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

 

 

 

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

 

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

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)

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

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

Keeper of Winds

 

Like Odysseus, after encountering the god,

I’m carrying my bag of winds—

 

the eight winds I learned in Catalán

from dictionaries,

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.

 

The pastures upswept by the wind,

the long grasses and wild sugar cane shoots,

only the gray horse and green chair fixed 

within the constant motion of the rest.

 

I learned it's called 'apa'apa'a, that wind, 

blowing always in the same direction.  

And I was charmed, learning 

to call the wind by name.

 

A hand-lettered sign along the road

at the crossing between ancient districts

welcomed the winds to Kohala. 

 

The wind was even in the house at night,

and an Italian aria returning from far

places and old times, carried precariously there

along with the low voices of the sacred bells.

 

And here?  Kitesurfers

carried by wind and waves,

by curls of eyebright silk.

That sure, that light!

 

Will these be loosed and lost like those others,

or might they blow me always safely back to shore,

to some untroubled harbor which I’ll recognize

     as mine?

image:  Jan Jansson, 1650, compass rose surrounded by wind heads, Volume 5 of his "Novus Atlas" of the Ancient World.

Compassion

 

Appeal

 

Appeal

 

I summon the comet back,

tail oh so long, splendid and glad 

as a cathedral train

sweeping along behind the bride

at the wedding of light to light,

attended by Venus

and a cohort of lucent stars 

there in the western sky

above the skeleton of the gray whale;

 

summon those owls of summer

haunting the interstices

of Shakespeare’s soliloquies,

frisky or fateful murmurs

in the hallowed grove, there on

the unceded ancestral homeland

of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe.

 

I persuade the traces 

of the driftwood labyrinth 

drawn in remembrance 

on our little sandy beach 

to tarry one more day 

here on this shore,

on the uneasy limen of winter

and the onerous year beyond.

 

A line or two of it’s rewritten every night 

by the kleptic November waves, 

exacting this and that, 

but I bid what stray sticks and branches 

of the whole circle are still in place 

and can be paid homage by my bare feet

to stay a little longer within reach 

in their steadying dignity,

in their contemplative orbit. 

 

Inspiration.  Heartsease.

Sometimes, I think, all that

can possibly save us.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell

Tea

 

TEA

 

In tea leaves

I read my fortune,

journeys past

and yet to come.

 

Orange pekoe

was my grandmother,

dawn leavetakings

from Flagstaff, trains passing

in the lonely hours of the night.

Against those departures,

a comforting circle

of yellow lamplight, tea,

which reassures me even now.

Lapsang Souchong, my father 

called Old Indian Moccasins, 

smoky and exotic

as the Old Prospector’s Shop

where in my teens I bought

crepe paper flowers 

from somewhere in Mexico,

holding within themselves, 

their folds, whispered and deep,

a whiff of copper, the bewitching 

smell of unaccustomed distances.

In Hawaii we learned 

the almost sacramental genmai cha, 

green tea with toasted rice, 

shared from a sly-lipped pot

with our kupuna friends

in the big airy dining room 

of the rustic hotel near Captain Cook, 

with wooden walls and floors 

and those friendly old screens 

welcoming ocean breezes in.

 

At Tassajara, in its far valley,

peppermint tea, delicious, iced,

after waking at dawn to running bells, 

rising to walk down soft footpaths

to the bath house, still half asleep, 

and sit in one of the hot springs

under a bough of pine, moon fading

to a watermark as daylight takes the sky,

while others chant in the zendo 

and in the kitchen bread is baking—

seeded, rounded, full.

 

At the long-vanished teahouse

on one of old Palo Alto’s downtown streets,

in a warren of galleries and bookstores

and the futon shop, Earl Gray 

and finger sandwiches, its fragrance

telling of the past and things to come.

A moment of quiet reflection before 

stepping out the door again to go on 

shopping for my best friend’s wedding dress.

And finally,

at The Teahouse on Canyon Road,

back home, yet not, never again,

plum cinnamon or pepper berry—

fragrant teas, far too many to try.

For I am out of time.

Mornings, walking the labyrinth

barefoot, time and again, before

heading on to the hospital.

Needing the tea for the solace 

it’s always offered in the past. 

Having this time to pour it 

out myself, drink it alone.

 

 

images:  

Pierre Bonnard, Breakfast or Lunch

WWII teacup, Etsy

Japanese teapot, Oitomi

A Reader Lives teacup, saucer, and spoon