Catamaran Summer Issue Launch

 

A lovely launch last week, at San Francisco's Mechanics' Institute Library (and chess club), with readers from far-flung places joined for a few hours in heady words.

More soon . . .

Writing Spaces: Liber Floridus

 

Liber Floridus ("Book of Flowers") was one of the earliest and most famous medieval encyclopedias, compiled between 1090 and 1120 by Lambert, Canon of Saint-Omer.  Lambert wrote Liber Floridus in Latin, originally, and it was later translated into French as Le Livre fleurissant en fleurs.

 

image:  Leviathan, Liber Floridus

 

Writing Spaces: Writing Letters

 

“The act of writing itself is like an act of love.  There is contact.  There is exchange too.  We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them colour.”
(Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges)

 

 

image:  E. Phillips Fox, The Letter

Garam Masala

 

A new story of mine, "Garam Masala," has been published by The First Line (Volume 28, Issue 2).

 

I tried at least four other versions of this story, given the opening line as a challenge, and gave up on all of them—for no particular reason.  Finally I started once again, simply instead of adding lots of plot contortions, and added in what was fresh in my mind—Van Gogh's paintings of wheatfields which we'd seen a lot of recently during the production of Vincent by our favorite company, downtown.  Finally the story moved compellingly along, without going off on impossible tangents.  It had its own quiet direction, and a heart.  My happening upon the wonderful cookbook, 660 Curries, added the final ingredients needed (in this case coriander and cumin and my mother's favorite cardamom).

 

"She liked that it would last her a very long time, all of the years she could picture ahead.  She liked that the colors of the dishes she prepared and the spices she learned to grind were rather like Vincent Van Gogh's.  A lot of yellows and oranges.  The flavors varied, as the paintings did in mood, while following a common and familiar thread."

 

"Late in the afternoon, sun on the patterned tiles of the worn kitchen floor, Alex made Lamb with Yellow Split Peas, Salmon with Garlic and Turmeric.  Cardamom-scented Chicken.  Green Pea Croquettes.  She tried both Chunky Potatoes with Spinach and Chunky Potatoes with Golden Raisins. Blended twenty spices—all of the fragrant seeds like pigments, crushed and ground, used to create something other.  Something with ingrained radiance."

 

I must spend some of my own summer cooking, as well as looking at art . . . 

 

 

image:  Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper, Google Art & Culture

 

 

Pandora's Jar

 

only that residue

of hope left in the jar,

shimmer of cinnamon

rumor of cobalt blue

sheen of annointing oil

answering her

unquenchable asking

 

 

 

image:  Odilon Redon, Pandora

Writing Spaces

 

Coming soon!

Today, My Soul: A Meditation in Images and Words

 

“My soul, be satisfied with flowers,

With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them

In the one garden you may call your own.” 

(Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac)

 

Today, my soul is mourning many great things and some missing things that were once or seemed pure and innocent, without subtext.

 

Great, first—

• Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"

(see here)

• Joseph Fasano, "July 4, 2026"

(see here)

 

Then innocent (and also great, in their own quiet way)—

• espadrilles

• laundry hung like prayer flags on an outdoor line

(see also Richard Wilbur, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World")

• waking to innocence

• festive cakes and other festive fare

• tables set in a garden

• gardens of wonder (and their inhabitants) long ago

• gatherings of friends

• peace without sharp reminders of guilt

• joy and light, the same

• words that make us feel other than impotent

 

"We forget about the spaciousness

above the clouds

but it's up there. The sun's up there too.

When words we hear don't fit the day,

when we worry

what we did or didn't do,

what if we close our eyes,

say any word we love

that makes us feel calm,

slip it into the atmosphere

and rise?

Creamy miles of quiet.

Giant swoop of blue."

(Naomi Shihab Nye, "Over the Weather")

 

“You see, I want a lot. 
Perhaps I want everything 
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall 
and the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing 
And are raised to the rank of prince 
By the slippery ease of their light judgments
But what you love to see are faces 
that do work and feel thirst. 
You love most of all those who need you 
as they need a crowbar or a hoe. 
You have not grown old, and it is not too late 
To dive into your increasing depths 
where life calmly gives out its own secret.”
(Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke's Book of Hours)

 

images:

Christie Cochrell

• espadrilles, Dome, slatki dome

• laundry, Colin Page, Laundry Lines

• waking, Dome, slatki dome

• festive cakes and other festive fare,

Buttercup Cakes

Dome, slatki dome

Dome, slatki dome

• tables set in a garden,

Dome, slatki dome

French Country Cottage

French Country Cottage

• gardens of wonder long ago,

Dome, slatki dome

• gatherings of friends,

Keimpe van der Kooi, Garden Party

Kristina Hovhannisyan, Cafe Street

Witold Wojtkiewicz, Garden Party

• peace, Marie Hamamoto Photography

• joy and light, Ethan Hoover, Unsplash

 

In the Abstract

 

In the Abstract

And now,

the Sumatran tiger.

Care

in the sanctity 

of your own home.

The clarity 

of natural waters,

unblemished stone.

Not too much,

really,

to ask for.

The slightest

corner of my heart.

Things going, gone,

so in the abstract

taking up no space

at all.

image:  Tony Kershaw, via SWNS (South West News Service/Media Group, UK)

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)