As If to Demonstrate

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse

I pick an orange from a wicker basket

and place it on the table

to represent the sun.

Then down at the other end

a blue and white marble

becomes the earth

and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,

open a bottle of wine,

then I sit in a ladder-back chair,

a benevolent god presiding

over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing

a homemade canticle of thanks

for this perfect little arrangement,

for not making the earth too hot or cold

not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees

and the owl become possible,

not to mention the rolling wave,

the play of clouds, geese in flight,

and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again

and give thanks for the trout,

the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,

as sun and earth and moon

circle one another in their impeccable orbit

and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

—Billy Collins

La Vie en Ambre

Away for the weekend, and gratefully back home here to the coast, where I'm nesting again.

Making a chicken and farro salad with green beans, goat cheese, marjoram.  With shallots—always tantalizingly mythical, redolent of the Victorian poets, alchemizing those Medieval and Arthurian elements.  A kind of amber skin, amber a kind of alchemy as well, fossilized tree resin holding inside it flowers, fruit, feathers, insects, crustaceans, spider webs, healing, history, life itself.

Getting ready to read The Cleaner of Chartres, by Salley Vickers (having loved Miss Garnet's Angel, set in Venice, holding inside its own amber heart the Archangel Raphael and the restoration of a 14th-century chapel).

I have lived by the sundial motto, "Count none but the sunny hours," and am pleased to learn there is a rose for such as me, named Amber Sun.

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Sundial

Amber Sun rose

Beyond the Dusk

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

(William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)

With August comes an awareness of summer, summer no longer mid-, but in decline, on its long, slow way out, burning itself up as it goes.  There is a great nostalgia in it, wistful sadness for the waking glory lost, the potential more than likely unfulfilled, fading and making-do begun.

As I have said before, to me The Sound and the Fury captures the feeling of summer as nothing else can, the quintessence of summer.  So I must either read it again now, for the umpteenth time, or try Light in August for a change.

image:  James McNeill Whister, Nocturne, Grey and Silver