A Nurturing Poem: The Dog’s Ears

 

The dog’s ears, furred, furled,

fitting both palms

like home-knit childhood mittens

on a snowbound day, a day

for chicken soup 

with noodles, rice, the green tang

of innocent celery, finely diced.

A day for Harriet the Spy

or Nancy Drew, 

a mound of covers, 

and this pert-eared dog on top, 

listening constantly

for words promising things, 

the faint but keenly studied evidence

of a pined-for and despaired-of 

return.  In the meantime 

I rub her velvet ears, and they in turn 

perfectly smooth my ruffled feathers, 

settle into calm my rocking boat.

 

image:  Regal Animal Hospital

A Nurturing Poem: Egret Lily

 

Egret or white lily?

The purity,

the grace of throat,

of form—

either or both,

that long siphon of beauty

drinking in the long lagoon.

If not still here tomorrow,

then egret it will have

proven to be.  Or maybe 

Calla still, stolen away, 

bestowed with flight.

 

 

images:  Don Enright, Eric Hunt

A Nurturing Poem: The Plant Next Door

 

Some kind of sprawling

big-leafed plant moved in next door—

from which of all distant jungles?  

Place of Monarchs,

place of resplendent quetzals 

(emerged from the Andes, related to 

a deity, naming a coin)?

A green anaconda, maybe, lurks

among the voluminous leaves,

not off in South America or Trinidad,

island of sugar, home of the shapeshifting 

Temple in the Sea:  dedicated to Shiva, 

then destroyed, then built again, before

being reduced to fragments by the tides. 

And built again!  Love and persistence

of such magnificence leafing, 

though far from jungles, in my heart.

 

image:  Spencer Wing, Pixabay

An Appraisal Poem: Progress

What is this mulish obstacle

blocking my path?

A foot, and a second . . .

planted implacably in place,

dogged as the most 

Brobdingnagian dog or 

torpid old Galapagos tortoise,

simply 

and with the fixed

proclivity of years 

disdaining to be moved.

 

 

image:  Galapagos Giant Tortoise,

         Intl Fund for Animal Welfare

 

Writing Spaces in the Kitchen

 

Old recipes:  hand-written tales on stained pages telling of kitchens past, and some of them on parchment paper, torn sheets folded maybe into neat packets.  Stolen biographies of far-away places and times, of grandmothers or unknown chefs in New Orleans or the countryside of Normandy, a friend nearby, a friend across the world but always in your heart.  Sensual stories from distinctive cultural settings, written again while mincing garlic and not mincing words.  That expressive ambiance of spices, those life-changing/life-commemorating stories in every ingredient and every taste to come.

 

This afternoon’s writing was in ancho chile powder, paprika, cumin, a rainbow of little tomatoes sprinkled with oregano (Mexican rather than Turkish), caramelized onions, snow peas, baby lettuces.  Black beans will show up in the final paragraph, as well as salsa fresca and that oven-roasted evergreen poblano which will have so much to say.

 

 

image:  Pixabay, Bru-nO

Writing Spaces: Words

 

Words, how I loved you

Then—when I

Was young

And you led me

Out of the dark!

 

How I love you now

Even more,

As the dark approaches.

 

(#14 of 15 parts, Gregory Orr, “Ode to Words”)

 

 

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ashmolean Museum

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Giacomo Puccini manuscript (looks like La Bohème), Torre del Lago

An Appraisal Poem: Forgiveness

 

I forgive myself

for being ineffective and unsure.

And I forgive the day 

for being imperfect—

the noise of the cutters of long

and lovely grass on the hillside below,

probably gutting daffodils

in the process, the heartening yellow

of hope not spared either

in the indifferent clearing going on.

The unease lurking in the margins

of it all reminds me 

of a long, shadowed portal 

sliced into sharp diagonals 

by unpropitious interpolations of light.

I forgive the shadows

wherever they fall, the chill

of the long covered walkway

in my heart now, headed backwards,

some winter cloister with no roses 

and no limestone saints, 

perhaps the one way up beyond Harlem

and a battlement bootless now,

won in those hours on the bus 

I rode only one time, unhesitating,

to that place in turn called 

Chquaesgeck, Lange Bergh, Fort Tryon, 

between rivers, on a ridge high above 

the city I had borrowed for a day or two,

as was my wont, in snow and wind 

and no thought the whole while

of any imperfection in myself, that day.

 

 

image:  Cloister, Hans, Pixabay

Writing Spaces

 

image:  "Romeo's House," Verona

(Christie B. Cochrell)

What Poetry Can Do

 

Poetry
tugs me by the hand into the room with all the maps 
the muses on the double stair, the dragon 
spilling out in undulating constellation overhead 

and there—the blue to end all blues, clairvoyant, 
on that little bit of wall I might so easily have missed 
now that they keep the light deliberately dim. 

It builds a fragile paper kite of balsam wood 
on which to knot my shirttails and myself, and fly 
above it all, oh wobbly Icarus, giving myself 
into the breezy, flighty keeping of the February wind. 

And more substantial architectures too— 

the old stone cloister with the winter oranges and 
the unicorn, above the river, following the slow
progression up Manhattan through Harlem by bus. 

And in another time, the low adobe rooms on
Canyon Road that were once science labs, where
in a sunny window children I no longer recognize,
long grown and gone, are shaping red clay heads

reading The Zoo Story, exploring new fantastic
algebraic rhythms, smoky, foreign in the blood

as Tunisia or some one of those other countries in
North Africa where they have those brilliant blue tiles
and spices heaped in little bowls, one of those sultry
countries in the foreign films. 

And in the ghost-light of the projector
it summons ghosts— 

outside the windows of those other science labs 
south of Los Alamos, built on ancient burial grounds 

and Japanese too—unanticipated revenants.
Samurai faces cicatrixed with characters;
the gardener I tailed after for his measured spirit

raking last year’s leaves on the school path 
under a fall of paper-white petals more transient 
than spring snow, before a careless breath 
melted them utterly away. 

And when I stop to find the words to say how much 
I’ve missed him all these years, and
his deep tractor scoop that bore us up into the sea-light
of the apple trees, that man of common poetry,

who I glimpse just ahead of me again 
slipping unnoticed down the muddy rutted drive 
into the canyon’s plum-bruised heart, that place I loved 

once and forever, beyond words,

here comes running 

through all that brittle yellow rabbitbrush 
which the new tenants haven’t taken time to clear
one of the dogs from Billy Collins’s poems,

its cold, insistent nose 
urging me up the silent rise, back up 
into the traffic of the wayward, chatty road.

 

 

 

image:  fresco from Pompeii, commonly said to be Sappho

(just fyi, see this)

Writing Spaces

 

image:  www.VagabondJourney.com

An Appraisal Poem: Cyclamen

 

Two doves on the neighboring roof.

Two pots of cyclamen aflame

in quintessential purple, pink,

out on the deck in shadow still,

two crucibles of holy flame

calling to mind the Delphic oracle 

(priestess innominate and unobserved).

O cyclamen, phenomenon of color 

burning at the verges of the morning chill,

the chill our hearts have taken on themselves

this February when the old divine power

adjured by the oracle’s flame

is no longer divine or even old, revered,

its intent merciless and earth-focused 

instead, the flame only 

a moment of ephemeral brightness 

inside the dolorous shadow.  Shadow 

gorging, spreading, encompassing,

the verge unquestionably breached.

The doves have taken flight;

the cyclamen wavers a little, burns on.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell

Writing Spaces: Offerings

 

A ti leaf offering is a sacred package wrapped in ti leaves and placed at a significant location to honor ancestors, loved ones, or scared beings.

 

But for those who are not conversant with what’s appropriate in context, in Native Hawaiian culture,

“The most appropriate offering that any person can make can be made without any tangible item being left behind. The most perfect offering is one’s aloha, ha, and olelo. To love a place, and breathe out that love in the form of a spoken promise to cherish and protect it, that is the most perfect offering.”

(Leilehua Yuen, from “Ho`okupu – Offerings”)

 

Image:  collage by Christie Cochrell 

Writing Spaces for a Rainy Day

 

Image:  Dome, slatki dome, with Mariza Fdez De Castro Jenkins and 濱谷千里子

Writing Spaces

 

image:  the incomparable George Booth

Writing Spaces: Querencia

 

QUERENCIA:  (noun) a place 

from which one's strength is drawn, 

where one feels at home; the place 

where you are your most authentic self.

 

 

 

images:  source unknown

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Edmond Aman-Jean  

(French painter 1858 - 1936)

An Appraisal Poem: The Year of the Snake

 

(an appraisal poem, 

as prompted by Robert Lee Brewer)

 

The Year of the Snake sidles in,

all slippy and, well, serpentine—

throwing us curves before

it’s even here, even fêted

with firecrackers and all that hoopla

(fangs, lion dancers, marching bands),

though Fate, writ large, 

is written on its vexèd brow,

those scales not for weighing

but for naying, eyes venomous

as ever was (green, slit; orange of iris

with a black rim)—not comforting

by any means or ways.  Not what 

we need, for sure, or readily invite 

into our saporous grasses, over 

our faithfully sagacious threshhold

of alder, terracotta, tumbled travertine,

time-honored limen 

of welcome, reverence, what once 

could be.  Couldn’t but be.

 

images:  Jeff Beane, Copperhead

Manuel Cohen, Relief, Archaeological Museum of Sparta

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Matt Riches, Unsplash

Writing Spaces - Dragons in Our Rearview Mirror

 

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Books of Hours, books of waning years . . .

 

 

images:

 

. Liber Floridus (“Book of Flowers”), a medieval encyclopedia compiled between 1090 and 1120 by Lambert, Canon of Saint-Omer

. Book of Hours and Prayer Book, Southern Netherlands, c. 1490-1500 (Picryl, Public Domain Image Search)

. Liber Floridus

 

 

Color Diary: Turquoise Sequin

 

TURQUOISE SEQUIN

 

Tricky to catch, one of those fugitive colors

which won’t stay fixed.  Equivocal, elusive,

inconclusive, evanescent, multifaceted, 

needing an uncertainly certain angle 

of sunlight just so, on its six—seven—

gently slanted planes, 

the shallow saucer of its surface,

the glimmer and glint of it, miniature 

disk, discus, some ancient votive offering

to Zeus, or tiny sacred pool.

Set off by crystals and gemstones

and the soft-textured tile,

the sequin found on the carpet

next to the table leg while 

taking the Christmas tree down,

like the evasive slipper Cinderella lost

fleeing the ball, returning 

to reality from brightness,

to the humdrum after the drumroll.

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Morris B.J. Kelmscott

Color Diary: Lichen Green

LICHEN GREEN 

lichens

on bark, stone, henge—

whether before the pastures 

on the path to the ocean

or in the realm of 

the ancient Alpine storm gods,

inhabiting 

a place of crossing, 

a passage or boundary or wall,

the sanctum

of the hoary apple tree goddess

just past the laundry, kitchens, 

where soup and earthy bread

are shared with all comers

images:  Maelmin Henge, Northumbria

 

Writing Spaces

 

Slowness, Speed (again)

 

I feel immensely honored to have had my story “Slowness, Speed” included in Pinyon’s impressive 30th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Fall 2024), just out.  The story was originally published in Pinyon in June, 2022 (Edition 31).  This is a lovely publication, and the cover is of handsomely textured paper, with an elegantly high-spirited font.  The inside is full of great full-color art and written content.  The editor’s introduction to this celebration of continuing creation ends “What we’ve gained, or lost, in this world hasn’t changed who we are, and for that I believe we all should be not only grateful, but joyous.”  And so I am.

 

This should inspire me to get back to work on the novel I’ve conceived which includes this story and its sequel—a story which has morphed three times and now again, last time I checked still called “Ojos de Dios,” though I think that too has changed to something like “The Weight of Butterflies.”  It might well be a grateful, joyous, worthwhile thing, if I give it the attention and care it needs.

 

Thank you, Pinyon.

Hymn to Pan

 

Appropriate, perhaps, to have this story published now—dealing as it does with a seemingly dreadful man, a famous breakcore musician, a torturously disruptive neighbor, who the heroine must write up for the upscale music review she works for.

 

Carly has been ordered to make her article positive (“Capital P”), and can’t imagine how she’ll manage that, the way she feels about the man and his excruciating entourage next door.

 

“Maybe Antonio Zugasti thought himself some kind of warlock or vodouisant.  He wore his warpaint often, hung around his scraggly neck some kind of charm pendant with snakes worn on a length of nylon climbing rope.  He kept those witchy Cayuga ducks, shimmery emerald green, on a black-hearted water pond beside his neo-Soviet Brutalist house.  My daughter was intrigued by the green waterfowl, but I couldn't let her go anywhere near.”

 

One idea she explores is classical—

“Maybe metaphor, or myth?  I pulled my laptop toward me, balancing it on my knees, following a desperate train of thought.  I found the words to the Homeric hymn to Pan my classicist mother once read to me: 

         "Muse, tell me about Pan, the dear son of Hermes, with his goat's feet 

            and two horns—a lover of merry noise. Through wooded glades he 

            wanders with dancing nymphs who foot it on some sheer cliff's edge, 

            calling upon Pan, the shepherd-god, long-haired, unkempt." 

Could I expand on that?  Pan, the god of music, was Antonio Zugasti's sort.  Maybe somehow I could worm out lots of jocund Pan-like details without having to actually interview the man.  I liked that, smiled.  Humor or my sense of the absurd might after all save me.”

 

Her journey to a workable answer, acceptable to everyone, can be read in the “Second Look” themed issue of Constellations, Vol. 14, Fall 2024 (print only).  And of course the half-goat Pan has his own constellation—Capricorn.

 

 

image:  Pan, mythologysource.com