creative ramblings & reverie

Friday, March 30, 2012

Writing Spaces



A bench tucked under an old arch, half-shaded, for writing historical thoughts, meditative thoughts, journals mentioning Father Junipero Serra both in his native Mallorca and the California missions where he ended, stories about swallows.






image:  Christie B. Cochrell, San Juan Capistrano

Inklings

Maya spiced chocolate
in a favorite cup
the morning of hard rain


unending rain!
drop bay leaves
into the kettle


buying sausages
this day of heavy rain,
for gumbo in a blue bowl


my oldest sweater
against the spring chill,
rising early to write


insatiable redbuds
have blotted up
every last drop of purple



—Christie

Friday, March 23, 2012

Writing Spaces



Last words . . . 



image:  Family scene with inscription “[daughter of] Mousiaos”, funerary stele From Demetrias, near Volos in Thessaly, tempera on marble, The Louvre

Trees

Our lane, named for a sacred place
of the Algonquin Indians, rides up
from the main road and mailboxes
through a thicket of western yellow pine.

Cones lie in the lower drive,
ungainly creatures of the woods,
though we’re only two miles
from the modish headquarters
of the future here—Tesla,
Facebook, all the latest dot coms.

Every week, it seems, our landlord is
cutting down trees, as if
in some kind of blood feud.
The eucalyptus shimmering like rain
outside our front window.
Half of the big old pine.  Oak limbs.

And when I drop my guard
for no more than a moment,
another sturdy, blameless trunk.

I feel these losses keenly,
knowing by heart our family history
in the evergreen forest of the northwest,
the apple orchards of Basse-Normandie—
a clan of trees.

My father and his father
scrupulously tending their fire lookouts
on Mount Washburn
and high above the Nez Perce Forest.
Our good kupuna friend planting
papayas and mangos on the Kohala Coast.
Those elders of the tribe, those who
taught me compassion for all things.

I look out from my writing room
on the ruins of the big pine
that sheltered the clothesline;
smell resin
like an intimation of distress
in the December air when I get home.

And alongside the driveway
just this week, I see, all of
the old peach trees are coming down,

while up on Deer Creek
where swaybacked gray horses
graze beside the road
above a menacing huddle of bulldozers,
I pass a sprawling oak in noble silhouette
against the darkening sky—

exactly like the tree in the green paddock
of the miniature riding school
I badly wanted as a child, but soon
lost interest in when my parents finally
bought it for me.

The coveting more urgent somehow
than the having.

There are essential lessons
everywhere still to be learned.
But how are we to learn them,
now that those who have our lives
our living in their care
are cutting down all of the trees?




—Christie

Friday, March 9, 2012

Writing Spaces




Beautiful manuscripts illuminated by Celtic monks. This, unfinished, from the Abbey of Kells in County Meath, Ireland, its text in iron gall ink.  Or perhaps, some speculate, brought up from holy Lindisfarne.






image:  The Book of Kells, Folio 114r, Decorated text. Tunc Dicit 

ars penicilli


taking notes
on the Nunuma bush buffalo
at the museum after lunch
I’m apprehended for using a pen
(instead of red ochre, black resin,
or perhaps the civet pelts
used in the diviner’s headdress
just through the doors ahead)
and feel the mischief in me, sharing
the raffish spirit of the creature
who quizzically bears my scrutiny
as I continue his or her portrait
with a borrowed pencil


—Christie