Lilacs

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,

Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle......and from this bush in the door-yard,

With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, 

A sprig, with its flower, I break.

—Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d

I caught a glimpse of lilacs this morning in a yard near the office; they are so rare here, they always surprise me and gladden my heart.  They are so evocative of Santa Fe, of growing up there and yearning for the future as I now yearn for the past.  In those “lilac years,” like the name of Gustave Baumann’s woodcut print of purple lilacs draped over typical coyote fences, the dusky flowers draped, dripped, poured out of gardens everywhere, all over town, as irrepressible as the beginning spring, with that haunting fragrance, promising things I didn’t then know how to name.

Lilacs are reminiscent of the old world, too, carrying with them memories of old-world gardens left behind.  It was Bishop Lamy (famous from Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop) who brought lilacs to Santa Fe:

 “In the summer of 1867, following a journey to Rome and a stopover in his native France, he started over the Santa Fe Trail to return to New Mexico. In his supply wagon were precious cuttings of French lilacs.”

images:  Heirloom Lilacs, Michael Weishan

A Lilac Year, Gustave Baumann

Muddlement

A morning devoid of inspiration, which leads me to wonder what might in fact inspire me.

I think of a cabin I once visited on weekends at the Russian River, on Cazadero Creek, with sunlight coming dappled through the redwoods and the water slow, purling (or even pearling), green as I remember it, offering quiet advice.  One particular morning I could hear Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto coming from the cabin across the creek through an open window or door; I absorbed it utterly, like an eager sponge, and was quite prefectly happy—until I was interrupted, disturbed.  

I think that’s what I need now, more than anything:  clarity of mind, which is only going to come from quiet, solitary actions.  Avoiding the disturbances.  Walking in the woods (such as they are here); finding a little chuckling stream or maybe fountain; letting the confusion of work and obligations and unwanted distractions settle, the muddy thoughts clear.  A week at Tassajara would be perfect, or a week on the long-lost Mallorcan hilltop swathed in olives and aleppo pine.  

But if retreat isn’t possible, I guess the only answer is a strategic advance.  Walking this muddled mood out; leaving this troubled inner place behind, to arrive at another.  Music too might help. Something as lucid as the Emperor Concerto or sunny as Mozart.  The water-glimmer of a piano.

image:  Gustav Klimt, The Park of Schloss Kammer

Thought for the Day

 

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

—Joseph Campbell






image:  Marc Chagall

Easter

La fête de Pâques:  c’est une bonne idée.

Easter:  it's a bunny day.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Easter Eggs

She Sings!

Spring! And Earth is like a child
who has learned many poems by heart.
For the trouble of that long learning
she wins the prize.

Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
of the old man's beard. Now we can ask her
the many names of green, of blue,
and she knows them, she knows them!

Earth, school is out now. You're free
to play with the children. We'll catch you,
joyous Earth. The happiest will catch you!

All that the teacher taught her—the many thoughts
pressed now into roots and long
tough stems: she sings! She sings!

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 21

(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Eggs

Friday Calm: Reading

Reading on the bank of a slow river . . .  what greater calm can there be?

On a spring day such as this, I’m remembering as if I’d eaten it myself the simple Parisian omelette which struck me with such force in Henry James’s wistful The Ambassadors when I read it many springs ago, wistful too, and has stayed with me all these years (feeding some kind of aesthetic hunger).

It was on this pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they eventually seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a window adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where, for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving deep, Strether was to feel he had touched bottom. He was to feel many things on this occasion, and one of the first of them was that he had travelled far since that evening in London, before the theatre, when his dinner with Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had struck him as requiring so many explanations.

. . .

He, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright clean ordered water-side life came in at the open window?— the mere way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her grey eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his face and their human questions.

image:  Theodore Robinson, La Roche Guyon, Brooklyn Museum

Wisteria

Today I’m celebrating the wisteria that’s in bloom all over the cover to the trashcans, gladly abetting me in my efforts to ignore what isn’t worth my limited energy or attention.

Field Guide

No one I ask knows the name of the flower
we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick
and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.

I am passing through the needle of spring
in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south
as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs
and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas

and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport
to return to where this purple madness is not seen
blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the
   roadside.

On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer
my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave
the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.

Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger
looks up from his magazine and says wisteria. 

—Billy Collins

I’m not sure the flower Billy Collins saw along the southern road was really wisteria, away from its usual trellis, but I’ve had that same experience with purple flowers spotted in a foreign land, hungry for their name.  Mine, in Canada, turned out to be fireweed.  I’m not sure how I finally tracked that down, but it made a surprising difference to be able to call it what others did.

image:  Wisteria sinensis, Christer Johansson

Back to Blossoms

Sorry—that last post was too wintry, and lowers my spirits!  (Though the photo was taken in July.)  Here's a Monet orchard to get us back on track.

Happy poetry month!

image:  Claude Monet, Orchard in Bloom

Thought for the Day

 The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

—St. Augustine





image:  Christie B. Cochrell, St. Bernard Monastery

Sunday Morning

Sunday Morning With The Sensational Nightingales   

It was not the Five Mississippi Blind Boys

who lifted me off the ground
that Sunday morning
as I drove down for the paper, some oranges, and bread.
Nor was it the Dixie Hummingbirds
or the Soul Stirrers, despite their quickening name,
or even the Swan Silvertones
who inspired me to look over the commotion of trees
into the open vault of the sky.

No, it was the Sensational Nightingales
who happened to be singing on the gospel
station early that Sunday morning
and must be credited with the bumping up
of my spirit, the arousal of the mice within.

I have always loved this harmony,
like four, sometimes five trains running
side by side over a contoured landscape––
make that a shimmering, red-dirt landscape,
wildflowers growing along the silver tracks,
lace tablecloths covering the hills,
the men and women in white shirts and dresses
walking in the direction of a tall steeple.
Sunday morning in a perfect Georgia.

But I am not here to describe the sound
of the falsetto whine, sepulchral bass,
alto and tenor fitted snugly in between;
only to witness my own minor ascension
that morning as they sang, so parallel,
about the usual themes,
the garden of suffering,
the beads of blood on the forehead,
the stone before the hillside tomb,
and the ancient rolling waters
we would all have to cross some day.

God bless the Sensational Nightingales,
I thought as I turned up the volume,
God bless their families and their powder blue suits.
They are a far cry from the quiet kneeling
I was raised with,
a far, hand-clapping cry from the candles
that glowed in the alcoves
and the fixed eyes of saints staring down
from their corners.

Oh, my cap was on straight that Sunday morning
and I was fine keeping the car on the road.
No one would ever have guessed
I was being lifted into the air by nightingales,
hoisted by their beaks like a long banner
that curls across an empty blue sky,
caught up in the annunciation
of these high, most encouraging tidings. 

—Billy Collins

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Amandier en fleurs