Translations

 

I'm reading blackberries, translating them to clafoutis.

It is the day after the day of translations, the letters 

and their combinations played like chesspieces 

across the indeterminable board, vast and extraordinary

as the famous piazza where life itself has often been

played out, between the great Basilica and the timeless cafés,

where erstwhile spies, or lovers lost or not yet happened on,

or in the old days Mozart, Byron, Casanova, men with 

one of those "ways with words," and in that sea of chairs

and little tables too contessas, students of art history, sopranos

all sit whiling away hours, watching others wait and watch, 

sip cioccolata in tazza, caffè del Doge, un calice di Champagne

—or a bottle in its entirety, translated in a sorcerous instant

to frosted silver, moonrise, glass.  One of the nocturnes 

of the magician of tones famous for eking light from night. 

 

 

 

image:  James Whistler, Nocturne:  Blue and Gold, St. Mark's, Venice

Greek Unorthodox

 

A fifth excerpt of my hypothetical Crete novel, Reading the Stones, has been published online by Scrawl Place (great name)—"part visitor’s guide, part travelogue, part literary journal.  It’s meant for readers who prefer Bashō to Lonely Planet."

 

This is another segment of Anna's story, called "Greek Orthodox," and follows "Octopus" (Lowestoft Chronicle, Spring 2019), "Blue Monkeys" (Belle Ombre, March 2019), "Naxos" (Mediterranean Poetry, 2019), and a stand-alone segment featuring the novel's other main character, Mar—"Green Flash" (Silver Stork, September 2019).

 

Yet another portion of the novel was rewritten for different characters, with a different focus, as the story "Without Trace," and published by Halfway Down the Stairs (Frontiers issue) in March 2022.

 

"Greek Orthodox" takes place in Chaniá, on the northwestern shore of Crete, mostly in the agora (buying a red mullet and bit of feta; other days fish soup, various types of pite, the time-honored Greek pies), and various churches.  Eighty-year-old Anna loving what's there ("colorful as all get-out, she’d be the first to agree"), and always, achingly, the man who's still vividly with her in memory; but longing for her old, familiar home ("my own small fiefdom") back in Philadelphia, where she becomes resolved to return.

 

"A sunbeam fell through a high, crossed window—meant, charged.  Half the time she wondered whether religion wasn’t all about aesthetics.  Like theatre, it involved putting on a good show, lest your audience quickly lose interest.  Her eye followed the commanding beam of light that cut across the dawdling arches straight and sure, like a theatre spot.  A spotlight was meant to highlight faces, the action at dramatic center stage where the whisper was happening.  But moving into it, she was aware only of gold.  A field of gold.  A sown field and a battlefield.  (She would have to start incorporating gold into her paintings, it had such a dazzling effect.)  The dizzy gold of bees of saints of all the wisdom of antiquity passed down through scholars’ hands, hushed and guarded as religion, forbidden as passion."

 

 

 

image:  View of Agia Aikaterini church, Chania old town, Wikimedia Commons

 

 

September Picnic at DeLaveaga

 

September Picnic at DeLaveaga

 

Observing our unendingly exhausted souls,

I'm grateful all the same to have our sink unclogged

(the plumber like a Scotsman we have come to know

who plants a kindergarten of baby redwoods, 

builds things, voice like a dram of finest single malt, 

Laphroig once shared beside the river 

all awash with city lights).  Grateful to have one more 

(if only one—an ache of absence at the other end) 

incredible rendition of that metamorphic play, after 

another evening's consultation with the trees

and cloths narrating light on the table of sturdy, 

reassuring wood.  Lustrous cotton woven in France, 

underlying our summer salads, generously layered cake.  

And maybe as I write owls are gathering there,

above the stilling town, the stone blue ocean 

a marginal note with maybe a little sailboat or two, 

guileless as children's drawings (a few peaky pencil lines, 

a daub of white), as nothing else is anymore.  

Making a grocery list before we go:  "something like

twenty shrimp," fresh mint (which I somehow forget), 

feta, tomatoes still holding summer in them—

tasting of Greece, of the island we visited

where a long ago favorite book was set, about 

a kind of Prospero manipulating love and loss.  

Things we're all facing now, so I have my heart set

on that shrimp with summer tomatoes and oregano, 

another hour or two there among the watching trees, 

before the summer and the rest of it comes to an end.

image:  Christie Cochrell

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Santa Fe

Journeys by Water

 

Later this week (after a journey by air) I'll take a harbor cruise on Lake Superior, a place I've never been before, though I've just learned that the lake water flows eventually and most circuitously into the St. Lawrence River, which I have seen and noted in Quebec, and that its name in Ojibwe is gitchi-gami, flowing in its turn into Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha" which I came across in school ages ago.

The flow of words takes me (circuitously too) back into letters and journals, which find me staying in "a green-roofed attic high above the St. Lawrence River in Vieux-Québec," seeing "the blue copper roofs above the St. Lawrence River in old Quebec," and reading The Cleaner of Chartres, "which sent me off on a quest after porc aux pruneaux—which morphed into chicken with prune and mustard sauce, which I'm making for tonight's dinner.  Next time it will be lamb tagine with prunes and apricots.  I first found prunes as an ingredient in meat dishes and pies in old Quebec City, as I was walking around checking menus, high above the St. Lawrence River."

In June 2012 I wrote "I do love being on the water.  One of my favorite ways of exploring a new place is to take a boat ride around it—whether an architecture river cruise in Chicago, a ferry to Tiburon or Sausalito with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the diminished San Francisco skyline, a cruise on the slow green river below Durham Cathedral, a ferry from Boston down to Cape Cod, a kayak trip down the irrigation ditch in Kohala, a ride around the San Juan Islands or to Victoria, BC, a hydrofoil up Lago di Como or from Crete to Santorini, a rowboat on Wisconsin’s Bone Lake, or a paddlewheeler down the Mississippi from New Orleans."

 

And back in August 2009, just looking out at boats, "It’s good to be back in Chicago, one of my favorite big-cities-away-from-home (along with Boston’s Back Bay, midtown Manhattan, and Washington, DC up near the cathedral and zoo).  Despite the early hour, it’s pleasant to walk to work along the green river, under a lofty drawbridge, with architecture tour boats moored quietly along the opposite bank, impressive buildings rising all around.  To see the reflection of sky and clouds in a new hotel, on my way to the Corner Bakery for decaf espresso and croissants.  Then later in the day, sprung from the windowless, timeless exhibit hall, it’s reviving to see the play of fireboats and water taxis on their journeys to and from the lake, to sit with sandwich and notebook watching the wakes erasing as they go and the contemplative sparkle of sun.  And when the night comes on again the enchantment of lights reflected, multiplied, and with them unarticulated yearnings for things past or out of reach, the far places in me I long for and am always already leaving again."

 

And finally, further back and much farther away, sometime in the late 1980s, I noted the details of a journey by water among many in Greece, this from Santorini:  "There is room for only one boat to dock at the volcano, so the three or four that came after just tied up to the first and we disembarked by being handed across all the boats in turn—a bridge of boats.  After climbing we sailed around to the other side of the New Burned Island and went swimming off the boat, in thermal waters.  There was a small white church in the cove, and above it a cave with an outhouse in it overrun with goats."

 

All this especially luring, probably, because my birthplace was landlocked, and water so scarce there. Boat journeys came to seem the stuff of fairy tales.

 

 

image:  Henry Holiday, Sappho and Phaon

Ashmolean Museum, photo by Christie Cochrell

 

One Letter at a Time

 

Changing the world, even one letter or two at a time. 

 

I get the idea while sitting in the garden at the medical clinic across the road from our scholarly press, considering dappled tree bark and lanky winter rosemary.  I’m in a sad and gripey frame of mind, and trying very hard to escape it.

  

Thinking of one who sidles in, unpleasantly, but changing him to one who made saddles, my gentle grandfather, working with leather in Flagstaff.

  

Thinking “I cannot bear . . .” but then, instead, “Oh yes I can, bear”—responding to the little black bear, oso negro, scented with juniper, which hung in my early childhood on the gin bottle from Juarez in the dictionary room, the treasury of words.

 

Brash becomes the softer brush; hiss becomes hush, or wish, or even listen (o list!).  Thrash becomes a thrush—a wood thrush or a hermit thrush, plump and with tawny legs, or even a blue whistling thrush, found in the Himalayas with the snow leopards and dancing prayer flags.  Grind becomes a jaunty grin, or rind—of melons or of oranges, tangerines.  And even gruel, the flavorless and nearly empty bowl of poor Oliver Twist, becomes the Grail, holy and sought after by whole armies of knights. 

 

And so it goes, changing. 

 

(from my Writing with Light blog, Jan. 13, 2015)

 

 

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Treviso

Giving Way

 

The first picture I saw this morning was taken at Hovenweep, six prehistoric villages on the border of Colorado and Utah, and showed the “the moon giving way to the morning sun.” 

 

In my sleepy state, on the border of dreaming and waking, before my decaf Sumatra and warm croissant with olallieberry preserves, I started wondering about the idea of giving way—my dreamy morning hours giving way to rain and midday obligations, winter beginning to give way to spring, and everywhere, examples of this continuity which makes up life. 

 

The meaning of it, giving way, is ceding, passing the baton or the torch, letting the other have its turn. 

 

But beyond that, giving way is allowing passage, enabling a journey, leading to or even carrying. The stairs give way.  A train gives way, as does a horse, a mule descending the Pololu Valley, or a donkey climbing the steep rise of Santorini with its sheer white cliffs.  A wheelchair, graciously, gives way to those whose only way is that. 

 

And in a further sense of that, the spritual, it’s causing or inspiring a creative path.  Claude Monet wrote “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”  The flowers by their very nature gave way to Monet’s paintings of them, which in turn give way to the viewer’s pleasure, sharing the flowers. 

 

The meaning of that first moon and sun “giving way” is yielding, but that, too, has several sides.  Yielding as in letting someone else go ahead of you, as in losing yourself to temptation (both implying a kind of lessening of self, a ceding of one’s place in the landscape or moral world); but also as in producing—offering—yielding fruit or flowers or some other rich and generous bounty.  Giving of yourself to others, to the world, with natural and voluntary grace.  Not losing anything, but gaining everything. 

 

Finally, the giving way reminds me of the Navajo Blessing Way and Beauty Way, another way of healing and of finding harmony. 

 

(from my Writing with Light blog, Feb. 7, 2015)

 

 

image:  Hovenweep National Monument

Creator: NPS/Chris Wonderly 839447496169876 

Copyright: Public Domain