the sea

Kobe and the Sea : Ben Shewry from Johnny Abegg Films on Vimeo.

This is pretty much how I would like to spend 2012.

the end of the year

This is my favorite time of the year. I've made it through the holiday parties and expectations of Christmas. I can relax again and just be myself. This morning I dropped Tadzio off at a friend's stable (I love abandoning him with a bunch of girls and horses) and went back home to make a cup of tea and begin reading through the stack of books that are piled next to my bed.

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You’ve fetched a duvet and laid it

lightly over the shoulders
of someone beside you who’s slipped
unwittingly into sleep.
And drifting off yourself
on a sofa somewhere you’ve sensed
the same weight settle and known
how the warmth around you will soon
deepen your sleep. And that’s something,
whatever else you’ve done or not done.

Michael Laskey's "The Right Place"
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moon, weather, windows

Mei-mei,what follows is autumn
Sleep with closed lips, and tenderness

Tender is your scarf, to and fro, in the breeze
What follows is 
The palm of my hand - warm and full of memory

Not you, it's a garden that I am watering
Mei-mei, a safe place is spacious
On those delicate petals, what follows is
A silent, fleeting message

Moon, weather, windows lightly open
Clear bright lake
Close your eyes, Mei-mei
What follows is 
A gentle rainfall
And my feelings hurt suddenly by the leaves

-Zheng Danyi

Halloween, Ohio, and an Appropriately Named Lake

See, I've reserved Lake Erie for us,
and as we push away in our canoe, our eyes
touch everything, and it turns to costume.
The sky is a negative of a ghost, a black sheet
with star-slits for eyes, the lighthouse a hero
flashing his x-ray eye, and the flagpole on the shore
is the world's tallest matador waving, Ole! Ole! Ole!

Forgive me. I'm from a state shaped like a heart,
and this thought raises my soul as though by séance:
the seaweed bending in our direction, extending a dance,
the undead eyes of infinite fish surrounding us. And me,
setting aside my oar, bobbing for you Adam's apple,
whispering, See what a haunted house my arms make.
Then like a bully child: I dare you. Spend one night inside.

Stacy Gnall, excerpt from Halloween, Ohio, and an Appropriately Named Lake

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I scrub and lather him like a salmon

until he spits
soapy water. "Pig" I smile—

This man smells better than his country
I throw his shoes
and glasses in the air,

take off his t-shirt and socks, and kneel
in honor of Sasha Petrov
who was amputated, in honor of Lesha Vatkii the taken.

I dip a glass in a bath-tub,
drink dirty water.
Soaping together—that

is sacred to me. Washing mouths together.
You can fuck
anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?

And the cuddling up
before sleep!—and back-scratching
in the morning. My back, not yours!

I knew I had caught the fish
and he knew he had been caught.
He sings as I dry his chest & penis

"Sonya, I was a glad man with you—"

Ilya Kaminsky's "After Sonya, Bombardment"

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It shows no hours, only tides and moons

Doing what the moon says, he shifts his chair
Closer to the stove and stokes it up
With the very best fuel, a mixture of dried fish
And tobacco he keeps in a bucket with crabs

Too small to eat. One raises its pincer
As if to seize hold of the crescent moon
On the calendar which is almost like a zodiac
With inexplicable and pallid blanks. Meanwhile

A lobster is crawling towards the clever
Bait that is set inside the clock
On the shelf by the wireless—an inherited dried fish
Soaked in whisky and carefully trimmed

With potato flowers from the Golden Wonders
The old man grows inside his ears.
Click! goes the clock-lid, and the unfortunate lobster
Finds itself a prisoner inside the clock,

An adapted cuckoo-clock. It shows no hours, only
Tides and moons and is fitted out
With two little saucers, one of salt and one of water
For the lobster to live on while, each quarter-tide,

It must stick its head through the tiny trapdoor
Meant for the cuckoo. It will be trained to read
The broken barometer and wave its whiskers
To Scottish Dance Music, till it grows too old.

Then the old man will have to catch himself another lobster.
Meanwhile he is happy and takes the clock
Down to the sea. He stands and oils it
In a little rock pool that reflects the moon.

Ian Hamilton Finlay "Orkney Interior"

you drank a toast to him, and summer-time

In the window of the drawing-room
there is a rush of white as you pass
in which the figure of your husband is,
for a moment, framed. He is watching you.

His father will come, of course,
and, although you had not planned it,
his beard will offset your lace dress,
and always it will seem that you were friends.

All morning, you had prepared the house
and now you have stepped out
to make sure that everything
is in its proper place: the railings whitened,

fresh gravel on the avenue, the glasshouse
crystal when you stand in the courtyard
expecting the carriage to arrive at any moment.
You are pleased with the day, all month it has been warm.

They say it will be one of the hottest summers
the world has ever known.
Today, your son is one year old.
Later, you will try to recall

how he felt in your arms—
the weight of him, the way he turned to you from sleep,
the exact moment when you knew he would cry
and the photograph be lost.

But it is not lost.
You stand, a well-appointed group
with an air of being pleasantly surprised.
You will come to love this photograph

and will remember how, when he had finished,
you invited the photographer inside
and how, in celebration of the day,
you drank a toast to him, and summer-time.

Vona Groarke "The Family Photograph"


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A Shower of Summer Days

Violet had insisted that she must be allowed to do the flowers in peace before they started out on their long drive to town and to the mountains the next morning. And now she was standing before the piles of snapdragons, their heads heavy with rain, before the few tall spires of larkspur she had been able to save, and the careful faces of the zinnias (rain did not crumple them!) spread out on damp newspapers, covering almost the whole of the table in the study. At her feet she threw the withered stalks from the bunch which had stood there gradually disintegrating for the last two days. Sometimes the fugitive nature of this work into which she put so much thought and care depressed Violet. This was one of those days. They fade so fast, she was thinking. But what a rest it was to be arranging these passive stalks and stems, what a refuge from life with people who never stay put, who developed resentments and jealousies, or began to make demands just when one thought everything was settled.

May Sarton's "A Shower of Summer Days"

Coucou, I'm back after several weeks of adventure. To sum it up quickly, for the past three weeks I've been caring for large bands of children and trying to organize French people into a collective endeavour to start a public French immersion school. I'm happy to report that so far my efforts have been successful (although people never stay put!). And at one point, the highlight perhaps, there was even a pony.

Like Violet in Sarton's novel, I am ready to sit quietly and build my bouquet.

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Mozart in E-flat Major

I turn around.
I fell Monday's well-shaven face lightly
caress my left shoulder

most cherished part
most crucial here and now

Hsia Yu

Image via Audrey Hepburn Complex

Each time you leave, something is lost

I’m the sort of person who sits with her coat on, always ready to leave. It’s a tendency of heart passed on from my parents, who no doubt learned it from their parents. The problem is that each time you leave, something is lost: a ring, a tooth, a last name. Some things replace themselves, but many things do not. At some point I realized that if I kept on living like this, always on the cusp of leaving, I was going to find myself completely alone at ninety sitting in a cramped room in a distant country, unable to speak the language. A small mining town in China, perhaps. So I have given myself the task of learning to stay. This is no small task. There is always the inclination to bolt or simply wander off when things become uncomfortable.

Image by Dusdin Condren

and you felt the old tug at your ankles

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver "The Journey"

Image by Gary Isaac

Wesak

Happy birthday, Buddha. Today we celebrated Wesak, the festival of Buddha’s birth. This is a very precious time when the entire community — adults and kids, parents and those without children — celebrate together. In most forms of Buddhism, the festival of Wesak centers on children. This meant far more to me than a mother's day brunch, and I ate cake before noon.

image by Sarah Jaensch

avignon

"The sound of church bells and a procession of school kids dressed in black headed toward the end of the street where a wide set of stairs wrapped around the exterior of an ancient building.

I caught up and quickly passed without giving them a glance, climbed the stairs and waited at the half way point for them to pass me.

I held my camera low figuring i’d leave it mostly to chance.

Once past the last child gave me a face and stuck her tongue out. I stuck my tongue out in kind and she turned away laughing."

Photo and Text by Gary Issac

Happy Mother's day, tout le monde.

like the passionate daughter of a lighthouse keeper

It is a bright house;
not a single room is dim.
It is a house which rises high
on the cliffs, open
as a lookout tower.

When the night comes
I put a light in it,
a light larger than the sun and the moon.

Think
how my heart leaps
when my trembling fingers
strike a match in the evening.

I lift my breasts
and inhale and exhale the sound of love
like the passionate daughter of a lighthouse keeper.

It is a bright house.
I will create in it
a world no man can ever build.

-Fukao Sumako "Bright House" translated by Kenneth Rexroth

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Compared to the pain Tsugumi gives me, this is nothing at all

Everyone gets annoyed about something at least once a day, me included. But I noticed there was something I did whenever this happened to me - that there was a sentence I would start chanting over and over deep down inside, like a sort of Buddhist chant, without even realizing that I was doing it. Compared to the pain Tsugumi gives me, this is nothing at all. It seemed that during the years I spent with Tsugumi, my body had come to understand in a hazy sort of way that, in the end, getting worked up really doesn't take you anywhere. And there was something else that I understood as I stared into the orange light of the gradually darkening sky - something that made me feel sort of like I wanted to cry.

Excerpt from Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich.

Rereading a favorite Yoshimoto book this sunny afternoon. This story has always been poignant, but recent events has made this even more true. Sitting here I can imagine Tsugumi's response to my musings, probably something along the lines of , "God you're a moron! Keep your mouth shut unless you've got something worth saying." Gallant, wise, and surprisingly unpleasant, Tsugumi is one of my literary heros.

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The best way to eat squid is to catch it first

best if you pull it out of the dripping net yourself,
a gift you didn’t ask for among the ordinary
bone-filled catch you did, and the purple sea-stars, inedible
bad luck you didn’t deserve.
Next to eat squid you waste a fire
To coals, nestling the flaccid bodies
Into the earth for as long as it takes, usually
long. Finally you may eat the small charred
legs, one by one, working your way
to the ink-filled heart. This is a shared
humiliation, and at this stage you are obliged
to press your lips to any nearby lover,
mark him as indelibly as you can.

Suzanne Matson "Squid"

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a wedding in a field-the old saying:

 it's good luck to be seen from a train dressed in white, you must be looking the other way, so many things work only if you're looking away. A woman in a field is walking away.
Gardens early in the evening. Trees
planted a few hundred years ago to line a road no longer there
. The water is pale teal, light, field after field. Spire, steeple, sea

of trees that line roads long disappeared along with their houses, which were
great houses in their time.

Cole Swensen from "Five Landscapes Two"

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To have picked up my heavy hem and run

To have been age enough.
To have been leg enough.
Been enough bold. Said no.
Been a girl grown into that
negative construction. Or said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
celestial, appealed for planetary pleats.
And when you saw the sun a sequin,
the moon a button shaped from glass,
and in the stars a pattern
for a dress, when the commission
proved too minute, and the frocks
hung before me like hosts,
to have stood then at the edge
of the wood, heard a hound’s bark
and my heart hark in return.
To have seen asylum in the scruffs
of neck—mink, lynx, ocelot, fox,
Kodiak, ermine, wolf—felt a claw
curve over my sorrow then. Said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.

-Stacy Gnall excerpt from "Self-Portrait as Thousandfurs"

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the sound of the grass growing in the sun

Oh you will wake up some morning
to the sound of the grass growing in the sun
Oh your hair became darker
And your head is riding higher than it’s ever been
Oh your legs are running
And your stride is wider
Wider than you’ve ever known,
Oh the robins flying are
Building their nests out of your childhood.

-Joseph Pintauro “Box of Sun”

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Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Mary Oliver "The Swan"
Image by Laura Makabrescu

I never though Michiko would come back

after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody's dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.

Jack Gilbert "The Great Fires"

Images via Beklina and We Heart It

The Very Nervous Family

Mr. Horowitz clutches a bag of dried apricots to his chest. Although the sun is shining, there will probably be a storm. Electricity will be lost. Possibly forever. When this happens the very nervous family will be the last to starve. Because of the apricots. "Unless," says Mrs. Horowitz, "the authorities confiscate the apricots." Mr. Horowitz clutches the bag of dried apricots tighter. He should've bought two bags. One for the authorities and one for his very nervous family. Mrs. Horowitz would dead bolt the front door to keep the authorities out, but it is already bolted. Already dead. She doesn't like that phrase. Dead bolt. It reminds her of getting shot before you even have a chance to run. "Everyone should have at least a chance to run," says Mrs. Horowitz. "Don't you agree, Mr. Horowitz?" Mrs. Horowitz always refers to her husband as Mr. Horowitz should they ever one day become strangers to each other. Mr. Horowitz agrees. When the authorities come they should give the Horowitzs a chance to run before they shoot them for the apricots. Eli Horowitz, their very nervous son, rushes in with his knitting. "Do not rush," says Mr. Horowitz, "you will fall and you will die." Eli wanted ice skates for his birthday. "We are not a family who ice skates!" shouts Mrs. Horowitz. She is not angry. She is a mother who simply does not wish to outlive her only son. Mrs. Horowitz gathers her very nervous son up in her arms, and gently explains that families who ice skate become the ice they slip on. The cracks they fall through. The frost that bites them. "We have survived this long to become our own demise?" asks Mrs. Horowitz. "No," whispers Eli, "we have not." Mr. Horowitz removes one dried apricot from the bag and nervously begins to pet it when Mrs. Horowitz suddenly gasps. She thinks she may have forgotten to buy milk. Without milk they will choke on the apricots. Eli rushes to the freezer with his knitting. There is milk. The whole freezer is stuffed with milk. Eli removes a frozen half pint and glides it across the kitchen table. It is like the milk is skating. He wishes he were milk. Brave milk. He throws the half pint on the floor and stomps on it. Now the milk is crushed. Now the milk is dead. Now the Horowitzs are that much closer to choking. Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz are dumbfounded. Their very nervous son might be a maniac. He is eight. God is punishing them for being survivors. God has given them a maniac for a son. All they ask is that they not starve, and now their only son is killing milk. Who will marry their maniac? No one. Who will mother their grandchildren? There will be no grandchildren. All they ask is that there is something left of them when they are shot for the apricots, but now their only son is a maniac who will give them no grandchildren. Mr. Horowitz considers leaving Eli behind when he and Mrs. Horowitz run for their lives.

Sabrina Orah Mark "The Very Nervous Family"

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In my good night's sleep

In my good night's
sleep high tide
of my dearest rancor turns.

Nary a moon
shied me any glint of it.
Then this little shift,

fish switched its
dorsal ripple opposite;
slack took over. Black water,

blood flavor, settles off
shouldering stone. Reliefs
of ribbed sand rise.

Out to sea slides
flood temperament; it tows
some wrack along as some

lapses to drain behind:
dainty placations kinked in matted
sargassum, mineral chimes.

Martha Zweig "Ebb"

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a robin is ruffling its feathers

The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.

-Mary Ruefle, The Hand

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I had a canoe that took me into the forest I read about

It was fleet and I asked no questions. I saw the careless embroidery of the sky above me. I was small. I was embracing. And I was dear all my life. My instrument is silent. I never learned to play. But it sits poised in my arms like an amber deer that I'll give my life for. What does it sound like? Why haven't I tried?

She crept into my arms like a red flower a stranger gives me. She is tame and soft. In a low voice, I tell her stories of when I was a girl. I bring her fruit from the brook of my own glad tidings. I overflow and I almost forget her. My hair is wet and I feel I can be alone. I know other songs. But what about my deer? She's sleeping. I fit an arrow through my bow. I kill so she eats. She says if only I'd been a better mother.

Sarah Gambito "Hunger"

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the ink dark moon

On a night
when the moon
shines as brightly as this,
the unspoken thoughts
of even the most discreet heart might be seen.

Izumi Shikibu
Translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani
The Ink Dark Moon

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Hang on, my love, and grow big and strong

This letter from Iggy Pop to 21-year old Laurence brought tears to my eyes. He truly is a rock-n-roll gentleman.

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Canada, I have not forgotten you

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark

that I cut from a tree with a penknife.

There is no other way to express adequately

the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms   

and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility   

that hands you the horizon on a platter.

I am also writing this in a wooden canoe,

a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,   

resting the birch bark against my knees.   

I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,   

but I am thinking of winter,

snow piled up in all the provinces

and the solemnity of the long grain-ships

that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.

O Canada, as the anthem goes,

scene of my boyhood summers,

you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,   

you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night,

you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.   

You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:   

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,   

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,   

Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,

So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin,

and Peril Over the Airport, one

of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series

by Helen Wills whom some will remember

as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.

What has become of the languorous girls

who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading

Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,   

Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?

Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures   

as a veterans’ nurse, private duty nurse, visiting nurse,   

cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,   

dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done),   

rest home nurse, department store nurse,   

boarding school nurse, and country doctor's nurse?

O Canada, I have not forgotten you,

and as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision   

of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,

polar, North American memory.

You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.   

You are Jean de Brébeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.

You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.

You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.   

You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.   

But not only that.

You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,   

and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

-"Canada" by Billy Collins

A Canadian is someone who knows how to have sex in a canoe.
–Pierre Berton

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that's in a nutshell

I lay back like a canoe
and let my long hair
dredge the water.
The bluebird was really blue
its breast an apricot in the sun.

I picked up a human skull
that had suffered long enough
and with my own two hands
smashed it against a rock.

As a member of the world's most
intelligent audience, it's only natural
you ask questions, all of which
I answer with that's in a nutshell:
you can hold it in the palm of your hand,
for it is all that is made.

Mary Ruefle excerpt from "The Nutshell"

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the suspense- filled reader

As I've written before, I read in a grim kind of way. Responding to my own child's requests for food and attention with that unseeing glance, that ageless glance of the obsessed. It cannot be helped. Anyway, a month ago I discovered an old paperback by Mary Stewart, the author of the classic romantic suspense novel, in our local bookstore.

Since my discovery, I've been of no use. I haven't had such fun with an author in years. Her novels are light and fast-moving. So many confused identities, crumbling mansions, and hidden gardens, all coupled with tragedy in an unfamiliar countryside. All of the characters are delightfully British and the novels are light and fast-moving and wonderfully written.

There is something to be said for a good story in the gloom of winter n'est-ce pas?

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fruit, twig and stalk

for Noko
after ruining another season's harvest—
over-baked in the kitchen oven then
rehydrated in her home sauna
Aunt Yuki calls upon her sister,

paper sacks stuffed full of orange
fruit, twig and stalk still intact
knows that my mother sprouts seedlings
from cast off avocado stones, revives

dead succulents, coaxes blooms out of orchids
a woman who has never spent a second
of her being on the world wide web,
passes her days painting the diversity of

marshland, woodland, & shoreline;
building her own dehydrator fashioned from
my father's work ladders, joined together
by discarded swimming pool pole perched

high to discourage the neighbor's cats
that invade the yard scavenging for koi
"Vitamin D" she says, as she harnesses
the sun, in the backyard the drying device

mutates into painting, slow dripped
sugar spilling out of one kaki fruit
empty space where my father untethers
another persimmon, he swallows whole


by Shin Yu Pai "Six Persimmons"

Persimmons might be my favorite fruit. I love how they appear, so orange and ornate, in late November just as all of the color has vanished from the landscape. We have many many trees at our home, but I might be able to persuade Przemek to plan just one persimmon tree.

Image via Avignon in Photos