The air down here

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When the air is clear and dry, I don’t notice it, the air I mean. In September I notice instead the light, the way it falls shadowed on the drive next to the catalpa tree, or the way light inhabits leaves, along with their veins and squatters. I notice also the steady rasp that floats in currents and waves from the poplars by the pond. I stop, for that. I hear the screech of blue jays at Bishop the farm queen for being who she is, for they are who they are. I note the sun, the way it butters the meadow in its season of goldenrod and lace. I see white moths flaking the air, and countless, nameless flyers barely visible to me. I take note of the wind, the sensation of hair rising and falling on my neck and forehead as I watch sumac leaves rise and fall around swallows spiraling up. Sometimes I notice a stench, when a dead raccoon has begun decaying, and turkey buzzards circle down to commence their beautiful role, out of hunger, then preen for thirty minutes, later excreting what has been cleansed in them before delivering it back to their Earth.

But air? When it is July and humid I notice it, for then I lag under the oppression of moisture. But this substance I breathe in September, that would kill a glinty, sunny fish, what is it to me? Am I mindful that it is Life? When someone asks, If you were stranded on a desert island and could have just three things . . . do I think of air? The toupee of smog that hovers over Los Angeles where we lived when the children were born is a visible reminder that I live free and unhindered in a sheer garment that alters itself to my movements without scissors, stitches or darts. Without its molecules carrying vibrations to me, I would not hear the sounds of leaves, cicadas, birds, a stick snapping under my foot, a loved one speaking, or the strings and winds of Fauré's Sicilienne. I sleep, I breathe. I chop, cook, eat, I breathe. I read, write and speak, I breathe. I touch, smell, hear, listen, and I breathe. I walk and run, I breathe. I feel, I love, I breathe. I fall and ache and cry, I breathe. I think. I breathe.

And what do I give to this air that gives me the infinite and portable floor, walls and ceiling of my life? An exhalation: Thanks.

Post script: Today I messed around with GarageBand and recorded myself reading this piece. If you're interested in hearing me read "The air down here", go here. I prefer my voice with headphones.

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The walk . . . and Happy Birthday, Mary Oliver

                      . . . for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

- from Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot

Ever since my poetry teacher told me that she thought Four Quartets was the best, most important poem in the English language, I've intended to read it. One day I found it on the free book table in the big old dark hall outside my office at the university. It was strange, I thought, finding a discarded copy of the best poem in the English language. What English professor would cast it off that way? Oh well, my luck. Maybe they had an extra copy. The tiny black paperback volume sat for years on a small stack of books next to my telephone. Every morning when I listened to voice messages, I looked at the cover. It sat there, like my dad's tiny wooden screwdriver, photographs of my family, and a white piece of the refurbished Pont-neuf. The poem-book was something treasured, not for any personal reason yet, except that someone I thought highly of treasured it. At last, one lunch hour I picked it up and began to read, getting as far as the third page. I stopped reading because of the quote, above, on the second page, and another on the third. These were enough, I thought, for a while. This, my friends, is why I rarely finish books.

Then George posted about the poem Four Quartets, and because I like George and how he walks the world, I found my small black book, which had shifted from the desk next to my work phone to the dresser stack of books at home. I read it through (!). I went back and commented on George's post that I too was hooked. The poem would be a life-long friend.

About the quote, " . . . for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at . . . ," it's been working in my psyche all this time since first cracking the book open years ago. I was thinking about beauty in our culture, of the cost of it, the extent to which we will go to be looked at and admired. What hadn't occurred to me was that Eliot's little black poem-book had the look of flowers that are looked at, for me anyway. I didn't open it, read it and pull the words into my own flesh and blood, and maybe I wasn't ready. The quote on the third page that also paused me? "Garlic and sapphires in the mud". Catchy, a good title for a blog, I thought. But that line has also haunted my mind. It is the opener of a stanza that is like a free-standing poem in the bigger poem, an opaque passage, with too many words I don't understand. I don't know what Eliot meant by it. But today, after all this time and after reading the poem through now, these two lines together mean something like this to me: The stuff of life is what we walk through, what gets us dirty, what we wear out from frequent use, the things we treasure because we know them so well and soften up with our oily fingers. As Nanao Sakaki said, "Keep your feet muddy."

OK. So then, what? Help me get this from my head to real life. What are sapphires and garlic doing in the mud, and what does it mean to keep your feet muddy? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

* * *

That's where the post was going to end, and I was going to wait a couple of days to post it. After all, I don't post every day! Yikes. Lately it just seems there has been so much wanting to come out. But since writing the above, and then reading LoriKim's beautiful response (What about thorns?) at her blog A Year's Risings with Mary Oliver to a poem by Mary Oliver about roses, and because today is Mary Oliver's birthday, and because she is . . . is in the world, in me, expressing what floods from my heart every moment, I must post this today.
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Rowboat

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Rowboat

There is a life that was not meant for me,
of sailboats, and Nantucket shingles

of white shorts, white sails, white teeth, white gulls, the wind of the Cape,
the salt in the crab, the spit of the white bow piercing teal water,
of teak and polish and legs of sempiternal tan

I am not of pencil-thin
masts and marinas
clubbed, decked and chromed,
morning wedge of glint and beacon

But oh I am white
and privileged, without a doubt
peachy, the white of Lake Michigan sand,
of shells on that sand, striated with necklaces
of fine-grained earthery,
of peeling sun-blazed birch bark tree
organza diaphany,
skirt of light,
easy

I am of one rowboat
on one small lake, but infinite,
the rowboat of the patchwork paint,
of one broken oarlock,
of oars painted dove gray, one corner
of one oar missing,
with its splitting feathers
raised in the air

Water streaming down the oar-wing
onto my hand, paused
in one moment of many moments
and even more
and yes more
of airy moments
of leisure
of one coasting kind
or another

~ Ruth M.

Here me read the poem here.

Happy Birthday, Dee Dee.

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Back to School Lessons

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"I'm going to go lay down."

"Just what are you going to lay down?"

"Oh. I mean I'm going to go lie down."

Having a mom who was at times a substitute English teacher (among many other talents and training as a music teacher) meant that eventually, grammatically correct words fell from our lips as easily as maple leaves floating from black branches in September. To this day my three sisters like to hash out grammar questions and pet peeves. It's fun to listen. Lay and Lie are among their bugaboos. Not too many people get confused and say a chicken lies an egg. But when it comes to going to the couch for a nap, a lot of people say they're going to go lay down. Fingernails on a chalk board!

The fall semester has taken off in the English department like a big booming (and creaky) barge, and no doubt professors will be honking their grammar horns along the way, at lays that should be lies, thats that ought to be whiches, and infers, which should most emphatically be implies. The latter was one I had to learn from a professor honking at my term paper in which I wrote that I had implied such-and-such from the passage. He happens to be my boss now. (Embarrassing implication.)

But there is a far more important lesson with lay and lie for me to remember as the semester commences.  This barge will pick up cargo as it lumbers down the river. I need to load up my backpack and get off on the riverbank every now and then, lay down the big heavy load of the day, and lie down in the September grass. When I'm stressed, it helps at the end of the day when I've lain down (and laid down), to close my eyes, and practice this visualization:

There is a free-flowing stream running from my head down through the center of my body, and out my toes into the Earth. As I feel my muscles relax (especially my shoulders), I scan my mind for the burdens weighing me down. One by one, I place these worrisome morsels in the flow of my stream and watch them float away, down my body, and into the Earth's soft loam. When I've donated all my burdens to the Earth, I visualize Her transforming them back into something alive and nurturing, back up the stream in me. (Ohh, I thank Her.) If I haven't already drifted off in the stream of sleep, I am at least relaxed.

Won't you lie down, in this September grass? What about the ants, you ask? No worries. They don't mind working while we lay around, I mean lie around. There's plenty of room: Lay your burden down, and lie here in the grass with me, Bishop and James Taylor. I mean, with Bishop, James Taylor and me. We're so small and the world's so vast . . .

Scoot over, Bish.

I shot these photos of Bishop two years ago;

the leaves have only just begun to fall and are not this far along

September Grass

by James Taylor

Well, the sun's not so hot in the sky today

And you know I can see summertime slipping on away

A few more geese are gone, a few more leaves turning red

But the grass is as soft as a feather in a featherbed

So I'll be king and you'll be queen

Our kingdom's gonna be this little patch of green

Won't you lie down here right now

In this September grass

Won't you lie down with me now

September grass

Oh the memory is like the sweetest pain

Yeah, I kissed the girl at a football game

I can still smell the sweat and the grass stains

We walked home together. I was never the same.

But that was a long time ago

And where is she now? I don't know

Won't you lie down here right now

In this September grass

Won't you lie down with me now

September grass

Oh, September grass is the sweetest kind

It goes down easy like apple wine

Hope you don't mind if I pour you some

Made that much sweeter by the winter to come

Do you see those ants dancing on a blade of grass?

Do you know what I know? that's you and me, baby

We're so small and the world's so vast

We found each other down in the grass

Won't you lie down with me right here

September grass

Won't you lie down with me now

In this September grass

Lie down

Lie down

Lie down

Lie down

(repeat)

Won't you lie down here right now

In this September grass

Won't you lie down here now

In this September grass

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My tongue speaks French and Chinese

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Chinese long beans

I have tried to keep up with my personal farmer and his vegetable garden this summer by gathering and preparing the goods for the table. Just a few footsteps from our door we've picked strawberries, rhubarb, tomatoes -- green for frying and red, yellow and orange fresh or in sauce -- green & red peppers, jalapeños, banana peppers, kohlrabi (oh so crisply satisfying dipped in hummus), beets, peas, carrots, garlic, scallions, sweet corn, cucumbers, zucchini, bush beans and pole beans. From the herb bed: basil, parsley, thyme, chives, sage and rosemary.

While ordering seeds from his piles of catalogs back in January's blue ice days, Don discovered Chinese long beans and ordered some and even built a special trellis. These long beans are also known as long-podded cowpeas, asparagus beans, snake beans, chopstick beans, yardlong beans, dau gok in Cantonese and jiang dou (豇豆) in Standard Mandarin. They are thua fak yao (ถั่วฝักยาว) in Thai, right Dee Dee? (I sort of feel that I shouldn't say that out loud.) When the first beans were ready to pick, I was impressed with their length, but I asked myself, Does size matter? I am a green bean lover. When I go to Paris, a supper of haricots verts, baguette, Roquefort and a glass of red wine suits me very well after a day out on the rues. I like a thin, delicate bean, with a warm, mellow flavor and texture that is tender and smooth.

Chinese long beans next to a handful of bush beans; 

the long beans are about 18"

As we learned more about Chinese long beans, we discovered that they are all the rage in fancy restaurants. Chefs have fun sculpting them into different concoctions, like an entertainer does with balloon animals. I decided to create nests, and Don suggested the little onions that were strangely anchored on the surface of the soil under the scallion leaves, for "eggs".

I am trés heureux to report that Chinese long beans are délicieux! They are tender and warmly savory, the way haricots verts are. And you get to create something clever if you want. These are what I call bird's nest beans, which I believe my tongue tells me is les haricots verts d'un nid de l'oiseau in French and 鳥的巢穴豆子 in Chinese, but I could be wrong.

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The Season of Falling

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It is the season of falling.

Falling down. Falling apart. Falling in love. Falling into step. Falling by the side of the road. Falling out. There must be more falling idioms I'm not thinking of.

Pears are falling. Leaves, tomatoes and sunflowers too.

One of my treasures is a poem by James Dickey called “Falling.” This is the same James Dickey who wrote the 1970 novel Deliverance and also the screenplay for the culturally significant 1972 movie of the same name. At six pages in his book Poems, 1957-1967, the very last entry (I love that), the poem "Falling" is too long to post here. But please read it when you have a few minutes and if you are interested, here, because what Dickey managed in "Falling" is beyond what I can imagine having the skill and inspiration to do. He took a tragic prompt from a New York Times news story, of a stewardess who was sucked through the door of an airplane that suddenly opened in flight, and wrote a six-page poem describing her descent to earth. Six pages. On falling. I almost can't abide its frightening content, while at the same time coming back to its beauty and craft again and again.

. . . with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat

The undying cry of the void    falling    living     beginning to be something

That no one has ever been and lived through      screaming without enough air

Still neat    lipsticked    stockinged     girdled by regulation     her hat

Still on . . .

It's shocking, how a writer can connect us with an imagined experience. My friend Inge said over her Pinot Grigio this week that novels are about loss. She explained that while novels may be sad, or tragic, when we read them we find solace that we are not alone in our own losses and sorrows. I feel that poems are like this too. There are ways to find beauty in loss, in the shared experience of being human. Sometimes pages of a book are the friend we turn to, when we don’t want to explain anything, when we just want someone who understands, even someone fictional.

In spring, the natural world rises. Tiny, thin sprouts and foal legs sway in a breeze and in a few weeks become strong with fiber and bone. In autumn, part of Nature retreats. Even though trees and plants become still as they cycle into dormancy, life is ongoing, keeping on, in a needful rest. If I can, I always want to live where the seasons contrast in extremes. Maybe I see in that a comfort, that I too have wide variations in my self, differing needs in different seasons, be they for an hour, a day, or a year.

What falls, goes into the earth and becomes one with it, even nourishes and feeds it. Decay is as beautiful and life giving as tender green shoots. What we lose is still in us, and can nurture if we let it. Falling . . . living . . .

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Goldenrod, by Mary Oliver

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Goldenrod

On roadsides,
    in fall fields,
      in rumpy branches,
          saffron and orange and pale gold,

in little towers,
    soft as mash,
        sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
             full of bees and yellow beads and perfect flowerets

and orange butterflies.
    I don't suppose
       much notice comes of it, except for honey,
            and how it heartens the heart with its

blank blaze.
    I don't suppose anything loves it except, perhaps,
         the rocky voids
              filled by its dumb dazzle.

For myself,
    I was just passing by, when the wind flared
        and the blossoms rustled,
             and the glittering pandemonium

leaned on me.
    I was just minding my own business
          when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
              citron and butter-colored,

and was happy, and why not?
    Are not the difficult labors of our lives
        full of dark hours?
           And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
    All day
         on their airy backbones
             they toss in the wind,

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
    they rise in a stiff sweetness,
         in the pure peace of giving
            one's gold away.

~ Mary Oliver

The poem "Goldenrod" was published in New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992.

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