Writing Spaces

 

What might I not be drawn to write at this window?

image:  photographer unknown

Birthdays

 

Celebrating this lifetime/lifeline of birthdays—

 

I perfectly remember still the June I turned twenty

between Corinth and Ephesus, 

my grandmother’s pearls running off me when 

the string broke on the ferry between land and land; 

sitting disconsolate when landed back in Athens

in the temple dedicated to the crippled god—

wanting not only all of Greece, but love. 

 

At twenty-five you wake early, thinking.

You make a pot of strong black coffee,

open wide the back door and look out:

it has been raining, but for now it's clear.

 

Though it will rain again, maybe 

this afternoon, for now the drops

like a fine bracelet of diamonds circle

the slender white arm of the birch.

 

At twenty-five the world doesn’t confuse you

anymore, its many-faceted array of promises

as bright and false as the rhinestones

you gave your mother when you were just six.

 

The world no longer frightens you—

that dark glare of water you couldn't cross.

You drive into it now headlong, throwing

bright wings of water up to either side.

 

Now you have plumbed its depths, and

calculated its circumference; and to the inch

you know the worst the world can do.

 

The coffee's bitter.  Close the door, can’t you,

somebody says—don’t let all of that cold air in.

But you are twenty-five,

and it won’t rain again now for a day or two.

 

As you hold a finger up to test the wind,

a rusty tigermoth lights on it, in passing.

 

And, being twenty-five, it is enough for now.

                           ___

 

Crippled, the god was slow.  Love wasn't to be had until the turning of another year:  fifty.  Lunch in a rustic taverna in Crete at the foot of a Turkish aqueduct, its arched face full of nesting ravens.  Just a few miles from Knossos through the sunburnt hills, sumac grown thick along the country road.  Discovering not Theseus this time, the labyrinth, the minotaur, the liberating thread of Ariadne—yet that too, all of the ancient world, everything we shared, miraculously, from those continents away.

                           ___

 

And in between, at forty-five, the birthday picnic with coworkers, friends. 

 

Sitting out one lingering evening under the cork oaks 

in the garden of Rodin sculptures, 

with the small children and black lab playing 

around Orpheus and the fallen caryatids. 

When it got dark, lighting candles in oyster shells

and opening a bottle of apple brandy from Normandy.

A parting too from good friends leaving the Bay Area—

one off to live in Mexico City, working with 

a famous old writer and watching a camera obscura

being built somewhere close to the Zócolo,

grinding spices for curries, he'll write (and later too,

another time, across the Pacific in Maui while I 

am visiting the Temple on the Hill of the Whale

on the island across the Alenuihaha Channel— 

translated as great billows smashing);

the other to Pittsburgh, whose farmers’ market 

has two farmers, both of them named Pete.

                           ___

 

At sixty-nine you wake at first light

or are lying wakeful already, dreams scattered 

long since.

 

The dark roast coffee

in the mug found in a shop window 

in Vieux-Montréal during a trip one August 

to sell books to sociologists 

(staying by chance in the hotel where 

John and Yoko sang "Give Peace a Chance" 

while famously in bed) is a commute of sorts, 

 

a mildly sloping bridge to wakefulness from sleep, 

an arbitration with the day to come; birds readying 

also in the gnarly old shelter of the near 

Monterey pine for their excited morning augury, 

a kerfuffle of song.

 

The sun is out, or not, imperfectly; the gray 

might clear this afternoon, or when June gloom 

is gone.  But it is day again, and all the days 

plaited together like a laurel wreath, 

evergreen leaves prized by the ancient Greeks, circle 

my head in lieu of dreams, declaring a small triumph—

once again!—over the primal dark.

 

Dark, though, has started crowding in betimes, 

the jagged shards of everything you've loved 

catching the light, the rough beast foretold by the poet 

now already born, howling into the sterile corridors.  

Not St. Vincent where you were born, not there—

that hospital was in another place and time—

 

close to the cathedral, only a little ways from the river

where seven wooden archangels stand watch.

Carved from old salvaged cottonwoods, painted with 

red and yellow ochres, walnut shells.  In spite of their 

vigilance, though, dangers crowd in from every side.  

 

Hatred so pure you could never have reckoned on 

its putting down taproots, those brambles quickly 

overrunning the bright world.  Invasive and malign as

Himalayan blackberry (both name and origin 

confused).  Sharper than glass shards, and impervious 

to light, except the wildfires it fuels.

 

You find a recipe for chicken with lemon, 

roasted potatoes, peas.  Vesuvio, it's called—

appropriate, for the volcanos 

all erupting now.  Etna and Kilauea and the one 

in Guatemala you hadn't heard of before.  

Oregano, unsalted butter—add those to 

the roasting pan, and kosher salt.  Ingredients

like counsel out of dreams.  

A lifetime of such dreaming, of defying this 

 

unwelcome wakefulness.  And yet it comes, 

mornings' eye-opening unrest, despite coffee and 

memories and birds.  You see the monasteries 

of Mt. Athos have been shaken 

by earthquakes, one of the domes cracked like the bell 

which it's said light gets in.  That's how it goes.  

One thing, and then another, on and on.  The knell.

 

(The contemplative archangel, Sachiel, fallen 

and broken in a storm, waiting for the santero

to revive him, to somehow make things right.

 

For you are sixty-nine,

and the collared Eurasian doves call endlessly to you

from tangled branches or the roof, message not clear

and maybe not peaceful, really, as doves are meant 

to be, but something more prophetic.  Peace 

having no chance

 

despite the peace-bearing songwriters in that 

Montreal hotel—not anymore.  But you study 

the news, the starcharts and nautical charts, 

fixing with kintsugi and little kindnesses 

those cracks (intensifying), 

fixing any way you can another day, and another.

 

And, being sixty-nine, not twenty-five ever again, 

let alone born today beside the river there, 

the humble river with its waterbirch and bridge 

to the print shop or cider press, when apples 

and pears still grew between river and  acequia—

fixing quietly is all that you can do.  

 

Take what's left in both hands, coaxing 

the glass shards out and taking pains to gather 

all the light you can 

from them.  Make of the leavings, somehow, 

something altogether fine.  

 

The mug's lip chipped over the years, maybe, 

but not where your lips touch.  

Bearing witness to the remaining light.

                                    ___

 

At seventy,

you're all these things—and more.

You are the haiku and the epic poetry, 

the Shakespeare sonnets beautifully decrying time.

 

The dark-hearted water 

scares you again—

it's gone so still.

It's so terribly deep.

But listen closely:  

frogs make quiet music 

with the water,

as they did for Basho too.

 

And see how the moon 

slips into it, silvery, 

besides. Aqueous, luminous,

adaptive as the luna moth—

that dull gray lunar crust

transformed in a heartbeat

into arpeggios of light.

 

At seventy, let me be light. 

Let me be a fleet flight of notes, 

rising, opening out and out.

 

Calm as the last awakening

in Donne's sermon,

"where there shall be 

no cloud nor sun, 

no darkness nor dazzling, 

but one equal light, 

no noise nor silence, 

but one equal music, 

no fears nor hopes, 

but one equal possession . . ."

 

This world.  

This convoluted poetry.

image:  pexels-beytlik-6515979.jpg

Writing Spaces: Sit Now Very Quietly

 

Sit now

very quietly

in some lovely wild place,

and listen

to the silence.

 

And I say that this, too,

is a poem.

 

(Mary Oliver)

image:  artist unknown

Writing Spaces: Sudden Realizations

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell

             Collage pages with daguerreotype 
             digitized by Michael Shanks

Wanting the Sky to Be the Limit

 

Wanting the Sky to Be the Limit

 

I'm troubled today

walking through the redwoods after rain,

finding them secretive and deep,

keeping the horizon from view

as if there isn't one at all, or anything beyond.

Instead I'm wanting

a graceful short flight of sunlit stairs 

on some English or European street,

a bookshop halfway down the block,

and outside the museum a café for sitting 

over an array of bright-colored postcards,

where I can linger, take the possibilities all in 

slowly, with limitless contemplation.

To drink deeply, rapturously,

of what I know I love.

Trees, yes, always—but I'm so greedy 

for the world out there in the painters' sunlight.

 

image:  Lucy Willis

 

Eagle Hunters

 

Eagle Hunters

 

The photos of the Mongolian eagle hunters

for a dizzy moment throw me for a loop—

that somebody a year or two behind me back in school 

who I scarcely noticed should be living there now

under the sacred mountain ranges and eternal snows,

in spring filming the Apricot Blossom Festival

in ancient orchards, in the Himalayan valley villages

out of time and the world—traditional music and 

storytelling by elders, mask dances, blessings by 

     the monks 

from ancient monasteries in a zephyr of prayer flags. 

 

In contrast, I meditate on the single apricot tree

outside my childhood bedroom window—

guardian, shade-giver, wellspring of jam,

and photograph a pair of goldfinches in our feeder,

close-ups, the background blurred.

I think I might reread The Snow Leopard, 

or find the copy of Death in Kashmir somewhere

on my bookshelves, among the many other

travels I don't take, safe in my well-mapped world.

My favorite teacher in high school admonished

on a quarterly report:  

     she's already decided how she's going to be.

 

Mountains too close, too high and stern, unsettle me.  

And being on them, above the tree line, exposed,

without that kindly childhood apricot to shade 

and shelter me, back in the Santa Fe garden confines.

So why envy the lives others make for themselves

up high?  Why am I tempted, as I was one late winter

by Roman archaeology in the high Alps—beyond 

my reach, or desires, I'd thought, until I was there 

standing in those new unwieldy hiking boots 

looking down like a doubtful god at the slight, tangled 

thread of road leading to a far village far below.

 

The world I love best is much quieter, closer to earth.

Hawks come here to me from time to time, if not 

Golden Eagles, their hawk feathers crosshatched 

with ancient heiroglyphs, messages from 

that other world assuring me I'm just where I belong,

my chosen realm no lesser than that exalted other.

Peripheral longing aside, gauzy pipe dreams, 

     I'd after all 

decided long ago already what I meant always to be.

images:  Selena Travel,

               Set My Trip

 

"mend"

 

What does it mean to me, this "mend"?

 

I think of thread and needle and a quiet, patient hand (or Benedick's "Serve God, love me, and mend" to hearten Beatrice).  And I have become captivated by the art of mending—originally Japanese of course—sashiko, visible mending.  Not invisible, as once it was, somehow puritanical.  Not trying to hide a fault or flaw, but enhancing the damaged cloth, making imperfections beautiful and part of a new whole.

 

images:  The Work+Shop, Sashiko Visible Mending

Karen Stevens, Tatter (past events, Narrative Mending, a virtual class)

Haiku: Bullfrogs

 

Tonight, with headlamps,

neighbors out counting bullfrogs.

Joyful spring chorus!

Frogs are good haiku material, of course, hearkening back to Bashō's famous creation!

(my favorite translation, I think, is the simplest—

The old pond

A frog leaps in.

Sound of the water.

image:  American Bullfrog, In Defense of Animals

             (Shutterstock)

 

Writing Spaces

I could surely write something sunny and heartfelt in this room today . . .
 

image:  Dome, Slatki dome

Haiku Day

 

fragilities and 

incongruities of Spring!

prudence overturned,

 

Turkish rose, blush pink

undoing the resolve of

even this stone saint

 

images:  Christie Cochrell, Cycladic Figurine, St. Jerome, flowers

 

Stillborn

 

For what seemed like much of my life, from late high school until my mother's death and memorial service up the coast, year's end was spent on the Big Island of Hawaii, most often at Keauhou Bay, south of Kailua-Kona.  I collected innumerable impressions and filled notebooks with loving detail of the place and its people, which felt akin and important to my own story.  An abandoned hotel figured in that, as well as the old temples of black lava fallen and reshaped into sea-walls.

 

Mention of those was casually slipped into a story set in England a few years ago, with an entirely different focus, and only last year did I write a fictional piece situated directly in that place of memory, setting and ambiance true and truthful, with only the facts changed to meet my whimsical fictional needs.  (The way, perhaps, I used to reinvent myself each year again waiting for New Year's Eve—and Chinese fireworks—under a little palm or other tree beside the bay.)  Whether I did it justice, finally, I don't know, and doubt, but it meant lots to me to be back there. 

 

"Stillborn" was published by the wonderful The Plentitudes in February, their Issue 21 (Winter 2026).  Here's a small taste of it—

 

Marley could get fairly close to some of the abandoned structures, approaching either from the boat harbor or the golf course, and get into the gardens on the property's periphery.  She unfolded the flowered beach chair she had bought up at the shopping center on the hill, and sat for hours on a strip of sandy lawn, or just in from the pitch black lava pools mirroring sky (cornflower, Maya, satiated blue), and try to picture how the place had been once, full of life.  The ocean was a living presence still, black-hearted blue, the color Helena had christened Kona blue, full of the spiritual energy the Hawaiians called mana.  A graceful freehand tree at harbor's edge, not a species she recognized, was her sole company.  Even the birds seemed to have gone for good.

     Line by line again she read her mother's poems, watched kayaks slipping in and out of the harbor like needles through green silk.  The harbor where the king was born, her mother said—just across the water from here.  Where boats anchored, cruise boats for snorkeling and island history tours, sportfishing boats, kayak rentals, and paddle boards.  She watched a fishing boat go by out of the harbor, past her observation post, loaded with brightly colored floats.  She glanced again the other way, toward the silent old hotel, bare as a scoured bone.

 

 

image:  Keauhou Bay collage, Christie Cochrell

Writing Spaces: Days Written in Flowers

 

Days written in flowers—

optimism, fragility,

constancy, consolation,

bashfulness,

wisdom and even hope—

fingers stained 

with the bright-colored ink

of all they want to say

before it is too late,

the urgent messages

hands cup, consult, 

the oracles 

of filament, stamen, petal

flaring like Pythia's flame

in far Delphi.  Visited 

once, and ever held within.

 

 

(I liked to learn that those seeking the counsel of Apollo would offer laurel branches, money, and a black ram.)

 

 

 

image:  Old-fashioned Ladies and Gentlemen Too

Or Die of Namelessness

 

I'm pleased to have another story out, to start the year—my third published by the excellent Wild Roof Journal, which over the past several years has, it says, "built a community of emerging & established writers, visual artists, teachers, grad students, mental health professionals, travelers, hermits, vagabonds, ragamuffins, etc. etc.," (that sounds like me!); whose name comes from a line in William Blake's The Book of Urizen.

 

My story, "Or Die of Namelessness," can be found in Gallery 1, Knocking on wood: on glass.

 

Its name comes from another poet, Wendell Berry, and these lines of his—

“we must call all things by name out of the silence 

again to be with us, or die of namelessness”

 

The names are of particular interest, for it is the names the forlorn hero of the story is losing, to nominal aphasia, to the lonely, silent void.  Along with all the rest, the names of the fossil shells he had made his career, and the shared language between him and his true love—"Cephalopods, ammonites, opalised pippi shells, spotted Babylon snails, cowries, dolphin gastropods, miters, moon shells, turbans and vases and urchins, whelks; Venus comb murex, hundred-eyed cowrie, rainbow abalone, sheep’s ear abalone, pontifical mitre, orange-mouth olive and lettered olive, colorful coquina clams, chambered nautilus, tusk."

 

A cousin of mine died from aphasia last year, and by coincidence we saw a fine play in the fall about a woman suffering and finally perishing from word loss too—Nick Payne's Constellations.

 

images:  generated in WordItOut