The immensely funny
play, The Beard of Avon, at the
relocated Pear Theater (still small, but maybe doubled in audience seating). Who was
that Shakespeare fellow, anyway?
For Shakespeare's
400th anniversary, deciding on my favorite of his lines. Out of some two dozen, I guess I'd have to
choose these, from the sonnet on my silver Möbius strip bracelet:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be
taken.
—Sonnet 116
Getting to hear Jane
Hirshfield read new poems, on campus.
And the comfort these last lines of her poem I've found again,
"Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape," brings:
And the heart, unscrolled,
is comforted by such small things:
a cup of green tea rescues us, grows deep and
large, a lake.
Getting to picnic
with friends, on grilled lamb and eggplant, charry baba ganoush, farro tabouli
with fresh mint, laughter and learning and the tiny fuzzy tickly feet of
caterpillars—the stuff of feasts.
Getting to lunch
with friends, at Chocolate on Pacific, and buy books next door at Bookshop
Santa Cruz. A spicy Fuego hot chocolate
to begin, and then grilled swordfish with lemon and capers, to celebrate an
April birthday. Watching the play of
surfers on the waves after, and then the afternoon sunlight all up the coast.
Getting to lunch
with yet another friend at Shoreline Park, looking out at a sailboat on the lake,
remembering wind in my sails, the play of water under me and all around. (Lake Merritt years ago, in college, coming
from that land-locked water-craving land.
Discovering also the campanile, frogs, philosophy, the letterpress,
shared balconies, Lord Peter Wimsey, the stone faun in the green courtyard
between dorms, blueberry doughnuts warm at midnight between bouts of studying.)
Orange tea buns,
made with buttery croissant dough.
Sitting at a breezy
table above the ocean at Pescadero, with sweaters, sandwiches, and books. The rock of cormorants like a lesson of
sorts, or a stanza. Something substantial
and specific to take note of.
Seeing the
sprightly over-90 Donald Pippin at his piano conducting our old favorite Pocket
Opera in the painted theater at the Legion of Honor on a Sunday afternoon.
While there, in
that Greece-like setting on pine-shaded cliffs over a farther sea, eating in
the walled patio (remembering the elderly couple drinking champagne that February
on the roof of the Uffizi in Florence), and seeing the light-drenched Bonnards
again.
The music of another
old favorite—Donizetti—whose home in Bergamo I once visited. His opera about the final love of Queen
Elizabeth, Roberto Devereux.
Juncoes outside the
front windows doing an exuberant dance of spring. Full of t(h)rills and breathless levitations
as a passage from Mozart.
How nice the washing
machine delivery guys were, despite the awful afternoon they'd had and our long
wait. Having it slip in easily, over the
grassy stones behind the house, and into place, the ancient dust mice swept
away with the green push broom.
Remembering Jane Hirshfield's poem about the clothes dryer.
When the body
dies, where will they go,
those migrant
birds and prayer calls,
as heat from
sheets when taken from a dryer?
(from "Three Mornings")
(Re)discovering the
paintings of Henri Le Sidaner.
The extravagant deep
purple blooming of the clematis on its lacy arbor against the house wall, and
the grace notes of the lighter purple blossoms.
image: Sunday, Henri Le Sidaner
