A fine edge, a jag

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The maids are long gone who dusted the porcelain and fluffed the down. Bone-white pressed linens on pillows and perpetual shine on mahogany are visions of the past. A few of my grandmother’s things are here on windowsills and in corners, some broken—the Staffordshire cow and calf with a horn missing, a gap in a piece of trim on the Hepplewhite, the lip of the Baccarat decanter chipped, a threadbare velvet ribbon streaming down like a wilted vine from the needlepoint stool where a fine 19th century bustled lady picks flowers in accumulated dust. It is no longer fashionable to be counted among the 1%, though courting fashion has little to do with why we live here on this piece of land, with no hired help, and time-worn buildings.

Here they are, lovely whatsits transported from a fine house, yet belonging in this old farmhouse with us, though I do not love them well enough. In my way, I kiss them all—the crystal arcs on the hip of the decanter, rising like a tide in waves along the sand, one by one. Such a fine edge on each scallop—perfect ellipses, lip upon lip, then the smooth neck, and finally the jag where someone (maybe a servant) banged it on the mouth with the stopper or a glass, and perhaps cognac bled to the floor. I love her, that maidservant, and the lady who yelled at her too.

Somebody loves us all, Elizabeth Bishop said. What a privilege. See how someone planted the trees—to stand, long-necked, perpetually being, shading—and simply and dotingly witnessed.

 Mr. Baccarat decanter with a broken lip seems to watch

the maple sap buckets on the trees

and wonder how much of that elixir has accumulated overnight 

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A walk around the farm in autumn

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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.

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Poem: Stacking in October

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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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Poem: The earth's economy

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The earth's economy

Just when I thought the day
had nothing left to give,
when heat was ladled across
the shallow dry plate

of the nation, working or not, alive
or not, my country
road home from work
an affair of sour radio news and roadkill —

the furred skunk, possum, cat,
squirrel, raccoon, in the
special economy of the outward-
facing nose, lost in final scent,

the surrendered open mouth,
forehead pressed back in frozen
tragedy, tension gone, time done,
appetite dissolving into skull —

I find myself at the kitchen counter
in a different Americana, tearing
kale ruffles from their spines
for a chilled supper of greens with lemon

and oil, Dijon, garlic, cucumber —
live, wet and impossibly cool from the
earth garden just outside the door,
where the farmer’s wife one hundred

years ago also opened her apron
like a cradle, gingerly receiving
into thin billowing cotton pockets
as much as she could carry

as much as she could carry

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Winter at last: nostalgia

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Lately, my thoughts want to come out in poems. I don't know what has happened, it's never been like this before. I think I just long for an economy of words. I am also reading more poems than anything else. Mary Oliver. Rainer Maria Rilke. Rumi. Charles Bukowski. Mark Strand. Whatever Garrison Keillor offers in the daily Writer's Almanac. The poems you write. Or, if I read a book or an article, I read them in short bursts, as if a paragraph is a prose poem. I force myself to read a few Op Eds in the NY Times or BBC online. Have you ever read David Brooks or Paul Krugman with an eye to metaphor? OK, I just clicked on the Opinion page to find some good metaphors to show you what I mean, and guess what? Paul Krugman's piece today is titled: Block those Metaphors. I'm not kidding, it happened just like that, synchronously. Is he saying he doesn't want me to co-opt his column as poetry?

Anyway. When the snow finally arrived on the weekend, I felt at ease, at last. A poem-memory slid out. Also, because of the nostalgia, I turned the photos sepia. Don't get me wrong. I love the blue of winter, and I'll show you plenty of it in the months to come. But for this first snowfall, let me take you back . . .

Winter at last

When at last she comes

in the middle of December

Winter pulls our old toboggan of bamboo

by its curled bow

like a come-hither finger

“Sorry I’m late”

and in red and black woolens

I climb onto the vinyl pad

with three older brothers

me pocketed in the imperial front seat

of the curl

muscled by their weight behind

secure in their brotherly oar-like legs

shoving off the hill into the wild white

like Norse Vikings, my seven-year-old face

the brave winter-fairy figurehead

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seven

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Seven is the number of wholeness and completion. This week we complete seven whole years living on this little farm. I've filled pages at this blog with farm joys since our second winter here. Today I'm planting wee memory haiku in the soil, like crocus bulbs. I was going to plant seven, but an eighth nudged its way in. Let's say the eighth is for the year ahead.

1shopping for a country house

here’s the driveway, stop!

tree embrace. seduced.

you’re ours, they whisper

2winter modesty

nothing but lace above

white sheet below

bare arms, chilly

3Pleiades orgy

cold night, hot tub

lucky man

one woman, and her seven sisters

4laundry joy

sun and wind call:
to Lake Michigan!
she replies, I'm coming!
as she hoists her sails

5how do you do?

let me introduce myself

come outside

I'm nature

6pendulous

heavily they fall

bounce in the grass

soften

7farm wedding

August rain
waters plum vows
100 people become one

8pharoah’s dichotemy

seven years

abundant leanness, or lean abundance

wet sky, dry sky

does it matter?

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Note: Image of the Pleiades found here.-

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My tongue speaks French and Chinese

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Chinese long beans

I have tried to keep up with my personal farmer and his vegetable garden this summer by gathering and preparing the goods for the table. Just a few footsteps from our door we've picked strawberries, rhubarb, tomatoes -- green for frying and red, yellow and orange fresh or in sauce -- green & red peppers, jalapeños, banana peppers, kohlrabi (oh so crisply satisfying dipped in hummus), beets, peas, carrots, garlic, scallions, sweet corn, cucumbers, zucchini, bush beans and pole beans. From the herb bed: basil, parsley, thyme, chives, sage and rosemary.

While ordering seeds from his piles of catalogs back in January's blue ice days, Don discovered Chinese long beans and ordered some and even built a special trellis. These long beans are also known as long-podded cowpeas, asparagus beans, snake beans, chopstick beans, yardlong beans, dau gok in Cantonese and jiang dou (豇豆) in Standard Mandarin. They are thua fak yao (ถั่วฝักยาว) in Thai, right Dee Dee? (I sort of feel that I shouldn't say that out loud.) When the first beans were ready to pick, I was impressed with their length, but I asked myself, Does size matter? I am a green bean lover. When I go to Paris, a supper of haricots verts, baguette, Roquefort and a glass of red wine suits me very well after a day out on the rues. I like a thin, delicate bean, with a warm, mellow flavor and texture that is tender and smooth.

Chinese long beans next to a handful of bush beans; 

the long beans are about 18"

As we learned more about Chinese long beans, we discovered that they are all the rage in fancy restaurants. Chefs have fun sculpting them into different concoctions, like an entertainer does with balloon animals. I decided to create nests, and Don suggested the little onions that were strangely anchored on the surface of the soil under the scallion leaves, for "eggs".

I am trés heureux to report that Chinese long beans are délicieux! They are tender and warmly savory, the way haricots verts are. And you get to create something clever if you want. These are what I call bird's nest beans, which I believe my tongue tells me is les haricots verts d'un nid de l'oiseau in French and 鳥的巢穴豆子 in Chinese, but I could be wrong.

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The Season of Falling

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It is the season of falling.

Falling down. Falling apart. Falling in love. Falling into step. Falling by the side of the road. Falling out. There must be more falling idioms I'm not thinking of.

Pears are falling. Leaves, tomatoes and sunflowers too.

One of my treasures is a poem by James Dickey called “Falling.” This is the same James Dickey who wrote the 1970 novel Deliverance and also the screenplay for the culturally significant 1972 movie of the same name. At six pages in his book Poems, 1957-1967, the very last entry (I love that), the poem "Falling" is too long to post here. But please read it when you have a few minutes and if you are interested, here, because what Dickey managed in "Falling" is beyond what I can imagine having the skill and inspiration to do. He took a tragic prompt from a New York Times news story, of a stewardess who was sucked through the door of an airplane that suddenly opened in flight, and wrote a six-page poem describing her descent to earth. Six pages. On falling. I almost can't abide its frightening content, while at the same time coming back to its beauty and craft again and again.

. . . with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat

The undying cry of the void    falling    living     beginning to be something

That no one has ever been and lived through      screaming without enough air

Still neat    lipsticked    stockinged     girdled by regulation     her hat

Still on . . .

It's shocking, how a writer can connect us with an imagined experience. My friend Inge said over her Pinot Grigio this week that novels are about loss. She explained that while novels may be sad, or tragic, when we read them we find solace that we are not alone in our own losses and sorrows. I feel that poems are like this too. There are ways to find beauty in loss, in the shared experience of being human. Sometimes pages of a book are the friend we turn to, when we don’t want to explain anything, when we just want someone who understands, even someone fictional.

In spring, the natural world rises. Tiny, thin sprouts and foal legs sway in a breeze and in a few weeks become strong with fiber and bone. In autumn, part of Nature retreats. Even though trees and plants become still as they cycle into dormancy, life is ongoing, keeping on, in a needful rest. If I can, I always want to live where the seasons contrast in extremes. Maybe I see in that a comfort, that I too have wide variations in my self, differing needs in different seasons, be they for an hour, a day, or a year.

What falls, goes into the earth and becomes one with it, even nourishes and feeds it. Decay is as beautiful and life giving as tender green shoots. What we lose is still in us, and can nurture if we let it. Falling . . . living . . .

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Farm Day(s) 2010

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Farm Days 2010.

My family came to the farm for the weekend, just to play. Oh, I love them! It was a small group this year, 26 of us, about two thirds of our usual group.

Fresh air, cornhole and ladderball, picking and shucking sweet corn, eating our fill of tomatoes, chasing ducks, creating masterpieces with sidewalk chalk, picking and eating loads of wild blackberries and catching and cuddling with quail. Tents, bonfires, a huge RV, fireflies, shooting stars, making bamboo & shell wabi-sabi windchimes, eating DeeDee's exotic Thai fruits, playing euchre, walking the path, sitting in the shade, playing tag, jumping on Brian, Don and Peter, looking for pumpkins in the pumpkin patch, eating Lesley and Brian's thawed wedding cake one year later and watching them eat their wedding plum, Peter coming in from LA for the last day. Just being together.

I'll let the photos fill in the blanks. You can click to make them bigger.

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-We are only 21 here, as some had left or hadn't arrived.

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