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

 

 

 

Les Godasses Émile

 

My short-story “Les Godasses Émile” has been published in Lowestoft Chronicle, issue #61.  This is a nostalgic look at Paris, as you will see, and indeed a nostalgic look back on my part, remembering how sore my feet were after walking endlessly to see the famous sights, museums, bookstores, and cafés there, and once, in addition, all of the hoopla (tout ce tapage) attending the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and the crowds of le 14 juillet.

 

This is the third story of mine to have appeared in the delightful Lowestoft Chronicle, which celebrates both travel and humor; the others were "Octopus" and "Show Me the Bust of Marcus Agrippa."  Here's what some happy readers say about this quarterly online literary magazine—

 

“Reading Lowestoft Chronicle is like jostling through a sprawling bazaar in Tashkent or Ulaanbaatar, with eyes wide open and wits on high alert.  Invigorating, too.”

— Victor Robert Lee, author of Performance Anomalies

 

“What a delightful refuge the Lowestoft Chronicle provides, artful and clean, featuring sparkling writing in multiple voices—all of it strong, provocative, wry, funny, and wise.  I’m so proud to be part of it.  Add this marvelous site to your reading matter, travelers and armchair travelers alike: your world, and mind and heart, will get larger.”

— Joan Frank, author of All the News I Need and Because You Have To:  A Writing Life

 

 

 

image:  depositphotos, Vintage Paris

Gardens of Longing

 

Late in February gardens (at least in California) began showing new growth, and green sprouts, and our wonderful local Catamaran Literary Reader published a celebration of gardens of all sorts—Catamaran Vol. 13, 1: Special Garden Edition, 2025, Issue 47—

"In our Special Garden edition, we invite you to enter our pages consisting of literary works with settings that span from public gardens to imaginary gardens, themes of flowers, plants, and the organic world, in a narrative accompanied by a range of visual artworks exploring gardens from landscape and still life paintings to abstraction and realism." 

 

In my creative nonfiction meditation included in this special collection, "Gardens of Longing:  A Memoir in Stolen Cuttings, Hoarded Seeds," I hope I show how the gardens we plant for ourselves are a hopeful, wistful, always nostalgic mingling of longing and belonging, comprising the places and their essences we’ve lost, or on various journeys found.

 

"I cultivate a garden of stolen plants, the way the words of poems and stories in my rag-tag notebooks also make me what I want to be.  Cultivate, I see, comes from colere—also meaning inhabit.  Like sea creatures which inhabit others’ shells I borrow and then live inside a casing of inspiriting plants and trees for dapple and for shade, and tuck old worn stone figures among them, companions of my muse. This thieving reprehensible, perhaps, but something I can’t help.  It’s essential to who I am, and the telling of that.  I acquire plants the same way I buy books:  believing each will give me finally exactly what I long for.  My belonging and my home."

 

Here, in my always ephemeral garden in Santa Cruz, I find

". . . the salvias and herbs and weathered stone, upstart yarrow, geraniums in every shade of pink, a little St. Jerome with his lion and book—all [these] elements assure me that this, my seat under the lichened pine with just a scrap of ocean view, a passing dog, a junco searching through the tangled grass, and all those cherished scraps of other times, elsewhere, is exactly where I belong."

 

I'm honored to have this rumination featured on the Catamaran website, and it can be found here.

 

 

 

image:   Andrea Johnson, cover artist

 

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