Monday, March 18, 2024

Almost the first day of Spring!

 Here's a wonderful poem by   Amy Shutzer:

WHAT TO DO ON SPRING EQUINOX

Compost this poem.
Take out all the words that remind you of winter,
words that slip frozen into the heart,
bare limbs of words that stick into the sky and shake.
Prune out dead wood;
rough ragged never gonna fruit,
done is done!
Pay attention to what is here,
not what isn't.
Send your roots into another row or field or bed.
Mow. Rake up all the grass.
Layer, as if you're expecting hail or a deep frost;
the end of winter is always unpredictable.
Add manure, plenty of manure
and call in the flies, the dung beetles, the worms.
Soon, there will be heat. Steam.
The pile will soften, break down, give in, let go.
Compost winter into spring,
take off those old clothes you've been wearing,
the despair like a hat on your head,
dig into the pile,
into the heat and the heart of what matters.
Plant your garden and remember, each year,
everything will be different;
compost what you can.


Luci Grossmith


"I heard a wood thrush in the dusk
Twirl three notes and make a star —
My heart that walked with bitterness
Came back from very far.
Three shining notes were all he had,
And yet they made a starry call —
I caught life back against my breast
And kissed it, scars and all."

Sara Teasdale - Wood Song, 1884-1923.

Heinrich Vogeler - Frühling - Porträt von Martha Vogeler, 1897


Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Major Facebook trouble all over the place

 I can log on to mine on the phone,but not on the laptop.  Very weird and frustrating. But at least I know I'm not alone in this craziness.  Facebook users all over the country and probably the world are struggling.

However, some weren't affected at all.

I mind because I can't post the beautiful artwork or photos or reallly anything.

Sigh. A first world problem.   It will get fixed eventually.

full moon over the Inn of Cape May




 

"March is the month of expectation,

The things we do not know,

The Persons of Prognostication

Are coming now.

We try to sham becoming firmness,

But pompous joy

Betrays us, as his first betrothal

Betrays a boy."

-  Emily Dickinson, XLVIII

 

 


Sparrow... art by Elena Selena


"This hill

crossed with broken pines and maples

lumpy with the burial mounds of

uprooted hemlocks (hurricane

of ’38) out of their

rotting hearts generations rise

trying once more to become

the forest

 

just beyond them

tall enough to be called trees

in their youth like aspen a bouquet

of young beech is gathered

 

they still wear last summer’s leaves 

the lightest brown almost translucent

how their stubbornness has decorated 

the winter woods"

-  Grace Paley, A Walk in March





The Rose-breasted Grosbeak won't arrive for another month or more.  I wait for him.




Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Harshness vanishing


Early Spring

  •  

    by Rainer Maria Rilke

     

    Harshness vanished. A sudden softness

    has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.

    Little rivulets of water changed

    their singing accents.

    Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth

    from space, and country lanes are showing

    these unexpected subtle risings

    that find expression in the empty trees.

     

     





 

Michael Cheek    Robin









Sunday, February 25, 2024

"February made me shiver..."

 "with every paper I'd deliver,

Bad news on the doorstep,

I couldn't take one more step..."

( from "American Pie" by Don McLean)


Art by   Laivi Poder

Truly, being in my middle seventies has turned my mind to nostalgia, or memory, and hopefully not regret.  In the month of Valentine's Day, I have been remembering the men I've loved in my rash youth.  I connect them all to songs from my youth, which now I can access through itunes, and can download and save and play on my ipod.  Those are words that didn't exist in my youth, though the songs certainly did.   Here are a few:

Angeles   (Enya)

A Summer Song   (Chad and Jeremy)

Try to Remember   (Harry Belafonte)

You've got your troubles, I've got mine  ( the Fortunes)

Yesterday ( Beatles)

I'll follow the sun ( Beatles)

We'll sing in the sunshine  (Gale Garnett)   


Here comes the sun (Beatles)

Stranger on the shore

Ventura Highway (Simply Red)

Waiting for Snow (Gordon Lightfoot)

Song for a winter's night  ( Gordon Lightfoot)

MacArthur Park (Richard Harris)

Come to my bedside my darling  ( Eric Anderson)

I'll always be beside you

Fields of Gold ( Eva Cassidy)

I'll be seeing you  ( Judy Collins)

Miles ( Richard and Mimi Farina)

One time only ( Tom Paxton)

Greenfields (Brothers Four)

The green leaves of summer  ( Brothers Four)

The Promise ( Tracy Chapman)

All that you have is your soul  ( Tracy Chapman)

The good times we had     ( Peter Paul and Mary)

Friends   ( John Denver)


Last month I found out that Frank Reilly has died in Florida. He was 82, and had Alzheimers.  Sixty years ago I had an enormous crush on him, though our relationship was strictly platonic.  I had an email from him, out of the blue, in April of 2017, and we corresponded until 2020. Then, I imagine , his mind began to go,.

Others have passed away:  Jim Wambold, Pat Finnegan, John Whelley, Barney Galvin...

Now occasionally they show up in my dreams. 






Friday, February 23, 2024

insights from writers in The New Yorker

 

  Tufted Titmouse      artist: Diaga Dimza

The last few issues of The New Yorker have been filled with articles I really loved reading, and which provoked my own thoughts.

In this latest one, from February 26, Adam Gopnik had an essay called  "Four Years Later,"  about "What we can't learn from 2020 "--- the COVID Pandemic. He says "when normal life stopped  in mid march of 2020. He reminded me that a million Americans died before a vaccine was accessible . 

He says  "What if the Pandemic, rather than knocking us all sideways and leaving us briefly unrecognizable to ourselves, showed us who we really are?"

"KLINENBERG'S own figure on the pandemic ground is that America's exceptionally poor handling  of the crisis exposed   the country's structural selfishness:     tell people that they are on their own."  
I need to say more on this, but glare on the pages got to me tonight. 

our country's structural selfishness.... that really hit me.


"The pandemic exposed the geological faults in American society, which now threaten to split the earth and plunge us inside."


Then he asks: "Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years

are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not.

A life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity."





Wednesday, February 21, 2024

No narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis

 



A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis   Hilary Kelly

talking about writer  Diana Athill

How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions. 

“I believed,” she writes, in “Somewhere Towards the End,” “and still believe, that there is no point in describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching in my upbringing: Do Not Think Yourself Important.” 

Photos of her (Athill), with her snow-white hair and velvety, folded skin, fomented interest in a nonagenarian who would “run through all the men I ever went to bed with” instead of counting sheep.


"She watches her own diminishment with a sharp eye. “We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so,” she writes. “We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.” This isn’t callousness or delusive optimism but, rather, a rebellion against the suffocating expectation that the elderly have foreclosed the possibility of joy."

She was still writing when she was in her nineties.   I hope I'm dead by the time I am ninety.






 


Saturday, February 17, 2024

Only in winter

 

"There is a privacy about winter which no other season gives you … Only in winter…can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."

-  Ruth Stout,  How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back

 


 

The Freedom of the Moon

by Robert Frost


I've tried the new moon tilted in the air

Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster

As you might try a jewel in your hair.

I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,

Alone, or in one ornament combining

With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.

By walking slowly on some evening later,

I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,

And brought it over glossy water, greater,

And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,

The colour run, all sorts of wonder follow.

 



The Dream of February

BY JOHN HAINES

 

         I

In the moonlight,

in the heavy snow,

I was hunting along

the sunken road

and heard behind me

the quiet step

and smothered whimper

of something following . . .

 

Ah, tree of panic

I climbed

to escape the night,

as the furry body glided

beneath, lynx with  

steady gaze, and began

the slow ascent.

 

         II

And dark blue foxes

climbed beside me with

famished eyes that  

glowed in the shadows;

 

I stabbed with

a sharpened stick until

one lay across

the path with entrails

spilled, and

the others melted away.

 

The dead fox

moved again, his jaws

released the

sound of speech.

 

         III

Slowly I toiled

up the rotting stairs

to the cemetery

where my mother lay buried,

 

to find the open grave

with the coffin

tilted beside it,

and something spilled

from the bottom—

 

a whiteness that flowed

on the ground

and froze into mist that

enveloped the world.

“The Dream of February.” Copyright © 1993 by John Haines. Reprinted from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Source: The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1993)





Monday, February 12, 2024

Gardening in January...and February

 


In January and in February it begins with a dream.  These grey days I look out at my garden and imagine all the activity going on under the leaf litter and cluttered sticks and twigs. Struggling right now with my desire to "leave the leaves" and follow the guidelines for "overwintering habitat" from the Xerces Society, and clean up some of the messiness.  My faithful friend Micah, the grounds guy in charge of the courtyard, is pushing for a cleanup. My other faithful friend, Sister Mary Jo, is urging me ( and him) to leave everything until the temperatures reach the fifties .


January got away from me, not because I was particularly busy, but because my mind was occupied with worrying over a situation in our house.  With one of the sisters who lives here, and who is having some serious physical and mental problems involving a hoarding disorder.  That's about all I can say about that in this semi-public forum.

art by Kat Fedora





Here are some wintry poems :

Winter Trees

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold.

 

art by Olaf Ulbricht


 

I Am Learning to Abandon the World

BY LINDA PASTAN

I am learning to abandon the world

before it can abandon me.

Already I have given up the moon

and snow, closing my shades

against the claims of white.

And the world has taken

my father, my friends.

I have given up melodic lines of hills,

moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.

And every night I give my body up

limb by limb, working upwards

across bone, towards the heart.

But morning comes with small

reprieves of coffee and birdsong.

A tree outside the window

which was simply shadow moments ago

takes back its branches twig

by leafy twig.

And as I take my body back

the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap

as if to make amends.

Linda Pastan, “I Am Learning to Abandon the World” from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982). Copyright © 1982 by Linda Pastan. Reprinted with the permission of the Jean V. Naggar Agency, Inc. on behalf of the author

 

art by Penny Gaj


Fairy Tale, by Miroslav Holub

He built himself a house,
                his foundations,
                his stones,
                his walls,
                his roof overhead,
                his chimney and smoke,
                his view from the window.

He made himself a garden,
                his fence,
                his thyme,
                his earthworm,
                his evening dew.

He cut out his bit of sky above.

And he wrapped the garden in the sky,
and the house in the garden
and packed the lot in a handkerchief
and went off
lone as an arctic fox
through the cold
unending
rain
into the world.

(Translated from the Czech by George Theiner, from The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1972)

 


Tomorrow is FatTuesday - Mardi Gras day...

and the next day is Ash Wednesday....And  Valentines Day...


Deborah Gregg -  Valentines




Sunday, January 7, 2024

A little snow

 Here are some lovely snow scenes from artists:

Alexis Lavine



January      by William Carlos Williams


Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision

outside my window:

                                  Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am

bound more to my sentences

the more you batter at me

to follow you.

                                  And the wind,

as before, fingers perfectly

its derisive music.








Olaf Ulbricht




 The Breathing     -  Denise Levertov, 

"An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear."
 



William H. Hayes


The snow was beautiful as it fell,  and as the temperature rose, it melted from the roads and sidewalks.




Winter happiness in Greece        by Jack Gilbert


“The world is beyond us even as we own it.

It is a hugeness in which we climb toward.

A place only the wind knows, the kingdom

of the moon which breathes a thousand years

at a time. Our soul and the body hold each other

tenderly in their arms like Charles Lamb

and his sister walking again to the madhouse.

Hand in hand, tears on their faces, him carrying

her suitcase. Blow after blow on our heart

as we grope through the flux for footholds,

grabbing for things that won’t pull loose.

They fail us time after time and we slide back

without understanding where we are going.

Remembering how the periodic table of the elements

didn’t fit the evidence for half a century.

Until they understood what isotopes were.”

 

 

Sunday, December 31, 2023

New Year's Eve

 

Vanessa Bowman


Maria Popova

Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.








What have I read this year?   I've re-read more things than I've read,  and re-listened to things that I've listened to many times over.


There are more, but I can't think of them at the moment.


As Maria Popova says, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.


So , what do I remember reading in the past 12 months?

Many New Yorker pieces, for sure.

Several pieces from The Atlantic, too.

What else?


Anyway, it's New Year's Eve, and I'm spending it at home. I was invited to a party, but one of the sisters here has RSV, and I don't want to take those viruses with me.

I had hoped to spend the day, a retreat day for the Daughters of Charity, meditating over this past year.

But one of our sisters had to be rushed to the hospital late last night, and the resulting activities here have kept me busy. She is 85 years old, and a very serious hoarder.  I won't go into the gory details here, but we've been cleaning out a small area of floor which was two feet deep in paper, shoes, cards, dirty clothes, etc.  And that was just a small part.  She will be in the hospital for a few days,  and we all dread her return here, when she sees that we've been intruding on her private space.  But when her private space is strewn with urine and feces, because she was so sick that she couldn't make it to the toilet, we really had to intrude on her private space. But enough on that.

Here's a poem by William Stafford:


Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

 

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

 

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

 

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

 

by William Stafford

 



It's been a terrible year in the world, full of violence and war, the hateful politics of the Republicans, and the threat of Donald Trump.




Here's a wonderful poem from Richard Wilbur:

Year’s End
Now winter downs the dying of the year, ​ ​
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show ​ ​
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, ​ ​
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin ​ ​
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell ​ ​
And held in ice as dancers in a spell ​ ​
Fluttered all winter long into a lake; ​ ​
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, ​ ​
They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns ​ ​
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone ​ ​
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown ​ ​
Composedly have made their long sojourns, ​ ​
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise ​ ​
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze ​ ​
The random hands, the loose unready eyes ​ ​
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause. ​ ​
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause ​ ​
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
Richard Wilbur (1921 - 2017)




rs