Mar loved all the chance discoveries, the truths she came on for herself within or beyond the stories. The things that made the pursuit memorable for her—whether a tone of light or a smell or a stolen glimpse into a half-opened doorway on a street named for an ancient shipbuilder; something that amused or touched her, somehow, however small or momentary. But somehow right for what she was after. Standing at Epidaurus, within the fragrance of the pines and flowering trees, the humming chorus of cicadas, she had experienced a feeling of immense well-being, and felt that of course Asclepius’s sanctuary had to have been there, the god of healing connected with a place so redolent of health. Epidaurus would forever after be the pine smell, pitch and gracefully splayed needles bruised to pungency by her thumbnail. Coming back from Sounion, the place of watching, where she’d gone to see the famous Temple of Poseidon and take her pictures, the bus had passed through what she had immediately thought of as the district of lambs on a spit (grilling, browning, in shop fronts all along the street). On impulse she got off to wander there and found a taverna called Friends of the Fish—delighted details of Greek life that would stand out in her memory in connection with her journey down to the temple on its high lonely promontory, complementing the overarching story of the heartbroken king.
And now this afternoon in the leafy arbor would lay itself gently over the faded underlayer of dried thyme and disappointment and be Phaestos for her—laughter playing among the serious old stones, like the children in the grassy wastes of the stadium. Many truths, and what you want to make of them. Or what you could.
Terns
Don't think just now of the trudging forward of thought,
but of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation.
It's summer, you never saw such a blue sky,
and here they are, those white birds with quick wings,
sweeping over the waves,
chattering and plunging,
their thin beaks snapping, their hard eyes
happy as little nails.
The years to come -- this is a promise --
will grant you ample time
to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought
where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.
But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,
than this deep affinity between your eyes and the world.
The flock thickens
over the roiling, salt brightness. Listen,
maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world
in the clasp of attention, isn't the perfect prayer,
but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,
is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,
but of pure submission. Tell me, what else
could beauty be for? And now the tide
is at its very crown,
the white birds sprinkle down,
gathering up the loose silver, rising
as if weightless. It isn't instruction, or a parable.
It isn't for any vanity or ambition
except for the one allowed, to stay alive.
It's only a nimble frolic
over the waves. And you find, for hours,
you cannot even remember the questions
that weigh so in your mind.
~ Mary Oliver ~
(from New and Selected Poems, Volume Two)
Like the colors of an old fresco under layers of newer paint, words of my seventh-grade Spanish begin to show spookily through the later layers of Italian, French. They come almost as soon as we land on Mallorca, as if they’ve been here waiting for me all this time, letting me know I’ve been a long time coming. It is a little unnerving to find them ready to pick up again where we left off. I have not spoken Spanish for more than thirty years, but it was the language I learned first and most comprehensively, subjunctive tenses and all, and here it is again—the words rising effortlessly to the surface, however patchily. Quizás, demasiado, Londres, izquierdo, estoy. Maybe, too much, London, left-hand, I am (if only temporarily). Have they been here all this time, I wonder? What doing, who talking to? What will they tell me?
This Much I Do Remember
It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.
All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of you shoulders
that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way that stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.
Then all of the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all of the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.
Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.
—Billy Collins
 |
| the embodiment of calm |
Istanbul
It was a pleasure to enter by a side street
in the center of the city
a bathhouse said to be 300 years old,
old enough to have opened the pores of Florence Nightingale
and soaped the musical head of Franz Liszt.
And it was a pleasure to drink
cold wine by a low wood fire
before being directed to a small room in an upper gallery,
a room with a carpet and a narrow bed
where I folded my clothes into a pile
then came back down, naked
except for a gauzy striped cloth tucked around my waist.
It was an odd and eye-opening sensation
to be led by a man with close-cropped hair
and spaces between his teeth
into a steamy marble rotunda
and to lie there alone on the smooth marble
watching the droplets fall through the beams
of natural light in the high dome
and later to hear the song I sang –
‘She Thinks I Still Care’ – echo up into the ceiling.
I felt like the last of the sultans
when the man returned and began to scrub me –
to lather and douse me, scour and shampoo me,
and splash my drenched body
with fresh warm water scooped from a marble basin.
But it was not until he sudsed me
behind my ears and between my toes
that I felt myself filling with gratitude
the way a cloud fills with rain,
the way a glass pipe slowly fills with smoke.
In silence I thanked the man
who scrubbed the bottoms of my feet.
I thanked the history of the Turkish bath
and the long chain of bathmen standing unshaven,
arms folded, waiting for the next customer
to come through the swinging doors of frosted glass.
I thanked everyone whose job
it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers,
and I gave general thanks that I was lying
facedown in a warm puddle of soap
and not a warm puddle of blood
in some corner of this incomprehensible city.
As one bucket after another
of warm water was poured over my lowered head,
I stopped thinking of who and what to thank
and rode out on a boat of joy,
a blue boat of marble and soap,
rode out to the entrance of the harbour
where I raised a finger of good-bye
then felt the boat begin to rise and fall
as it met the roll of the incoming waves,
bearing my body, my clean, blessed body out to sea.
(Billy Collins)
It’s not easy to tell which end
is which of a resting snail.
(Kyorai)
 | |||
| "So wonderfully Wabi-Sabi" |
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside
