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

 

 

 

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

 

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