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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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”)
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
