen size to the small five, we punched out big rectangular snow bricks. Deep, deep I still feel the way of precision, my fingertips in wool mittens slicing snow stones from the whole quarry yard for layering in the masonry of igloos. No one taught us this. When the walls were an inch higher than the thirteen-year-old, my brothers placed the plywood ceiling and finished the exterior with a roof of ice-and-snow slate. We packed white mortar in each gap; smoothed with pearl-iced mitten-index fingers: a ten by ten closet or a small bedroom where the four of us could lie side by side hidden in mystery in the expanse between our father's parsonage and the church. We slept quietly in our civilized and insulated imaginations. We could live there, and survive. So warm; so home. So temporary.
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Winter poem by Hayden Carruth: The Curtain

2011-12-02T05:54:00.016-05:00

Since I love exploring winter in all sorts of light, here is a tremendous winter poem by Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) to spread out in — to feel the contrast between the romance and beauty of winter, and the pain of existence. Carruth was an American poet from Woodbury, Connecticut. I don't know his work well, though I've known of him for years, but I mean to.

“A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.” ~ Hayden Carruth

The Curtain

by Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.
For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.
Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

*Note: This page says that Carruth's Selected Poetry was a finalist for the 1987 poetry Pulitzer, but I do not see evidence that he won for 1996, which the Poetry Foundation claims. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey in 1996, the volume this poem is from. NPR has this moving article upon his death in 2008. Read more about him at the Poetry Foundation.
-

Winter: getting what I want

2011-12-01T06:11:00.000-05:00

standing in the meadow path, facing the pine woods

I asked for snow in the morning (last post), and I got what I wanted that night. When I woke up, and the sun began to rise, these were the scenes around us. Sometimes we get what we want. And sometimes we want what we get. But often neither is true. I wonder about this. I love winter and welcome it with glee equal to what I feel in spring in intensity, but it is a very different feeling. Most people think winter is pretty with a clean covering of snow. But I have found that a rather small portion of the population likes to be in winter, with the cold. Even though my fingers ache as the cold grips them, I can't imagine myself without winter. Maybe my psyche is accustomed to the four seasons, having grown up in Michigan. When we lived in southern California five years, it never felt right to me. I don't want it warm year round! I don't want the lushness all the time of Birds of Paradise and jasmine vine. I want the smell of sunlight refrigerated in earth. I want the low light of the sun. I want frosty air on my face. I want things to stop growing a while. I want this.

the front yard; can you see a bit of our road on the right?

Bishop loves the snow too; her coat is very thick

When she comes out of her heated garage bed in the morning,
she squirms around in the snow

looking toward the outbuildings from the house;
from left to right: barn, corncrib, shed, l'atelier

two maples Don taps for sap in March,
and the catalpa on the right line the driveway

the barn and corncrib

starting out on the path toward the meadow, looking toward the orchard
where Lesley and Brian were married;
corncrib is on the far right, where we store yard tools on one side
firewood on the other, and the Farmall tractor between;
l'atelier just behind

facing the back of the property where the meadow and woods await;

corncrib on the right, barn on the left,
with the lilac bush, blooming white "blossoms"

barn and lilac

the beginning of the path to the meadow

the meadow, with lots of deer tracks!
sumac on the right

sumac silhouetted against the morning sky

meadow and pines

walnuts our neighbor planted next door to our pine woods;

many people here in Michigan planted walnut trees

as an investment; I wonder if they are still worth a lot

the way they were in the 1980s

the path through the pine woods

under a white pine, where I'd like to camp out one day,
maybe not in the winter; but who knows?

I am experimenting with white balance for the first time;
I thought winter with snow is a good time to start shooting in RAW mode;
you can see different tones in these photos;
this may reflect my lack of expertise, but I have tried
to be true to the different tones of light on this morning;
maybe I should compile a Monet series
of specific scenes in varied times of day and seasons

Poem (with apologies to Blake): Waiting for snow

2011-11-29T03:11:00.001-05:00

All of November nearly gone, and not a snowfall worth chatting about around the office water cooler. Cooled water, harumph! I want snow. We went to see the Nutcracker the other night. Lovely, you know. The dance of the snowflakes just beautiful, and the Snow King and Queen. But, harumph!

I wander around the meadow path, and all I can find is evergreen and brown. Where is the harsh winter that was promised, huh?

In my snowlust, I walked and could not get "The Tyger" out of my head, though that is about stars and tigers and the Creator and what is simultaneously terrifying and beautiful. I thought about my recovering mother-in-law and the proximity of terror and joy: almost gone, then in a day or two sprouting jokes and love. The air was cold, and I kept thinking about the tearful symmetry of snowflakes, and the dancing ones in Nutcracker, and the rhythm of my feet on the ground that was beating out rhyming, metered verse. Like this. (Seriously, my apologies to Wm. Blake for this.)

Waiting for snow

Snowflake, snowflake, come to me

down the spiral of this breeze;

where on mountains do you hide—

in Shambhala, or Telluride?

In what distant keeps or skies

swirl the centers of your eyes;

white unseen, at heights too high

for me to catch, or eat, or slide.

And your Winter, where is She,

poet Mistress of Tchaikovsky?

And when the Finns flop onto ice,

wouldn’t some for me be nice?

Where the crystals? where the drifts,

in what hollow blues my bliss?

And where does power click and fail

under avalanche and gale!

While the blizzard puffs the tree

in Anchorage and Nikiski,

Michigan wind just blows us bare:

the birds and I, we perch and stare.

Snowflakes, snowflakes on the stage,

bobbing tulle in a silver haze;

groove the dance, chill the Queen;

sift powdered sugar on these evergreens!

The Muse of Winter another year

If the ballet doesn't work,
there's always Ahmad Jamal

playing "Snowfall" at the Alhambra in London;
for something kind of cool, load the YouTube video,
turn the volume down a fair bit and listen to me read
my poem on podcast here with Jamal playing in the background.

:-)

William Blake's "The Tyger"

Poem: Blue hour

2011-11-27T05:25:00.006-05:00

Blue hour

The tall spruce with wild
but silent upcurled arms
conducts the cool dark night
on a track of wind into morning’s
thinness; like God, and I lying still
under him; my moon-white face
a lit candle floating in the font
of the hot tub; the wind on my face
and arms as if prayers whispered
from a distant train; rumbling through
the entire outdoor room; the barn,
house, rocking bamboo, the hunters
asleep next door; nowhere is there
a smell of death, no deer hung,
no blood, no mouse in the mouth
of a snowy owl; this is God’s early
hour when lips are still closed, when
prayers for the dying are snored
through noses like praise out the back
door; when the doe rises on groggy
legs, believing the tender leaves
are still wet, still green.

We learned early Thanksgiving (Thursday) morning that my 83-year-old mother-in-law was suffering in a crisis of renal infection that had spread into her blood. It has been touch and go since then; Friday we thought we might lose her, but thanks to her medical team who made difficult decisions that saved her, and to her strength of will, she is recovering steadily, though still in ICU. This poem comes out of my morning prayers for her. "Blue Hour" — in the French "l'Heure Bleue" — called Madrugada in Spanish and Portuguese; it is the twilight between the full dark of night and the light of day. For me it is a magic hour, when occasionally dark possibilities clutch from the night, but more often my thoughts lean toward brightness and hope, toward everyday miracles in the large and small cycles of life.

What to do on Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T06:03:00.004-05:00

Take

the torch

down from the wall

and bravely wake

the sleeping giant

of your soul

Stir

dormant magnificence

out of her crouching

fraction of light

Strengthen

hibernating

hips arms and legs

into stomp

and thunder

on the dance floor of

your particular praise!

This is my daily goal, not just on Thanksgiving.

Friends around the world do not necessarily know about American Thanksgiving, how it began and why we celebrate, what we celebrate. Here's an explanation I wrote to a friend in another country. It's the traditional, happy, non-NativeAmerican view of the holiday:

Legend is that it began with the first European settlers to America. They didn't know about the New World's agriculture. The Native Americans befriended and helped them understand and raise the crops that were new to them, like corn. So when harvest time came, they had a big feast and included their new friends, celebrating together. Every year they celebrated again, and so the tradition continued. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday in the 1860s. Since then it has become the most beloved holiday in the U.S., because there is no religious affiliation, no gifts to buy, no commerce outside of food, no complications (except family). People just gather and express thanks for what we have. Traditionally we eat a turkey, which they would have eaten in the 1600s, along with fish and other meats and vegetables like pumpkin, squash and corn. It is a beautiful idea.

BUT the truth is that the European immigrants to the New World brought the most horribly annihilating devastation to the Native Americans that it almost seems like a cruel joke that we celebrate with thanks today. (I also sent this information to my friend.) I don't know how to reconcile these two perspectives, and I don't think there is any reconciliation. I do think the day provides an opportunity to face straight on what has been done in the name of God (the Pilgrim settlers thanked God, not the Native Americans), commerce, and "progress." You can watch a powerfully honest look at the Native American view of Thanksgiving here; I warn you, it isn't pretty or happy.

So, this is what we do. We investigate our shadow and destruction. We do what we can to make it right. We wake up. As Rob Brezsny says, we can always, always be thankful for all our blessings, both the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones, because they wake us up.

Wake up, wake up, and be thankful that you are awake. Love your family and friends, love your neighbor, love your enemy, and celebrate when you stop seeing them as your enemy. Isn't that something to dance about, in wild abandon?

"Freedom from Want": Thanksgiving and grandmothers

2011-11-22T06:28:00.005-05:00

What I want is not the turkey on the platter, which seems too big for the spot where Grandma is placing it. And how is she carrying it anyway? My weak wrists would never make it, and the turkey would crash onto the floor. I’d let Grandpa carry it and smile sweetly, basking in the oohs and ahs.

What I want is Grandma herself. And Grandpa. How kind and cuddly they look.

The song associated with Thanksgiving is “Over the River and Through the Woods” which continues with “. . . to Grandmother’s house we go.” I never did such a thing. The only time I went to a grandparent’s house was at the time of Grandma Olive’s death and funeral, in Bayonne, New Jersey, when I was four. I played with toy cars in the steep driveway of my grandmother’s home on the bay. That’s what I remember.

When childhood friends said their grandma died, I thought, big deal. I had no heart pocket for such a relationship.

Grandpa Reuben is the only grandparent I remember, and he was not my mom’s biological dad. He was Grandma Olive’s second husband, who happened to be the cousin of her first, my mom’s dad Sidney. Olive didn’t have to change her last name when she married Reuben. I met Grandpa Reuben twice and was in love with him, the way a girl is in love with her grandpa. He was posh in suits but intensely kind.

Is there a word for being a grandchild orphan?

It is an odd and empty feeling not to have met my grandparents. But it is even odder now to contemplate that my grandparents did not meet all of their grandchildren. Dad’s dad was 70 when he was born; he fought in the Civil War in 1865; he died when Dad was 9. Dad’s mom died in the ‘50s before I was born, the last of eight kids. Mom’s biological dad Sidney was divorced from Grandma Olive and far away when we kids came along. Grandma Olive died when I was four; maybe she held me, I don’t remember. Then there was Grandpa Reuben, a fine substitute, but once on his jostling knees and once after his stroke in a wheelchair is it for memories.

Now, I’m going to be a grandma. When I first found out our daughter was pregnant, I thought I would need advice for my new role, since I had no grandparent memories to speak of. But guess what, there seems to be a heart pocket (think cargo pants) for this relationship after all. Strangely enough, while I’m loving my unborn grandson, it's almost like I'm sitting on my own lap, feeling loved.

Note about the painting: "Freedom from Want" was one of four "propaganda" posters by Norman Rockwell inspired by Theodore Roosevelt's speech to Congress January 6, 1941, urging the country to enter World War II. Read more here.

A walk around the farm in autumn

2011-11-21T04:15:00.003-05:00

It's going to be a busy week here, with Thanksgiving this Thursday. Living out in the country on this farm (it's a non-working farm, I think you know) means we can go out for a walk in nature when we need a break, into the sanctuary of the meadow and woods. I made a video slideshow of some of my photos, so come out with me and Esperanza Spalding while she sings "Ponte de Areia." We might not be digging our toes into sand on a Brazilian beach with the surf pounding in our ears, but the air is fresh and the November sun is warm. Sometimes I even discern a zephyr from across the sea.

Five and a half minutes through my little cosmos. It's best full screen.

Ponte de Areia
Esperanza Spalding
2008 Heads Up International Ltd.

concrete poem, and alternate traditional form: family tree

2011-11-19T06:55:00.015-05:00

family tree

while traveling

at the speed of a car   a particle hovers in the
passenger seat next to me      a neutrino of time and
space travel that I do not need to prove to anyone   or apologize

to the standing cows    for talking to myself like a mad scientist
who is to say he isn’t my self    a particle miracle      I go on
about my dead brother and gasp because he is not old enough
yet to hear about death    not even arrived here in this hubbled air
not having swum the arc through his mother’s arch    that opens
to the courtyard wherein the    family tree spreads limbs
on which my brother,   my father,     my mother have already

ripened and fallen in earth’s gravity and I tell him
we don’t even know what they are

gravity or death or falling

but    soon    he    will
drop    and      be
caught     in
his
mother’s

ivory
hands

then

perched

and

nestled

in the

fork

of her

armpit

and

breast

his head

a plum

the crease

of his mouth open

for the galaxy of milk and I point

to the calf in the farmer’s field holding on to his mother for dear life

from the twig of her teat between the branches of her legs and say see life falls like that

Added note, from wiki: Concrete poetry or Size poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.

* * *

11/20/11 7:22am I am reposting the poem without the shape, which may be a distraction this time. Fun to experiment (as Brendan says in his comment), but maybe this poem is better served in a traditional shape.

family tree

while traveling at the speed of a car
a particle hovers in the passenger seat next to me
a neutrino of time and space travel
that I do not need to prove to anyone
or apologize to the standing cows
for talking to myself like a mad scientist

who is to say he isn’t my self
a particle miracle

I go on about my dead brother and gasp
because he is not old enough yet to hear about death
not even arrived here in this hubbled air
not having swum the arc through his mother’s arch
that opens to the courtyard
wherein the family tree spreads limbs
on which my brother, my father, my mother
have already ripened and fallen in earth’s gravity
and I tell him we don’t even know what they are
gravity or death or falling
but soon he will drop
and be caught in his mother’s ivory hands
then perched and nestled in the fork
of her armpit and breast
his head a plum
the crease of his mouth open
for the galaxy of milk
and I point to the calf in the farmer’s field
holding on to his mother for dear life
from the twig of her teat between the branches
of her legs and say see life falls like that

Poem: What I don't know is

2011-11-17T08:04:00.005-05:00

“The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised.”

~ Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 233

What I don’t know is

if a tiny black druid
croons like a grasshopper
in the wood stove
of my soul, singing
summer’s tune, rubbing
witch-hazel and rosemary,
divining love's heat
from fear's icy skin. A leap
from the lines of earth,
or the lines of Keats,
their busy, bending legs
that never tire, forever.

"The poetry of earth is never dead."

~ John Keats, from “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”

Found poem: in the face of death, despair and fear

2011-11-16T10:31:00.004-05:00

I took this [film] photo in the Scottish highlands

in 1980, when I was pregnant with Lesley

I heard Representative Gabby Giffords' halting voice on the radio, recorded for the audio version of her new book. She speaks, she thinks, she attaches sentences to one another (with great difficulty), though she was shot in the head only months ago in a shopping center parking lot. My friend Susie is presenting testimony before Ohio legislators today, asking them to consider, please, not allowing people to text or even use hands-free cell phones while driving, after her granddaughter was killed in August when the driver behind was on her cell phone. I am home this morning and I can't go for a walk for fear that hunters might shoot me. There are dangers all around. How to live, without fear?

As I was thinking about these things, bits of poems surfaced, as if, like whitecaps on a stormy lake, they wanted to be scooped up by the wind, and tossed together in the air. So I have strung together the bits of poems in a found poem. Please see the list of references below, which gives the titles of the poems they are from. By the way, the top lines were posted at the Rilke blog a few days ago, from a poem elegy Rilke wrote to Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, a poet who committed suicide. (Her backstory in the Russian revolution is here.)

When I get to the last lines, by William Carlos Williams, I think of life, and death, in one whole poem of his existence. This is all a mystery, how to live . . .

in the face of death, despair and fear

Waves, Marina, we are the ocean! Depths, Marina, we are the sky!
Earth, Marina, we are earth, a thousand times spring.
We are larks whose outbursts of song
fling them to the heavens.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God's sake!

Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.

How can you aim a fire?

The golden sheep are feeding, and
Their mouths harbour contentment;
Gladly my tongue praises
This hour scourged of dissension
By weight of their joyous fleeces.

Practical to the end,
               it is the poem
                                  of his existence
that triumphed
              finally.

(from "Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efrom (II)" by Rainer Maria Rilke)

(from "No Better Gift" by Rumi)

(from "Lines of Winter" by Mark Strand)

(from "blue" by Cara Benson)

(from "To a Very Slow Air" by Philip Larkin)

(from "The Sparrow" by William Carlos Williams)

Baking banana bread

2011-11-15T04:30:00.001-05:00

In the caramel drop of a second about thirty minutes in, reading deeply in your chair, the oven puffs a whisper from the kitchen, you remember you have a nose, and you wonder What else have I forgotten in my body of senses? What not seen, like the attraction of the word swallow on the page; What half-heard, like the varied timbre between the hiss of burning log in the wood stove and the wheeze of rain on the gravel; What not savored, like your lip, cool and warm, against the ceramic mug before you lick it, and after; What not felt, like the broom on the floor, drunk crumbs ferried, the broom and dustpan perfectly back on the hook, the basement door clicking closed, insulating mitts on your hands holding three hundred fifty degrees of now-solid food; What have I not considered and worshipped for too long?

Poem: A mother's breasts

2011-11-12T18:30:00.007-05:00

A mother's breasts

My body in the tub, candlelit,
doughy breasts shining, and
because of the baby to come
from my daughter’s body,
in this dream-light of a crone
everything is mother and baby
again, and my breasts cairns
to the memory of my children,
my daughter first, who swam to me
with her thrashing arms, and landed
a starfish hand on one white beach dune,
locked her shell-bud-mouth onto the biscuit
nipple, the soft pebble of her nose
pressed into shelter, the nipple
her doorknob into the hut—
to survive, to awaken, to trust,
to learn before the intolerable comes
with this quivering tongue, this pause
of eyes, this mouth petalled
into smile, the blue milk pooled
in the upturned keyholes at her mouth’s
curls, that this is the beginning
of life. To be kneaded
by the cupped tongue,
her eyes closed now. To be enough.
To be the bread of life.

-
-

My personal work spaces and books

2011-11-10T07:46:00.011-05:00

William Blake's workroom and deathroom

painted by Frederic James Shields

"In the universe, there are things that are known,

and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”

—William Blake

Friends Brendan of Oran's Well, Hedgewitch of Verse Escape and Mark Kerstetter of The Bricoleur bared their bookshelves and journals for us to see, shone a light on their work spaces, and encouraged others to do the same. What drives us to do such a thing? Something in me wants a peek at theirs and yours, and something else in me wants to show you mine. Will you be utterly bored? Intrigued? Curious? Will you relate to my shelves a little, or not at all? Personal libraries are just that, personal, intimately personal, driven by soul and spirit in ways we can only speculate about. I love that even the ways we organize our collections reflect our personalities. That and where we sit and do what we do: read and write.

So here goes.

(I'm not showing you our collection of classic and contemporary works of literary fiction, or children's books. Maybe another time.)

I have four personal bookcases and three workspaces, but I'll show you ~~one~~ two workspaces. I don't use a desk, just my laptop. I don't journal much any more, as writing longhand is nearly impossible for any longer than a card or note because of carpal tunnel. I have many poetry books on my shelves at the university office as well.

Bookcase #1: Poetry 

This is one of my three study spaces: the corner of the living room,

behind a screen my Grandma Olive made, creating a makeshift private space.
The chair is old, as you can see, from my grandparents;
pen and ink with watercolor on the wall: Paris;
Navajo rug inherited from my great grandparents,
who were explorers and mountain climbers;
stack of NY Review of Books waiting to be read

Most important here:

Jane Kenyon, Rilke, and Neruda;

Cartier-Bresson from MoMA

Key here:

Volumes of my mentor: Diane Wakoski;

Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Anthologies from college

Bookcase #2 Poetry and Spirituality, mixed

This one is in the bedroom.

The Chinese fellow on the wall is practically a brother,

I love him so much; and hanging from him is a talisman

made by my friend Alek Lindus in Greece for protection;

I think of this photo (found in an antique store) and talisman

as representative of all my friends around the world

with a charmed prayer for their safety and health;
my mother's waste basket, which I remember by her desk;

my dressing table is to the right of it.

Notable here:

Pagels, Moyers, Gospel of Mary Magdalene;

much study from these books as I began to rethink

spirituality from my religious past in Baptist churches;
I don't know where Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now is,
I must have given it away.

Years of studying good poems here:

Extra poetry stack in my spare room workspace;

anything that's stacked, not in a bookcase, is being read daily or weekly;
most important here: Rumi and Dickey

Bookshelf #3: Spirituality and Paris

Notable here:

James Hillman, Jack Miles' biography of God,

Jung's Answer to Job, and my grandfather's book on astrology

Most important here:

Gurdjieff, Ken Wilber's Brief History of Everything (!),

Oxford very short introduction books on the right,
bought in the Oxford bookstore:

these two on the Celts and Quantum Theory

Getting down into the France reference books now:

Three very significant books here:

The NIV Study Bible, Rob Brezsny's Pronoia,

perhaps my most valued book: my Plan de Paris,

a street by street map of Paris (the blue and red one)

Bookcase #4 Oversized:

Flowers, Plants, Art, History 

This is the bookcase Grandma Olive picked up

secondhand somewhere in NYC and painted.

Here you go, Montag; I had this closeup photo of the painting above on file:

Notable here:

Carolyn Roehm flower books, The Way We Live,
a fabulous look at dwellings and lifestyles around the world;
Better Homes & Gardens reference book

standing up in the middle, importantly;
the "Donald" and "El Freda" mini-planters
we found at a secondhand store:
guess which of us is which?

My primary workspace:
The Red Chair

I sit here in the dark every morning, starting at 3AM. 

Current stack of books read daily or weekly:

Table by the red chair with handy stack and quilting thread;

glasses of varying strength, for reading books and for quilting

Collection of postcards from museums used for bookmarks;

thread and scissors for quilting;

my Kindle

What's on the Kindle:

most notably:
War & Peace by Tolstoy,
Fermor's A Time of Gifts
Rumi's Big Red Book

Phew! Well, I wonder what you'll find interesting.

This is one of those exercises in which it's hard not to immediately focus on one's own spaces when seeing someone else's. At least that's what I found looking at Brendan's, Hedgewitch's and Mark's. Won't you join us?

Painting at top: Frederic James Shields, "William Blake’s Workroom and Deathroom," c. 1880.

Poem: The Soul in November

2011-11-08T05:39:00.006-05:00

The Soul in November

How she looks I cannot say,
although the petal-less heads
of goldenrod, not flaming

yellow any longer,
are something like her
stillness

and so they must be the reason
I go out, after reading
the morning’s poems

written by others
at their desks, on typewriters,
or by hand in fine black ink,

and be with the blank
desaturated truth of them
standing alone

without any topaz,
though their sun-flares
are a visible memory.

Birds circle us
from tree to tree
in their orbit of the dun meadow.

Then I walk back to the house,
to my red chair,
the laptop, the empty

white sky of the page
and remember from scratch
my own small explosion.

Poetry should be heard.

Bedlam: A fresh look at an old horror

2011-11-06T07:12:00.018-05:00

I am interested in how openly we share intimate stories of cancer, lupus, stroke, heart attack, and other physical maladies, but we are still fenced in about mental illness. Even Alzheimer’s is all right to discuss: it is a physical disease. But when it comes to mental disease, we hesitate to talk about disorders within our families, let alone personal struggles, feeling stigmatized by the mere association.

The days are still too close when people paid money to see the freak show: not bearded ladies, giants, Siamese twins or Elephant Men, but the insane. The wards of the infamous Bedlam asylum were salons for gawking, where fine ladies came to be entertained by raving lunatics.

Tom Rakewell ends up in Bedlam after a profligate life;

one painting in a series of paintings and engravings
by William Hogarth called "The Rake's Progress"

Bedlam, now Bethlem Royal Hospital, is known as the oldest institution for mental patients (1247) and is notorious for its tortuous and dastardly treatment of patients. Remarkably, now it is a major center for research that promotes the best and most humane psychiatric practice and care. (See the history of Bedlam here.) But the word bedlam will always mean the uproar and chaos exemplified in that madhouse.

Eerily and perfectly timed for the end of Halloween week, two friends of mine have just opened an art exhibit of their Bedlam project. Robert Turney is an art photographer in the media of gelatin silver prints and wet-plate tintypes. (He happens also to be married to my professor, mentor and friend, Diane Wakoski.) Stephen Rachman is an American Studies scholar and chair of graduate studies in my department.

I really love Robert's photographs. Here is a sampling of his previous work, in gelatin silver prints.

Robert's gelatin silver prints

Rio Chama, New Mexico

Shack and Seatless Chair

Goldfield, Nevada

New York #5

New York #9

New York #10

Robert's wet plate tintypes

And here is a sampling of Robert's more recent work, wet plate tintypes. To watch a stop motion video of Robert developing wet-plate collodian tintypes, twenty minutes shortened to two minutes, go here.

You know I love these two still lifes:

Moonflowers

Previously Robert and Steve collaborated on a subject happier than Bedlam: moonflowers. Robert created 10 x 10 inch gelatin silver photographs, shooting the moonflowers he grew potted in his wonderful town garden, at night. (Robert's garden is famous for certain rows of basil that went into Diane's legendary pesto with twenty-five, yes 25, cloves of garlic, that I ate with abandon, and after which Don would not sleep in the same room with me.) Of course Robert photographed them at night, when they open. Robert's evening dance in his driveway with lights, medium format camera and moonflowers is enough to send a poet off for a week's contemplation, but combine it with Steve's gorgeous essay "Evening Glories," published with images of Robert's gelatin silver prints in the Red Cedar Review, and I am truly inspired. Below are a couple of Robert's gelatin silver moonflowers and excerpts from Steve's essay; see the twelve piece portfolio here. Read Steve's essay about Robert's moonflowers called "Evening Glories: Robert Turney's Moonflower Photographs" here:

"From 1999-2001, in this seasonal way, Turney pursued the flowers, under clouds, under stars, under the glowing coal of his cigarette. . . . It would be easy to misconstrue Turney’s moonflowers as conventionally romantic. . . . If they are romantic at all then they refer to the romance of ordinary beauty, sensuality, and sex. . . . "

~ excerpt from Steve Rachman's essay "Evening Glories"

Two of Robert Turney's gelatin silver prints of moonflowers:

"One secret of the moonflower photos lies in that Turney has photographed flowers as if they were movie stars from the 1930s and 40s. Think of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Martha Graham rendered by Edward Steichen . . ." ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Evening Glories"

Bedlam

So what led these two to another textual and photographic partnership, this time about the insane asylum? Robert got to talking about the tintype self portraits he was developing, and Steve began to imagine a fiction about a psychiatrist and a patient, with tintype photography as therapy! The gallery show has single rows of tintype portraits of the patient (Robert himself, acting as G.G.), separated by text written by Steve: imagined journal entries by the psychiatric doctor about his patient G.G. He brings the patient into his studio, observes him under the lens, and sees an improvement in his demeanor. As you progress around the room, the patient in the portraits evolves from a state of violent agitation to calm melancholy.

A sampling of Robert's self portraits, as asylum patient G.G., with some of Steve's journal text,
progressing from extreme agitation to almost beatific calm:

"G.G. converses rationally on most subjects often with amiable feeling and charming manners; and yet he is incapable of going among people without severe mental agitation and reflection. G. G. exhibits great terror and excitement at the prospect of crowds."

". . . And this, it occurred to me, might in the end be what the camera reveals: I have always been struck by this phenomenon in cases of insanity. The insane pose for the sane in postures of madness—or feigned sanity—much as we pose for the camera."

(This one, above, is my favorite of Robert's tintypes;

it moves me in ways I cannot describe.)

Here are two fascinating pages of Stephen's text, which are especially interesting to me, in light of our discussions about translation and poetry at the Rilke blog. I hope you can read my images of them:

I asked Robert if he found himself in any emotional distress while photographing himself as Bedlam patient G.G. "No," he said. "I just made faces." And he asked if I knew the work of Sally Mann, who photographed her children, at home, in intimate poses, sometimes naked. Yes, I did. He said, "She is the only one who could take those photographs, they are her children, in her rural home." He said that these self portraits are like that. He was not exploiting a patient in a mental hospital. He was imagining himself as one, yet thankfully (?) with emotional distance.

For me, through Robert's faces I felt the pain of mental disease, and the terrible history of ostracism and stigma surrounding it. Yet I did not feel disturbed the way I anticipated feeling at Robert and Stephen's exhibit, linking to the ghosts in my own family's history, like that shadowy hand mysteriously moving between candlesticks in Robert's tintype, above. These were after all imagined portraits and journal entries. (Before attending the show, I thought Stephen had discovered real Bedlam documents.) There was jaunty jazz playing in the background. Stephen's fictional journal entries reflected sometimes humorous aspects of the patient's world, stepping over the sacred line of treating mental illness in only morose and somber terms. This kind of open exploration and artistic imagining can help us bust down fences about the ways we may feel threatened by the topic of mental disabilities.

But no matter how painful the topic—and reality—remains, we will still have the tender melancholy of moonflowers for comfort. In the end, perhaps it is only a full frontal look at ourselves, that includes our dark shadow side, that will heal us and make us whole.

"There is one that Turney doesn’t particularly care for (because the blossom appears more like a pansy than a moonflower) but might just as easily serve as an emblem of the study. It consists of a full frontal blossom. It is the moon almost full but for a petal edge bending into a deep shadow, the moon become a flower, a flower become the moon." ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Morning Glories"

Robert Turney and Stephen Rachman,

Bedlam art exhibit at Scene Metrospace in East Lansing, Michigan

The show opened Friday and will run until December 11.

I hope you'll forgive me for going on a little longer in an already too-long post for a blog. While I stood before one journal entry at the exhibit, in dialog with my friend Reade about my findings in the bits of research I'd done on Bedlam and how people paid money to see patients writhe in torment, I told her about William Hogarth's painting "A Rake's Progress" at the top of the post. She then told me about the opera by Igor Stravinsky (libretto by lifelong friends and collaborators, the poets W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman) of the same name, based loosely on Hogarth's paintings and engravings of Tom Rakewell whose dissolute life led to the poorhouse, and then to Bedlam. Here is another imagined Bedlam story, in which Tom cavorts in London with a bad sort of fellow, Nick Shadow, who turns out to be the Devil. It is a moralistic tale, and Rakewell ends up in Bedlam, affirming the belief held by some that "For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds a work to do." Dawn Upshaw sings a lullaby, "Gently, Little Boat" as Anne Trulove, Tom's betrothed, in this touching scene toward the end of the opera.

I'm grateful that psychiatrists like James Hillman, who continued the work of Carl Jung, have encouraged us to stop moralizing about our dark side, denying or rejecting our shadow selves. I want to keep that open and eager spirit alive and working, to gently love the shadows in myself and in others, or as Hillman puts it, to see generously:

Shadow is the very stuff of the soul, the interior darkness that pulls downward out of life and keeps one in relentless connection with the underworld. . . . the shadow may be reconceived. (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld)

. . . you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code)

"Lines for Winter" by Mark Strand

2011-11-03T07:53:00.002-04:00

No snow here yet, this is from a couple of years ago . . .

Mark Strand is one of my favorite poets. In my morning devotional when I read poems at the Poetry Foundation's site, I feel wet ink on my chin from the first lines in his poem "Eating Poetry":

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry. . . .

Strand's poems are often surreal, but always accessible. His craft in simple straightforward lines belies his depth of sight and spirituality. Because of my love of winter here in my white bowl meadow, I'd like to share this from him, as the season of subtle lights commences. Though it grows cold, you will go on . . . .

Lines for Winter

    by Mark Strand

     for Ros Krauss
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

~ from New Selected Poems
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Poem: My hair returns

2011-11-02T08:24:00.009-04:00

I-

I have no idea why I am writing and posting so frequently these days. I hope it is not a hardship for you. But why should it be? You don't have to read, or comment, or nothin'. But I gotta keep this pen pumping for some reason. Whatever the lasting value (and that doesn't matter much to me) I am compelled. If you come and read, bless you, and bless you if you don't! Let it flow on by.

Here is a little bit of surreal whimsy as the sun rises over my shoulder.

My hair returns

My hair flows
out my office and
down the corridor at work,
the old, high-ceilinged university hall
with industrial lights hanging down
like dangle-pearl earrings,
not bright enough to read by.
Sadly, the old hall will come down
next year after its hundred-somethings.

My hair is gold again, in rushing waves
like in my college youth
not unlike these students who wait
outside my door
lined up in bands and ribbons
on their stiff wooden chairs on
the banks of my river-hair, with
bright white apples on their laps—
a virtual picnic!

They come for advice,
as if I am a scryer,
and my hair the crystal river
running on to their future life.

Did I tell you, I stopped straightening it
with flattening irons and other
falsehoods? And now my curls,
when you come in at last
to my room from the hall,
are the wiry wisps of a crone
who skips upriver
on the backs of stones.

Here is a photo of the top of my curlier-than-ever-it-was head at my office desk, taken by my own white apple mac magic camera. I haven't stopped coloring over the gray yet, maybe that will come. If I had Don's salt-and-pepper hair, I wouldn't think twice. Humor me, I'm taking this aging thing in baby steps.

Oh look, I just realized how like Stanisław Wyspiański's sewer I am!
Do you think she's really a redhead,
or did she (or he) color her hair too?

Poem: A plum on All Soul's Day

2011-11-01T10:55:00.015-04:00

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A stone fruit, nearly
midnight blue, is a globe
in my hand, shipped
from a country where
many souls are Catholic,
like Mexico or Spain,

now that our plum season
is past, and I wonder if I
will be remembered
when I am past, thought of
as among the faithful — though
not Catholic, or Christian, or

will I be as the white
gauze smear in the crease
of this plum, (like the cloud
that shawls the earth) — ghostly,
adding nothing essential

to a bite’s sweet prayer, yet
seeming necessary somehow
to the plum, to my rubbing thumb,
to my mute stone tongue, and
to the redemption of the sphere.

Poetry should be heard.

Posted for dVerse's Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub. Go there and read other poem-worlds. Yay, poetry pub!

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Poem: Under an autumn night sky

2011-10-31T09:47:00.003-04:00

With a broken-down hot tub, last winter’s night sky had to shine without us. We think of the hot tub as a vacation, spread out through the year. Even on the coldest nights (0º F, -18º C), we don stocking caps and soak for thirty minutes, groaning out the stresses of the workday, our heads laid back, eyes closed, then opened to behold the velvet sky-field with its distant lighted windows. So it was sublime when Don made a trade deal with our neighbor Bill across the road: Don’s 1974 International Harvester lawn tractor and trailer (we still have a John Deere for mowing) for a five-year-old hot tub and a face cord of cherry firewood. The hot tub needs a new pump, and then with a little Sawzall action to cut up our kaput twenty-five-year-old hot tub and get it off the deck, we’ll be back under the starry dome where the International Space Station blinks at us now and then, just after the gasp of a falling star.

Under an autumn night sky

Tree toads and crickets
have cupboarded up their cheer
for another year
while the wood stove commences
his chirp-and-clicky blaze.
Leaves of poplars
have waved farewell, tumbling
off like pilgrims down the windy road
to their southland. Above us
bony maple and locust branches
point toward the baptismal
pool of midnight.
The milk-blue moon
rolls over the barn
like a sacred rock of Sisyphus,
lifting to her white breast
the burdens of our day.
The Seven Sisters blink
twittery poems for the man
across the hot tub. Orion unhooks
a notch in his belt, beguiling me
with his bright torch. Then suddenly
the clattering season of O Henry,
Dickens and Thomas
hoofs up the fern-lined stony hill
in her shiny black Goodwill shoes
and we are children again, sitting
in this farm nave of holy velvet,
saintly candles lit on all sides
while we congregants listen quietly
for praise from the overturned font
above the meadow, and hum along.

Poetry should be heard.

Photo of Pleides: NASA

What I have learned about love

2011-10-30T04:38:00.001-04:00

When I love myself least, I am least able to love someone else.

When I am least in love with myself, I am the most self-centered.

I think Narcissists do not love themselves well enough.

When I most love my own soul, I am most capable of loving the souls and selves of others.

When I most love my soul, I am most able to love my self
—my personality, my aging body and face, my limited mind—
my every failing.

If I love myself, perfectly, I do not need anyone else to love me.

It is no one’s job to love me but my own.

If I do not rely on someone else to love me, I am more capable of being happy.

If I love myself as I am, in spite of my failings, I can love someone else in spite of theirs.
(I am in the process of even learning to love my failings; the correlative impact this will have
on how I view the failings of others is interesting to think about.)

James Hillman, who died Thursday, said,
Why try to eradicate your demons?
Better to learn to live with them.

I think a demon is one part of a whole. Think positive archetype and negative archetype.
Example: mother/victim. If I fall into the victim role (a lifetime habit), perhaps it’s time
to mother myself. There there, Ruth, that doesn’t feel good does it, tell me about it,
says my mother self sitting on the edge of the bed of my pouting, victim self.
No one else should have to do this for me.

Last night I saw through the wild eye of fear

2011-10-28T04:00:00.002-04:00

A poet read at the open mic: an old bright star. As a child her small eyes and mouth were shuttered in the Warsaw ghetto. Then she was passed off like a loaf of bread on a black train, first to be hidden from the danger of the camp to where her family was cargoed and killed, then shuttled from village to village on more black trains until she was fifteen to work in fields like a beast of burden.

It is easy for my mind to glaze over in numbness when I hear another story about the holocaust, until I meet a survivor. (Have you seen and touched a forearm with a tattooed identification number?) I drove home under the magic silver light of the old Jewish poetess, hearing her speak through that wide smile, line after line, her child-slow English spoken in staccato sibilants through beautiful teeth, until a key word in her second poem, one bead of mercury: the Polish word pamiętaj: remember.

Pamiętaj the wound, I thought, not the fear. I followed her silver star and drove home in the dark, wondering, where from, her bright and clear joy out of so much darkness? When suddenly a doe from out of the farmer's dark field appeared and shocked the windshield and me, the reflection of my car light in her eye a shooting star! In a second her umber-and-ivory-hided body jerked into a dancing constellation with my silver spinning car. The star you are following is suddenly everywhere, rays splayed to the horizon. She dives into the moment of you, the moment after fear, just before the wound blossoms.

Listen to me read this piece here.

Poem: Stacking in October

2011-10-24T09:33:00.001-04:00

Thanks for relishing with me the beautiful time at the lake with Inge, what we think of as our autumn writing retreat. Besides our luxurious hours reading and conversing, I did not do any new writing there, but I did edit, shuffle and organize poems for the book I want to self publish. I was encouraged because I got farther than I expected, with even a tentative title and cover design. I have much to learn about publishing, ISBNs, and all sorts of things I would rather not be bothered about. A dear blog friend has been of great help and is giving me time on the phone today to answer questions. While I don't care all that much about "marketing" this book, seeing it as more of a small offering to those who have asked for something like this from me (so very kindly), I suppose it would be negligent of me to press ahead without ample forethought.

Anyway, this poem was written after returning home. It almost sounds as though I could use another retreat, but don't worry: winter is coming, with plenty of time for naps near the wood stove on weekends.

Stacking in October

For a few minutes’ interlude from Sunday rest
I stack firewood in the corncrib from the pile
at its door. Wrists ache. My body is heated
from within by menopausal hot flashes. I am not
exhilarated by the exercise, feeling my age. I must
sweep off the curled, dried leaves on the porch
before the wicker and potted wilting impatiens
are mere crispy mounds, like bracken covered in kudzu.
So, too, I must pluck hairs from my chin. How like
honey the sun flavors the quiet air—my one clear hope
and pleasure in these autumn minutes, until powder
rifles and shotguns ring peals from neighboring land.
Prizes are claimed, herds thinned. Winter is coming
with its losses, its sleep, and its recycled comforts.

Poetry should be heard.

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Reigniting the spirit

2011-10-22T08:57:00.002-04:00

Inge and I are away at the lake with our books and writing tablets, tucked in under the rickrack of oak leaves outside. Indoors, surrounded by knotty pine, we're reading, writing and talking by the fire. Each fall and spring we escape after work for a weekend at my family’s cottage where it seems that within minutes of arriving our spirits are relit.

We quietly watch logs in the fireplace, like our souls: steady, certain, whole. Strike a match, light kindling, and flames cup and curl around them, like our spirits, which must be fed by some fuel. Without time in solitude, away from pressing routines, even for a few minutes a day in my red chair at home, my spirit lags. I must locate my soul, hidden in the thick maze of this chaotic life. I must hold her face in my hands. I remember, then, what it is I want. This is not narcissistic hedonism, but a force divine and true that guides me in calibrating my steps through this hectic and crazy-making world.

I will catch up with you in a couple of days.

In love with love

2011-10-19T09:22:00.007-04:00

Lesley planting our garden 2 1/2 years ago

There is the delusion of falling in love with love. My unborn grandson is a fragile being (and also powerful), and within minutes of his birth (maybe even mere seconds), his foibles will begin to appear, and my own will keep unwrapping, in our miraculous humanness. Something of love’s litany of pleasures remains in the heart, so that we seek another new love. We might reap more joy than sorrow, once again, this time. And when the new love is imperfect, meaning that we, or they, are disappointed, we come to the next fork in the road, able to choose: I will love you even if you do not want me in the way I envision. I will love you even when you are so different than the boy of my dreams. Is a dream a fallacy? Reality’s moment hoped into fairy kingdoms? O blessed are the realities that exceed our dreams. But set my heart in the fertile ground that includes poo in the compost. Rotting matter is what feeds the next fruit of abundance.
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Poem: Meditations in the stitches of a baby quilt

2011-10-18T11:53:00.004-04:00

Meditations in the stitches of a baby quilt

“Pins and needles” tingle
in my fingers
while I push
a tiny needle
through calico
in a quilt for my
unborn grandson.

Years on computer keys
and the bands over nerves
in my wrists
tightened
like a swaddling blanket
too snug: carpal tunnel. However,

my forearms are mighty,
said the chiropractor.
Like the pen.

But not my hands. Knitters fly,
their needles flapping wool sleeves
like the startled wings of pigeons.
I can’t fly that way.

The baby who will squirm
in this quilt will be startled
and cry. Right here in this quilt,
and it will likely be me
who will one day alarm him
with inadvertent
painful surprise
to us both
and I, too, will cry.

This baby will understand
much. He will surprise me
with the utterly
new and completely ordinary
all his own.

My aching hands will pick
him up, worrying
that I could drop him
in a terrifying
moment of weakness. Causing
pain

like when my son
two days old felt the poke
of a needle into his heel
in a bilirubin test
poor jaundiced boy, intentionally
bled for the good of the whole.
I had to escape
to the soft hall
to muffle his cry through the door

like feeling the needle poke
through these cotton layers to find
my left middle finger
on the other side!

Nice name for a boy, bilirubin: Billy Reuben.
Grandpa Reuben. O happy bouncing
knees of old time me. I did not understand
the pain of losing his gabardine lap
in one stroke. Sad, shiny wheel chair.
Downturned moustache.

I’ll wheel him around, this one
before he can walk. Happy
prospect: You will walk.

I have one life to give you.

And you will run it through
in the meadow like
this tiny needle through calico —
goldenrod, Timothy grass, thistle.

The forbidden "promised land"

2011-10-16T06:58:00.005-04:00

Our street might as well have been the River Jordan.

In my small town growing up our church anchored one corner, and another church the corner opposite, both large, dominant brick structures. Nothing about this arrangement seemed strange to me since it was all I knew.

Our house was the parsonage for the Baptist church, with a porch the size of a ship’s stateroom. When rainstorms battered the neighborhood and filled the air with the scent of wet dust and worms, preventing us from riding bikes, swirling hula hoops or roller skating, we sat on the porch furniture inherited from Grandma Olive and happily witnessed the deluge. We felt the spray on our skin as if we were skimming the surface of the Atlantic from the deck of a vessel cutting through the waves.

Rain flooded the street’s gutters between our house and church and the house and church across the street: the Methodist church and parsonage. Occasionally true to our Baptist belief that immersion is better than sprinkling, and that our feet needed washing, we jumped in and splashed in the rushing water.

But never did we venture into the Methodist church. I played Combat with the neighborhood kids all around its periphery, hiding in the alcoves, which were perfectly suited for our play as American soldiers against German Nazis. This was a couple of decades after the end of WWII, but we had a TV show that all of us loved called “Combat” with Vic Morrow as Sgt. Saunders and Rick Jason as Lt. Hanley. In my memory these soldiers are calm and peaceful purveyors of the gospel of goodness and light.

Besides being the setting for the enemy we searched and shot to peaces in combat play, the Methodist church was where they conducted dances in the basement. Now dancing was forbidden in our Baptist circles as sinful (in spite of scriptures about David dancing before the Lord). After football games I stood in the high school gym under the sparkling ball and watched my friends dance. I never went to the junior-senior prom, though my football player boyfriend asked me. I didn’t even consider consulting my parents, though I longed to go. We must be separate, holy.

Surely the God of the Methodists was more understanding and fun-loving than the God of the Baptists. Dances in a church basement must be safe, wholesome and bright, not tawdry like the close body-pressing in dark, smoky jazz clubs of my mother’s pre-Christian past. There must be a world where dancing (and card playing and saxophones and sex) was a natural and delicious response to the human urge to move, to feel the body’s presence in the air, like the fragrance a rose emits naturally, with no effort, and without any particular end. I had no way to understand the possible harmony of God and dance.

After my parents died my sister and I crossed the Atlantic for two weeks in Paris in 1997. One night we wound down a stair into a subterranean jazz club near the Luxembourg, drank gin and tonics, and listened to an American singer croon standards with a soft jazz ensemble. We were adults now with no parents to protect us from unholy endeavors. Among the tables and chairs with barely enough room for bodies there was no room for a dance floor, but I assure you, we were dancing, in paradise. God was everywhere.

Tesselating

2011-10-14T12:18:00.014-04:00

Our days run on in mundane, ordinary echoes of each other.
But think of honey from the tessellations of a honeycomb.
Consider the patient migration of a turtle in his symmetrical coat of arms.
What warm energy pushes within facsimiles and repetitions?
And what do their tiled borderings make possible,
like the scales of a snake’s skin that enable him
to undulate like an S of smoke sideways across the grass?

Eaglehawk Neck in Tasmania

one of the rare natural tesselations on the earth's surface;

see what natural movement formed it here.

Photo wiki commons

Drawings of symmetry by M.C. Escher; more here.

Poem: Doorstep of a dream (title change)

2011-10-13T04:02:00.005-04:00

I danced but one waltz and fell into my chair by Mr. Tolstoy, where I listened to music and conversation much of the night. You were all so charming and bright, but I had awakened too early the night before and could not keep my eyelid shades up. In a few moments of drowse, a dream-poem found and sailed me back to the farm, where remnants of the sea floated and mingled in the strange dance of the mind. The room spun slowly down to stillness.

Doorstep of a dream

In a dream, a house is my self,
each room an aspect,

their windows a glaze of eyes,
as these poem lines

are my skin, the letters ears—
small shells

that hear the weeping
overflow of the apple tree,

which exhales tales of the sea
in waves, of its lost city,

fragged stones on a mythic beach,
which is anyway

and after all lozenged
here in the house of me.

On the doorstep of a dream,
or in the sand of this poem

leaves fallen on the ground
are my next hands

recasting what would otherwise
be blown, buried or

forgotten, into this day's
room, with a window, open.

Poetry should be heard.

The Willow Ball!

2011-10-11T04:39:00.002-04:00

As Winter gets ready to hook her come-hither finger around the neck of the sun, our inner rooms begin to come alive with the warm glow of lamps, candles, a fireplace or wood stove, and a samovar for tea. It can only mean that the holidays are coming, and to start the season off properly, the Lady of Willow Manor shall throw her annual ball where everyone is welcome, no one excluded. With our bloggy imaginations we can publish fantasies right here with our fingers, choosing our dream escort and rich attire to adorn our perfect bodies. We are able to dance like gods and goddesses all cyber-night long. Maybe every girl who dreams of her someday-wedding gown at age five is really just dreaming of a ball. Which of us dreamed of anything as elegant (and sizzingly fun!) as Willow's Ball? And guess what, it's on the night of the full moon. With or without a full moon, no matter how perfectly envisioned and planned, things can go wildly out of control; you would not believe the stories from years gone by! Half the fun is reading reports of goings-on in the comments at Willow's blog the night of the ball! (Last year's here.) The ball is tomorrow, there's still time to gather your accoutrements and wits. Your invitation is here; Tess will have a Mr. Linky up in the next 24 hours or so. I didn't think I was in the mood for a ball, and here I am going on and on!

Update: Willow has declared the ball open, there are already acres of cars parked and terabytes of blogs to visit. The festivities are here!

I chose the white lace dress with yellow trims by James Tissot, at top. The whole scene is evocative, and although the painting is titled The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), some call it Remembrance of an Onboard Ball. A ball on a small ship? Wow. The dress looks good from this side, I think, the side you see on the dance floor.

As for who will go with me, I don't plan on taking a chaperone, as in Tissot's painting. Just a man.

I learned last year, with my fine escort Fitzwilliam Darcy, that a dreamily handsome and charming date is not necessarily the best choice. I barely got one dance with him. He was popular even with the men! Quite a change from the snob who turned his nose up at dancing in certain ballrooms. But he had lost his pride, and anyway he could see that at Willow's Ball, everyone is a fine dance partner.

Because Leo Tolstoy has been my close companion for over a year (I hold him affectionately in my hands: War and Peace), after fingering through potential escorts in my heart's little black book, I realized he would be the perfect partner for the ball. After he picks me up in his skiff and we bob up river to the Manor, he will settle in with a book in a nook. (I offered him my Kindle—not Nook—to re-read W and P, but he said he's more interested in Rilke's letters from Russia.)

Tolstoy is not one for balls, despite his noble upbringing. But his choice of an ascetic life, he assures me, will not cause him undue discomfort in the presence of so much frivolous ruffle and draped satin. He craves the music. He is well on in years, and tired, so he will sit and listen, or read, while I dance the night away with whomever I wish. When I am fagged from waltzes and fox trots and need a few moments' rest, he will be waiting in his radiant corner to captivate me in conversation. Don’t worry about him being bored and neglected. See how he holds the chair open next to him? You too can sit and carry on discourse with Monsieur Tolstoy when you need a rest. I will concede this so long as I can cut in. I doubt very much that the chair will be empty for long, as we will all need a rest now and then, and hushed dialog about many things. (I want to tell him, for instance, what came of his epistolary acquaintance with Mohandas Gandhi a few decades after they corresponded for a year about nonviolent resistance until the end of his life in 1910.) At Tess’s Willow Ball, all things are possible, because while Monsieur Tolstoy speaks Russian and French, and I don't, we will magically understand one another.

Notes about the paintings:

The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), circa 1876, sometimes called Remembrance of an Onboard Ball, by James Tissot, Tate collection

"Tissot often painted a man with two women in order to explore the subtle nuances of flirtation and attraction through body language and facial expression. Here a chaperone separates the young naval officer from the object of his attentions, the woman hiding her enjoyment of his flirtation behind her fan. Tissot focuses here on the boundaries of Victorian propriety and social convention, and their transgression. The languid pose of the nearest woman, and Tissot’s frank concentration on her fashionable hour-glass figure, inevitably led to the picture being criticised when it was first exhibited. The author Henry James dismissed it as ‘hard, vulgar and banal’." (From the display caption August 2004)

Leo Tolstoy, by Leonid Pasternak

This painting of my companion was done by Leonid Pasternak, father of the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, best known for his novel Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak was a friend of Tolstoy's and painted illustrations for Tolstoy's novels. More info about Pasternak in a short bit I wrote for the Rilke blog here.

André Rieu is rehearsing Shostakovich's Russian Waltz for tomorrow night!

Full House

2011-10-09T14:37:00.008-04:00

The week walks like a little girl in a brand new pair of black patent leather shoes, in a full house, ready for a huge piece of pumpkin pie with real whipped cream.

1Wednesday Inge and I toasted to eight years of good health and friendship since her breast cancer diagnosis. There is no way to express what this person I trust with all my being, with whom I have shared every discovery in tandem, means to me.

2Saturday the five of us (Don, me, Lesley, Brian, Peter—six with Poppy Seed) squeezed into Don’s new Chevy Cruze to drive down and help Don’s 83-year-old parents move into their new apartment. While the men moved the heavy stuff, Lesley and I made three pies: two apple and one pumpkin that we roasted a couple weeks ago. (If you don't have molasses in your recipe, add two tablespoons; you'll thank me.) I made pie crust from scratch for the first time in I don’t know how many years, and it was well worth the effort. (Ina Garten’s recipe was perfect.) A rare-for-me baking fest felt so good. Then feeding it to the five weary men felt even better.

3Tuesday is my Rilke blog partner Lorenzo’s 55th birthday. (Oops, I didn't ask him if I could tell you that, hope he doesn't mind.) Who'da thunk I'd have a blog partner in Spain whom I've never met? It just shows that you don't have to be with someone physically to develop a close friendship. Lorenzo's blog The Alchemist's Pillow is a haven of art enthusiasm and history, poetry, Spanish culture and other beauties that belie categorization. Happy Birthday, Lorenzo!

4Wednesday is the Willow Ball, and the moon goes harvest-full. Last week I wasn't feeling the ball thing, and then I got inspired. I'll tell you next post. I hope you'll go, because if you don't you'll feel like a slug. Everyone's invited. Go to the link and look at the invitation.

5Friday is our son Peter’s 29th birthday. He is now back in Michigan to live after moving to L.A. in the summer. All five of us are in Michigan now (six with Poppy Seed)! After Peter's accident last month, you can imagine my feelings hugging him a couple of weeks ago. His jaw is healing well; just a couple of more weeks of wiredness, and then we'll cut loose and celebrate his birthday a bit late with SOLID FOOD.

Now if only the Detroit Tigers win the American League title in the baseball playoffs against our son-in-law's Texas Rangers, we’ll be "hitting on all sixes ." To "hit on all sixes" is Jazz Age slang for performing at 100%, as in hitting on all six cylinders. Don's new Chevy Cruze doesn't have six cylinders, but it is a six-speed, the new Eco model. Sweet (but claustrophobic for five, especially when one of the five has a sixth in her).

The Wes Montgomery Quintet gets the idea of this glee in "Full House," recorded live in Berkeley in 1962. On Piano: Wynton Kelly; on tenor sax: Johnny Griffin; on bass: Paul Chambers; on drums: Jimmy Cobb. I love watching Wes's five l - o - n - g fingers on his right hand on the strings and the left five on the frets, then Wynton's five+five fingers on the keys while sun flare music and Wes's smile drive headlong on all six cylinders into my heart.

Lessons and inspiration for a grandma-in-waiting

2011-10-07T05:30:00.004-04:00

"In January it will be so nice while slipping on the sliding ice to sip hot chicken soup with rice . . . " (when I hold my brand new grandson). "Sipping once, sipping twice, sipping chicken soup with rice." (Maurice Sendak, Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months)

"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince)

"Granny, what was it like when Mummy was me?" (Tasha Tudor, A Time to Keep: A Book of Holidays; this illustration is not from that book, and I'm sorry I don't know which it is from.)

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” (J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, Arthur Rackham, illustrator)

"Well, please, North Wind, you are so beautiful, I am quite ready to go with you."

"You must not be ready to go with everything beautiful all at once, Diamond."

"But what's beautiful can't be bad. You're not bad, North Wind?"

"No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful."

"Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too."

"Ah, but there's another thing, Diamond:—What if I should look ugly without being bad—look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?—What then?"

"I don't quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then."

"Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife—even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife—you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?"

"Quite well," said little Diamond.

(George McDonald, At the Back of the North Wind, Arthur Hughes, illustrator)

"But Peter, who was very naughty, ran straight away to Mr. McGregor's garden and squeezed under the gate!" (Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit)

“Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think." (Christopher Robin, to Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne, E. H. Shepard, illustrator)

Peter Spier, Rain.

Poem: Red Pines

2011-10-05T09:12:00.007-04:00

Red Pines

Every day I drive to work
and it is the same thing. Listen
to two minutes of political news
or economic disaster. Turn it off. Sail
past farmlands with birds.
Sit at my desk, answer, type, question.
Drive home between the same
houses for sale. Work to Friday.

On Saturday the sun shines down
on the oasis of meadow and I get up
to walk the still-wet grass into the end
of summer. Sunflowers fall away
from the sun, petal-stripped but big
bellies of seeds still feeding the traffic
of chickadees. Goldenrod and Canada
thistle sputter in ragged frizzles out of
dirty brown stems; royal pokeberries
droop down down down like antique
necklaces from the necks of dowagers.

Long they stood, these thin strong
spines, day in and out. Would I
complain in their constant stillness,
rejoice in the skyslide of a storm?
So slow ! this meadow watching, and yet
too rushed the machinery of what I live.
Now they fall headlong, tassels touching
each other over the path, weaving a baldachin
over half-moons of egg-yolk mushrooms.
Orbs of green walnuts revolve around them
in planetary randomness.

Rain on my glasses blurs sight:
My favorite red pines in a long row glowing
and backlit — Are needles dying among
the soft green plumage? Tenderly I pull
a cluster, and without resistance they release
and fall into my palm, spent. Some blight
is taking the trees. O Beauty, where to?
I am always at the edge, this side of that. A fly
flies in and out, drawn to some heat
in me, or scent: the other. I am apart, skin
side out, embarking or disembarking
onto the path whose current pulls me
into the fields like kindness.

What honeyed dark energy sings
from the yellow soybeans in the field
next door as the beans dry brown, harvestable,
the green leaves going going almost gone?
Can the farmer, scientist
or economic analyst answer:
No matter the speed of matter,
no matter where we are falling,
what makes the heart keep accelerating?

Poetry should be heard.

Mary Oliver: "Some Questions You Might Ask"

2011-10-02T21:06:00.003-04:00

Some Questions You Might Ask
by Mary Oliver

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

~ from New and Selected Poems, Volume One, 1992

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Poem: Solitary tree

2011-09-30T05:12:00.002-04:00

Solitary tree

Do you feel yourself
standing on the platform of the earth
served up as if for my pleasure alone?

Alone, yet not lonely,
happy in the sunrise, or shining
in sheets of rain, you wait again
for the warbler to sing.

Patiently, you hold her
in your quiet branches,
where she sits or flits, free
in an improvisation of notes
high and low, never touched
twice the same.

Poetry should be heard.

Music lessons for Rumi's birthday

2011-09-28T08:50:00.003-04:00

Trade your cleverness for abandonment.

~ Rumi

Frederick Leighton’s painting of a music lesson (see note below), perhaps between mother and daughter, and the photograph below of John Coltrane giving piano tips to his wife Alice, offer a pretty, demure picture of music lessons. I am here to tell you that taking piano lessons from my mother was, at times, aggravating. She was so lovely, metaphorically like Leighton's silken mother above. But me, I had no diligence, where she had nothing but. I didn’t care enough about the piano, and I did not like to be told when I was doing something wrong, like when I didn't strike the keys with my fingertips as if they were the hammers on the strings inside the piano.

(Doesn't the porch these two are sitting on resemble a piano keyboard?)

I do care about poetry, with a passion. Because of this, diligence doesn’t feel like diligence. Discipline? Discipline is what you need for doing what you don’t want to do, or want to do but can't seem to find the time, or enough skill for. I am a lethargic procrastinator for nearly everything but writing. (As you witness, in part.)

This week to celebrate Jalalu'ddin Rumi’s 804th birthday (September 30) I’ve been swilling Rumi wine. (Normally I sip slowly.) There's a drunk donkey kicking down fences with all these words turning into wine. I wrote the two poems posted this week after guzzling his words. I don’t want to just imitate Rumi’s poems. I want to bust down mind fences, let the heart kick her way out of the pen of language, while putting my soul out there like fly paper.

Alice and John Coltrane

Rumi's way:
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks

Poetry should be heard. Listen to Coleman Barks read these lines for a couple of minutes, with musical accompaniment, introduced by Garrison Keillor. I can hardly separate Rumi from Barks' voice, in translation, and sonorous recitation. In this recording, you can feel, there are no fences.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī
30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273

"Poems are rough notations for the music we are."

Notes:

Image of Rumi on an old book in the Mevlâna museum;
Konya, Turkey; Rumi's body was buried in Konya, but
his spirit lives here, eight centuries later.

Frederic Leighton's "The Music Lesson" at the top is in

the Guildhall Art Gallery of the City of London Corporation,
is oil on canvas, 104cm x 101cm, painted 1877. If the scene
seems to be well suited for a post about Persian Rumi, who
lived most of his life in Konya, Turkey, maybe it's because
it is one of the paintings inspired by Leighton's visit to the
Middle East. The Leighton House Museum in London
interprets the painting thus:

An older woman helps a girl to play a guitar, possibly of Syrian origin. Leighton developed a deep interest in Eastern art and architecture after his first trip to Algeria in 1857, and here we can see him introducing this into his art. The two figures are surrounded by and dressed in souvenirs from Damascus. The architectural setting for the painting shares an affinity with George Aitchinson's contemporary designs for the Arab Hall at Leighton House, although it has also been linked with the sixteenth century mosque of Suleiman Pasha at Damascus.

You can see more paintings inspired by the Middle East by Leighton here.

Poem: What and where I was a few nights ago

2011-09-27T06:07:00.002-04:00

What and where I was a few nights ago

I wasn't a star.
Not a rain cloud.
Or a rose.
I was not the barn, or a bird flying out its chink.
The reflected sky-silk on the pavement
was thicker than a hundred of me—
not even an opal fingernail.
A pile of mountains
on a weave of snowmelt
in an ocean of red planets
brushed across the eyelid of air
like a fox
and twitched its tail.
I was a minute that couldn’t.
I couldn't touch the bud at the tip
of next spring’s twig-tongue.

I was no thing. No word. No body.
The air said: We are invisible.

And then there was
no where we weren't.

Poetry should be heard.

Poem: A year in an apple

2011-09-26T03:05:00.007-04:00

A year in an apple

Crunch into the sweet flesh,
and winter snow crumbles under a black branch
where the juncko lands.

With the second bite, the entire orchard
blossoms pink again in your mouth.

Hold its red skin against your cheek
and it is a hot summer day
but you are cool in the shade
of the tree it fell from.

It is autumn, you are eating an apple.
For a few moments remember the year,
how it opened and fell into a thousand pieces
and how you widened your being.

Our lady, and the onions of Chartres

2011-09-23T03:41:00.011-04:00

Our Lady, and the onions of Chartres

Her mismatched spires grow like flamboyant Gothic stalks of wheat and corn out of the fecund plain of Beauce. In medieval days the bounty from these fields was stacked on the cathedral steps, which served as the town bazaar. On the south porch, onions, potatoes and turnips were sold from baskets and wagons under three arches where Jamb’s saints and martyrs in stone supervised. For centuries pilgrims have crawled to Mary’s treasured dress inside—the Sancta Camisia— the sepia’d muslin garment the virgin mother wore over her labor-convulsing body when her boy was born, frail now as onion skin, behind glass and guarded by seraphim. Where has she gone, that woman? I want to feel her warm belly through the dress, the baby kicking. I want to hear her croon to him when his little paw jerks in the air and she nudges her nipple into his trembling mouth.

I am standing under the red and blue pools of brilliant clerestory windows beholding how the brown and buff stone of the labyrinth floor curves and hooks. In the stunning Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière (our lady of the beautiful window) Mary wears a dress of lapis lazuli (the pigment patrons bought for painters more valuable than gold, to give her honor). She is impossibly high, with censers swinging over her crown. The straight, plain wooden chairs have been removed from the floor this one day in a month, so I can walk the labyrinth, slowly. I invite her spirit to rest upon me. It is the year of epiphany, the zenith of my soul’s quest, yet as a result of my measured steps no flames fall from the windows or maternal roots of mystical spirituality curl around my pilgrim feet. The virgin does not bare her glassy breast and offer sacred blue milk. The womb of the church is empty, dark, silent.

We go out and cross the cold street into a cozy brasserie for rustic onion soup, the tables close and crowded under centuries of beams. I excuse myself to find the toilet up a winding stair and half-way up come to a room with its door ajar and window open. Light from the late afternoon sun reflects off the stone building across the street, pouring in on nothing but sacks and sacks of onions wall to wall and piled, spilling upon each other like stones in a quarry, like the fallen stones of Jerusalem. I stare what seems a good while at the nimbuses of holiness surrounding each little onion head and their burlap wraps. How sleepily alive they seem. I go up to the toilet and come back down, pausing one last time at the onion nap room. Back at the table the soup has arrived. I stir the hot salty broth, twirling the white rings, playing like a dervish in a schoolyard with my spoon. I consume, and am consumed by, the labyrinth of the onion.

Listen to Hans Christian play a cello improvisation, from his album
Sancta Camisia, recorded in Chartres Cathedral:

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Photos: Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière and labyrinth from wiki commons; Sancta Camisia Metis Linens; onion photo mine.

Poem: At the orchard

2011-09-20T12:34:00.007-04:00

At the orchard

It is a late Saturday afternoon in early
October, and I am headed nowhere,
certainly not the cider-and-doughnut orchard
I happen upon, where it seems as though
the Rapture has air-lifted the good farmer
and his customers up into a mountainous range
of clouds, leaving behind this littered
grassy harbor at the side of the road.
I stop the car of course
and stroll and meander among abandoned
crates and bushel baskets domed
with butternut squash and apples, the way
I might wander a marina eyeing steepled yachts
with prettily altared bouquets and exposed living
rooms of the heavenly high life, as frivolous
as these pumpkins lounging in the field, perfectly
tufted and plush in rafty orangeness,
waiting to be the chosen, to pose as ghouls
or toothy goofs, thick, rich flesh and eyes
golden candlelit within. And over under a tree,
a grubby discard of apples on the ground, unhinged
and white where broken, fading to gray ferment
at the bruises where a fleet of yellowjackets fizzes
out the only sound, in full-out bingeing, mindlessly
enraptured, partying like there’s no tomorrow
or this or that life.

Poem: In a train

2011-09-18T07:19:00.011-04:00

In a train

Never have I loved so well
the life given me
as when I was rocked
by the four o’clock train
from Chicago to Lansing in 1968,
the lap and arms of iron and steel
holding me, window-framed,
a vibrating twelve-year-old witness
to the dusky backside balconies
of yellow brick apartments
with Hancock’s black tower fading behind,
and I, eating the cool green grapes
my married sister packed, cold
fried chicken, a red and white
paper napkin tucked in a brown bag,
lumbering slowly past city windows
reflecting Magikist neon, where red-trim-
aproned women, the same
high-heeled secretaries I’d seen
on Michigan Avenue, were now fingering
the radio knob for jazz or polka while my train
lullabyed me home toward the small town
of my dull, window-gazing life,
but for a few minutes more, still here,
alone, humming along in the city.

Poetry should be heard.

Posted for the dVerse train poem challenge. This is my first time participating in this really terrific poetry community called dVerse Poets Pub hosted today by Claudia Schoenfeld of jaywalking the moon.

Paintings by Edward Hopper: "Approaching the City" and "Woman on a Train"

Poem: Thank you, Dr. Larkin

2011-09-17T08:34:00.007-04:00

Thank you, Dr. Larkin

Dr. Larkin
Dr. Larkin
Thank you, Dr. Larkin.

I sing your high praise
from Hoboken
to Interlochen.

O Coshochton, OH,
Have you heard of
Dr. Larkin?

He rescued my boy
who was bruised,
bumped and broken,
stitched him up fine
like a mama I reckon,

straightened the jaw,
set his teeth back to sparklin’,
called a friend, paid the bill
that was big enough to park in.

Hearken, hearken
all ye for Dr. Larkin,
a mender who’s there
but unknown and unspoken.

Is that your brother
building cars in Detroit, all stark in
the litter blowing back on itself, over
drunk homeless men, alive but unwoken?

You are me, Dr. Larkin,
mama, builder and poet,
you attend to our boys
from Hamtramck to Khanaqin.

Thank you, thank you,
thank you,
Dr. Larkin.

Notes: The doctor who helped our son last week was named Dr. Larkin. MediCal picked up the entire bill, including followup visits and coverage of the year ahead. Hoboken is an island city in the Hudson River in New Jersey, Interlochen is a Michigan town with a music camp, and Coshocton is a canal town in Ohio. Hamtramck (pronounced Ham-tram-ick) is a Polish town that sits in the middle of Detroit and has a General Motors auto plant where they make the new electric Volt. Khanaqin is a river city in Iraq, considered the symbolic center of Kurdish identity.

Painting: Jean-Francois Millet's “The Good Samaritan”

S.O.S.

2011-09-15T10:42:00.007-04:00

Through the window this morning, flickering behind poplar leaves, the sun rose. Was it S.O.S. he coded? I was on the phone, but I wanted to end it, someone else was calling. What if I, and only I, were the last hope of the sun, losing his way? Now tonight, three flaming candle wicks in glass duck and bob in the corner of this dimly lit bathtub like ladies urgently gossiping around a red tablecloth. I can almost hear them lisping. Yellow heads beat toward each other, but not toward me, and too rapidly and quietly to be comprehended while I am submerged, steamed and exhausted into stillness—eyes fixed on them and nearly hypnotized into sleep. I am an outsider, the last to know, and then, slow to respond. Is it urgency when poplar leaves twist and flutter like drowning hands? Or are they not drowning, but waving? Earthy sheaves of leaf and flesh lace over what burns and glows. Even just atmosphere alone flips the flame into frenzy. Glimpsing, we see some truth of it. But the light is still, in itself, and does not need rescuing.

synchronizing art & fashion continued: New York Fashion Week Spring 2012

2011-09-14T05:40:00.003-04:00

I painted and designed clothes for fun when I was young. I should have done more with it. Maybe it’s not too late. One way I get my fill of art and fashion now is during the fashion shows when I challenge myself with a visual matching game between pieces of art and new clothes designs. I become a junky looking for color and pattern every day at Fashionologie to see when the next designer’s photos get loaded, and then I go scour online art galleries for matches. It’s creative hedonism. I ignore the news. I forget about poetry. It’s also creative masochism, as my right arm, shoulder and wrist ache with mouse overuse.

My arm will recover, and the somber and complex tapestries of the world will go on being spun without me paying attention for a week. Poems will keep. (But the pears wouldn’t, so Don and I canned six quarts of them after we got home from work last night; bruises and soft spots were spreading.) Of course I was also with our son Peter in spirit through his scary accident when our world did stand still. Thank you for your caring wishes, he is on his way to recovery after reconstructive surgery Monday.

Truly, I look forward to these creations as much as I look forward to morel mushrooms sprouting overnight after April rains when we practically crawl through the woods by the pond and the fallen apple tree scouting for their weirdly beautiful brainy patterns.

I am especially excited by one pairing today. You'll see why in a minute.

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Sometimes a girl just really gets lucky. I don't know how Zac Posen could have designed a suit to look any more Picasso-esque. That peplum on Posen's jacket: serious cubistic hips! Zac Posen, a Manhattanite, first began designing clothes as a boy when he stole yarmulkes from his grandparents' synagogue to make ball dresses for dolls. If you're into clothes like Zac, browse his entire collection of ball gowns, it's simply gorgeous.

Don't you wonder what's happening in this painting?

"Interior with a girl drawing" by Pablo Picasso

Zac Posen suit with Picasso Peplum

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More cubism from Carolina Herrera. Every season this woman's designs knock me out with simple elegance, and this spring collection she does it again. There are actually many cubist paintings of gray that this dress reminded me of, by Braque and Picasso. I settled on Juan Gris.

Painting by Juan Gris

Dress by Carolina Herrera

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Another designer who never fails to satisfy with her confident sense of design and beauty is Donna Karan. She manages to be playful with pattern without being silly. Some of her fabulous collection had pattern, like this, which instantly reminded me of this textile by Lucienne Day, though I had a time finding it, since I didn't know the artist's name. Now that I do, I have learned that Lucienne Day (who just died last year) was a British textile designer who was inspired by abstract art by the likes of Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Hellooo! After the print pairing, see the graphic browns and blacks Donna Karan designed, which reminded me of Paul Klee's painting "Intention."

Lucienne Day's textile "Calyx"

Donna Karan dress

Donna Karan

"Intention" by Paul Klee

Donna Karan

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Now here are my favorite pairings. My charming friend George is one of those people who does many things very well. He ponders, writes, travels, walks, paints, photographs and blogs with utter grace and beauty. If you are not yet familiar with his posts at Transit Notes, you are in for a treat for the eyes, mind and spirit. On his sidebar, George has posted a few of his stunning abstract paintings, and it suddenly occurred to me in my last fashion post a few days ago that I might be able to match his paintings with fashion this season. Although I'd hoped to match clothes with more paintings of George's than one (I'll keep looking), I confess I didn't expect to find anything this well matched, by two different designers: Timo Weiland and Peter Som. "Subterranean" is among my favorites of George's work, partly because it represents an invisible world where life swarms and vibrates, like the inner realms we discuss at his blog, the Rilke blog, and elsewhere.

Timo Weiland dress

"Subterranean" by George McHenry of Transit Notes

Peter Som dress

Suit by Peter Som

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Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not;

and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

~ Luke 12:27

And now for the local show room. These simple jewels around the farm are beautiful in color, form and pattern. Any designer would be envious, and I imagine that songwriter Solomon himself would compare them with his beloved . . .

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of pokeberries . . .

As the goldenrod in the field glows like the sun, so my beloved's love is to me . . .

My beloved's lips are the color of the sumac blossom, and as soft . . .

You have stunned my eyes, my beloved, with even one of your lips,
red like the sumac leaf . . .

I have come to your garden, my beloved, and gathered your peppers, as colorful as the jewels of my temple, as sweet as flowers and as fiery as the days of our youth . . .

All fashion photos from Fashionologie.

Poem: September morning

2011-09-11T14:16:00.001-04:00

September morning

He’s tall as a tower, my son — graceful
in the resilient way

of bamboo, lithely connected
at joints and knuckles.

With guitar he eases out
a tune’s vulnerabilities, bending

fingers and strings as if not
bending at all, as if he were himself

the curve of wind on
a leaf ribbon,

tapping dew-riffs out of air.
Wind is the maestro,

we the geniuses who play
our one sublime

sound — tapering,
sometimes stuttering, ruffled

into harmonics, being blown
with the rest into a song untouchable.

Our son took a bad fall last week and broke a bone in three places. It’s times like this, on this day of remembered tragedy, that we see how fragile and vulnerable we all are.

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syncronizing art & fashion: New York Fashion Week Spring 2012

2011-09-10T06:46:00.005-04:00

Venus of Urbino, 1538, by Tiziano (Titian), Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Those maids in the background of Tiziano's painting are looking for her clothes, apparently. Yet she is unconcerned, and so is the artist. Who needs clothes, to be rendered charming?

An answer from Liotard:

Portrait of Maria Adelaide of France in Turkish Costume, 1753

by Jean-Etienne Liotard, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

I love clothes. I don't shop much now, though I love the adventure of thrift shops.

While there is a lot of misery all around, there is also a lot to admire and enjoy, in fact, we need beauty more than ever in such times as these, like bouquets of flowers for a loved one suffering from injury, illness, or loss.

Looking at women in new fashions is my pastime when the seasons of fashion shows arrive, and Thursday was the first day of the New York Spring 2012 fashion shows. Fashion is wearable art, poetry in motion. After last February's fall shows, I had fun compiling a gallery of art pieces paired with designer duds. I first explore the photos from shows at Fashionologie, then scour thumbnails of paintings and sculpture at the Google Art Project and at online museum collections. I look for arresting designs, both in art collections, and in fashion collections. They lead to each other back and forth, like a game of visual tennis. I'm back at it and plan to make galleries until the end of the New York shows next Thursday. We'll see how things go. You just never can tell when you will experience vita interruptus.

Hans Hoffman and BCBG square up, below. I don't think much says "spring" more than spring green:

Cathedral, by Hans Hoffman, MoMA

BCBG design; I really like BCBG;

the dress I wore for Lesley's wedding was this designer,

but I only paid 200 bucks

Imitation showed some beautiful clothes Thursday. Romantic and feminine. I see several artists' work in their dresses, and I'm not done exploring. Tara Subkoff launched the Imitation line after brain surgery a couple of years ago. Talk about obstacles increasing creativity! She is an actress in films like "American Pie" and "The Cell" and previously founded fashion design house "Imitation of Christ" with Matthew Damhave. Was Imitation imitating these pieces of art?

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Imitation and two artists at MoMa:

Imitation

left: Helen Frankenthaler's "Jacob's Ladder";

right: Gertrud Goldschmidt's (Gego) "Sphere"

both at MoMA

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Imitation and Monet:

Imitation

Water Lilies, Claude Monet

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Imitation and Whistler:

Imitation

The White Symphony: Three Girls, by James McNeill Whistler

Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian

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I love these other designers' collections too.

Graphic blue:

Peter Som dress

Paul Klee's Blaue Nacht

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Graphic yellow and black (or blue) a la Matisse:

Yigal Azrouel

Henri Matisse

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Sketches by Doo.Ri and Chagall:

dress by Doo.Ri

Joseph sketch, by Marc Chagall

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Graphic gold leaves:

Andy Warhol's Rorschach and dress by Wes Gordon

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Blooming red flowers:

Yigal Azrouel

Red Cannas, by Georgia O'Keeffe

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Sapphire Matisse blue:

Dress by Jason Wu, and blue nude by Henri Matisse

Those are my standouts from Thursday's and Friday's shows. More to come . . .

February's gallery of synchronized art and fashion for the New York Fall 2011 shows is here.

All fashion photos from Fashionologie

Polka Dots

2011-09-07T09:14:00.001-04:00

When I was an adolescent in my mother’s kitchen, eating ambrosia salad and pork steaks with gravy made from canned mushroom soup, I was surrounded by the latest pop design. We had just moved back to my hometown after living one year in a depressed town up north. I was about to start sixth grade, and my twelfth (or eleventh?) birthday was imminent. When Twiggy cut her hair short, my sister cut mine like hers.

We moved into the house across the street from where I had spent all my years before the move. The house was my dream house: big, old, oak trimmed, and where I’d played with my childhood friend Jimmie. But the kitchen was a disaster of rusted out white cabinets someone had decided were a good idea when they were shiny and new, the same time they slapped white aluminum siding on the outside. So my dad had the kitchen completely gutted and refurbished with wood cabinets and a pretty wood kitchen table for us who were left at home: Mom and Dad, my brother and me, and an array of foreign students mostly from Thailand.

I remember drawing mushrooms between meals at that kitchen table (along with Snoopy flying his bullet-dotted doghouse Sopwith Camel in battle against the evil Red Baron). Some of the mushrooms had polka dots, which I copied from orange, yellow and olive green placemats, napkins, canisters and glasses Mom had bought for the kitchen. I thought they were cute. I thought they were cartoon imaginings. I didn’t know until walking the farm eight years ago where our own magic mushrooms sprouted, that polka dot mushrooms are real. So yeah, you can assume correctly that I wasn’t ingesting anything psychedelic in the 1960s and 70s. I don't plan to grind these into powder any time soon, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like, after reading stuff like this at wiki:

Spiritual and well being

In 2006, the United States government funded a randomized and double-blinded study by Johns Hopkins University, which studied the spiritual effects of psilocybin in particular. That is, they did not use mushrooms specifically (in fact, each individual mushroom piece can vary wildly in psilocybin and psilocin content). The study involved 36 college-educated adults (average age of 46) who had never tried psilocybin nor had a history of drug use, and who had religious or spiritual interests. The participants were closely observed for eight-hour intervals in a laboratory while under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms.

One-third of the participants reported that the experience was the single most spiritually significant moment of their lives and more than two-thirds reported it was among the top five most spiritually significant experiences. Two months after the study, 79% of the participants reported increased well-being or satisfaction; friends, relatives, and associates confirmed this. They also reported anxiety and depression symptoms to be decreased or completely gone.

Despite highly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, 22% of subjects (8 of 36) had notable experiences of fear, some with paranoia. The authors, however, reported that all these instances were "readily managed with reassurance."

There are many psilocybin mushrooms on our walking path,
more this year than ever.
Maybe the heat and extra rain are good for them.