Writing Spaces: Spring Work

 

“Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.”
― John Muir

image:  Christie Cochrell, Filoli

 

Writing Spaces

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Liber Floridus, Leviathan

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Edward Gorey, The Interesting List

Torre del Lago

 

Another memorial sketch of mine, “Torre del Lago (A Triptych),” bits of creative nonfiction often reworked over the years, has been published in the Spring 2025 issue of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose—a print edition which can be ordered from the publisher.

 

The triptych includes Lucca, Italy; Santa Fe, New Mexico/Nagasaki, Japan; and Hawaii's Kona and Kohala Coasts.  (Unlikely—but then so has been my life!)  All of the threads of this are tied together by Giacomo Puccini the composer, and his transportative music (especially Madama Butterfly.

 

It begins (though not where it really began)

"One late October afternoon, some twenty years after my father’s death, we take the train from Lucca to Torre del Lago.  Arriving finally at the station on the lake where Giacomo Puccini's villa stands, where he wrote the music that has been for me since childhood the touchstone of beauty and sorrow.  The villa where, I wrote some twenty years ago, they found eight phonograph records with labels in Japanese."

 

And ends (much earlier) with yellow fishes in the blue-black water of the Kona Coast—after a long, time-traveling  journey in between.

 

Images:  Villa Museo Puccini

Yellow Tang

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Franklin Booth, Giving Wings to Words

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, The Globe Theatre, 2010

A Nurturing Poem: Selecting Flowers

 

Selecting a single rose, 

soft apricot flushed pink, 

and then another, 

pink as pink can be,

as complement, soulmate.

And then a stem or two

of golden freesia, streaked 

as if with tawny tigers

or Marrakesh sun 

(wholly Berber at heart) 

complete with minarets,

the mellow growling of 

an august tenor saxophone.

 

Meditating, my heart 

comes to be set on that— 

a mound of Berbere on my palm,

that mixture of sultry spices

including chile powder, dusty red 

(like sun-baked earth, terracotta

weathered by time), coriander, 

nigella seeds, rue, ginger, fenugreek.

 

And I am brought back to myself

in being so entirely carried away.

 

 

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Freesia

April Fools

 

This Month of Poetry and Fools

 

The Old French fol follows

as words do, dragging their metric feet,

from Latin’s follis, “bellows, windbag”—

becoming by extension (following

the logarithmic outward spiral

   of nautilus shells)

an empty-headed person, windbag—

so eventually the sort of fool I am.

 

Carrying with me,

everywhere I go, my bag of winds—

 

the eight winds I have learned

from dictionaries,

in the windmill where I sleep:

mestral, xalac, migjorn, and then 

the wind across the mountains,

coming from the north.

 

The winds found on that other island

years ago, while looking for temples, 

fish traps, the old sugar cane shipping port.

 

A sign along the road, lettered by hand, 

welcomed the winds of Kona to Kohala, 

across boundary crossings

kapu (quite forbidden) in ancient times.

 

And here?  The kitesurfers

carried by wind and waves,

by curls of eyebright silk.

That sure, that light!

 

Why not a bag of woodwinds, too?

 

Then I will be a holy fool,

wholly a fool, a fool of holes

if they can be

 

the holes in flutes, holes in

those lovely basset horns

akin by chance (the bas

of low-slung sheep, perhaps,

perhaps the Ouessant)

to amiable long-eared hounds.

 

 

The holes in

holy wooden cellos

through which

the light comes, curling, 

slow sea salt caramel.

 

The holes

breath enters 

and grace

courses from.

 

I am a fool indeed

for Mozart’s

sort of foolery.

 

And for the music

of the bells, i bronzi sacri

ringing changes, sounding 

stroke by stroke by stroke

the inspiriting call.

 

Back in the 15th century the meaning of windbag  

was “bellows for an organ,” and I follow on

into the church, up to the organ in the loft 

played by Puccini, who composed so many

divine operas about so many fools for love—

until his brothers stole the organ pipes

to sell to ironmongers for some cigarette money.  

 

Better an empty head, I say, to fill with daydreams

and the motley wares of spice-traders, word-tinkers, 

peddlers of extracts (vanilla, eucalyptus, bitter orange), 

elixers, pigments.  Cardamom tea, in a bone china cup.

Fragrances.  Tulip oil.  A small tube of crimson lake.

 

No book learning, no wisdom of the head.

Instead, these other miracles.  (From the Old French:  

objects of wonder.)  My object, to go on wondering.  

Wandering off, feet painted with henna.

 

And what do I remember of it all?

 

The color yellow symbolized joy for medieval Arabs.

Both frankincense and myrrh are aromatic resins,

derived from tree sap.  (Sap³:  a foolish person 

with an empty head, smelling of pine, smiling wonderingly.)

Fools rush in, we are told, where angels fear to tread.

 

And so sometimes I drag my feet, sometimes I rush,

fool speed ahead, often I fool around, fool to the gills

with this silly delight that comes of having no great purpose 

but to go on as I do—most happily in April, month of fools.

image:  Italian Old World Exploration Angel & Cherub Map by Paolo Forlani circa 1565