image: Christie Cochrell, The Globe Theatre, 2010
poetry&prose
creative ramblings & reverie
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
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
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
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
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
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
James Merrill wrote in his memoir, A Different Person (1993), about visiting a doctor about his depression, saying that he didn't know how to live or how to love, he just knew how to write a poem. The doctor, he said, "listened closely, then acted with undreamed-of kindness and dispatch. 'Come with me,' he said, in a flash ushering me out of his downtown office and onto the back seat of a smart little pale-green motorscooter. I put my arms, as instructed, about his stout, gray-suited person, and off we went in sunlight, through traffic, under trees, past architecture, over the muddy river to lunch." (The Writer’s Almanac, 3/3/3)Our hope is that this collection of writing will give readers the same je ne sais quois that brief but immense lunchtime voyage gave us—encouragement for going on; inspiration to do something simply good for ourselves each ordinary day; a smile; a moment of respite or recognition; time out from global numbing; a pause for weirdness, wonder, and delight. We want to share what gives us pleasure or some keener satisfaction putting down as well as picking up.