In Celebration of the Flaw

Which of us is or wants to be perfect?  Our charm, our quintessence, appears exactly where the pattern deviates, where the leveling regularity is left behind.  What makes us who we are is our own peculiar collection of warts—those crooked little fingers we inherited from our grandmother, our gap-toothed smile, our inability to ride a bicycle, to carry a tune, to pronounce "r"s in French, to suffer fools gladly, to disappear into the crowd.  Our flaws distinguish us.


The Flaw

The best thing about a hand-made pattern
is the flaw.
Sooner or later in a hand-loomed rug,
among the squares and flattened triangles,
a little red nub might soar above a blue field,
or a purple cross might sneak in between
the neat ochre teeth of the border.
The flaw we live by, the wrong color floss,
now wreathes among the uniform strands
and, because it does not match,
makes a red bird fly,
turning blue field into sky.
It is almost, after long silence, a word
spoken aloud, a hand saying through the flaw,
I’m alive, discovered by your eye.

—Molly Peacock

image:  slight flaw in Kayseri prayer rug, kaiser kuo

Joies de Vivre: Bed-time Reading

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.” —Vladimir Nabokov

image:  The Bed-time Book, Jessie Wilcox Smith

A Cow from the Back of Beyond

The area around Hadrian’s Wall, the liminal borderland at the edges of the map of ancient England, of the extensive Roman Empire, did not contain the monsters drawn into the farthest reaches of explorers’ maps—only this amiable cow, and other affable creatures.

I would love to be wandering there today, enjoying the greenery and light rain and a prawn sandwich—or egg and cress.

Instead I am lazing here, reading a new mystery in the company of the vicar (or canon, actually) of Grantchester.  The toasted brown hills of California in the summer are far indeed from the thirty shades of green that paint the English landscape, and the calling of the sheep one to another reaches me only faintly, in my “mind’s ear.”

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ancient British Cow

So Many Things

Some things that make me happy:

cool summer mornings

wrens

grilled eggplant

starting a new book

the color of nasturtiums

Maya spiced chocolate

the smell of rain on a dirt path

Mesa Verde

wandering around Aosta

friends being happy

linguini con vongole

blackberry Hint

the sound of water sprinklers

clean white pillowcases

feeling a dog’s cold nose against my cheek

cherries

Marcovaldo

tubes of watercolor paints

the thought of being in this yellow room

having so many things that make me happy

image:  hdwallpapers . com

Summer's Drenched Palette

Everything is looking bleached-out here, and I remember how, by contrast, colors seem to deepen in the heat of Santa Fe summers, becoming almost impossibly intense, drenched.

That same quality (like moving the "saturation" bar daringly over to the far right in Photoshop) is evident in this lush passage:

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Santa Fe Colors

Light through Glass

Light through glass—the two elements complementing and completing each other.  An alchemy to something fine and transformative of the spirit as well.  Roman glass seems to have absorbed the light into itself over the aeons. Stained glass—glass colored with metallic salts— has radiated spiritual grace in churches and cathedrals since medieval times.  Light itself is holy, but in glass it is somehow utterly exalted.




image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Light through Glass

The Oak That Still Eludes Me

After coffee in my hand-painted Italian mug, and nice sweet apricots and peach slices, but while remembrance of the night’s fog was still on the morning, I walked down our little pine- and oleander-lined lane then crossed Arrastradero and walked on shaded horse trails of soft earth and pine needles up past the riding stables, the row of multicolored wooden stalls, early riders out with their palominos or bays, on up the muddy rutted road to the upper paddock, to get some pictures of the oak that always catches my attention on the hill—a quintessential oak (though oddly misshapen from the other side, like being as we were once on the wrong side of the Matterhorn unable to make out its famous profile), the one that reminds me of the excellent tree in the model riding stable I so coveted as a child, the one I put into a poem as possible savior at the end, unable to decide whether that oakly spread of its branches, the lovely characteristic shape, is best described as outstretched, outspread, held out, extended. None quite right; none doing it artistic justice.  

The sun was in the wrong place for taking pictures, and one evening I’ll have to go back at twilight and catch the fine black silhouette of that oak against the last light of the day, the hills fading into indistinction.  But I got my morning walk, some communion with trees (and ground squirrels, hawks, the watching horses), and returned home ready for cold tea and writing.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Oak, Morning, Blue

Spelling Out the Names

The Names

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name—
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner—
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening—weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds—

Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

—Billy Collins

image:  Hidden Names Found, Goole – Howden Courier

Romance Sans Paroles

I can dream, can't I?  

The romance of a far sea with fairy lights and fresh fish and cold Greek wine and not a single word all night about the everyday reality that has no place in whatever land this is, nameless and pine-hushed.  

Not The Tempest, with its hectic enchantments, but the calm after the storm, the refuge at week's end, at land's end.  A play that would hold no one's interest but mine, because it would have no unhappy or upsetting goings-on—only sheer poetry.  Or maybe utter silence.  Or the music of the soughing wind and waves (like the wonderful sound poem recorded in Il Postino).

image:  Ana Georgeta, A Room with a View

The Lost Island of Childhood

Clean sheets hung out on the clothesline—like sails filling with wind, carrying me in zig-zag line across the wide waters of memory back to the island of my childhood, where everything was safe and ruled with love and in the summer dazzling with sun and ever-stretching time.

I’ve fallen in love with other islands over the years, reached on the blithe white wings of sails or by more mundane transport, once that first and best island proved impossible to get back to— vanished as surely as Atlantis (more absolutely, in fact, since I’ve stood looking at the uncovered ruins of what I’m convinced was Atlantis, on the sheer cliffs of Santorini).

A journey back in time, carried swiftly away from my charted morning commute by those gauzy white sheets.

image: White muslin sheets hanging on a washing line, blowing in the wind, in a backyard in Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia. Hanging baskets are also attached to the line.  DahliyaniBriedis