“For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” ~ Wallace Stevens, from “The Snow Man”
Tuesday afternoon. Clear and cold, 31 degrees.
We were hit with snow, sleet, and freezing rain yesterday and into the night, so of course the whole area is shut down. It’s quiet, though. Funny how you don’t notice the quiet until it’s there.
I always love waking up after snow because there is a blue light hovering outside the windows and a dampening of all of the grating sounds of cars and trucks and noise in general. But I was reminded of my father last night as Corey was complaining of being cold: My father, who hated winter, hated snow, hated the cold . . . my father who would rather stay on a ship thousands of miles away for months at a time rather than be in a city blanketed with winter.
“Sneeuwlandschap in Etikhove” (1924) by Valerius de Saedeleer
Too Much Snow
Unlike the Eskimos we only have one word for snow but we have a lot of modifiers for that word. There is too much snow, which, unlike rain, does not immediately run off. It falls and stays for months. Someone wished for this snow. Someone got a deal, five cents on the dollar, and spent the entire family fortune. It’s the simple solution, it covers everything. We are never satisfied with the arrangement of the snow so we spend hours moving the snow from one place to another. Too much snow. I box it up and send it to family and friends. I send a big box to my cousin in California. I send a small box to my mother. She writes “Don’t send so much. I’m all alone now. I’ll never be able to use so much.” To you I send a single snowflake, beautiful, complex and delicate; different from all the others.
~ Louis Jenkins
Winter Landscape (oil on board) by Graham Noble Norwell
Smelling the Snow
I’ve heard it said
there are those on such
close terms with night
they can smell the very light.
Not only does the moon,
they say, give off a scent
nothing like the sun’s,
but old moon smells
sweeter than slivered new.
Monks of old claimed sin
took the breath away, while
God was wild onion, lilac, pine.
I know a carpenter who
boasts he can sniff out a maple
in a woodlot of ash and oak.
A stalking cat knows
the unsinging sparrow
from the finch. This day
as it returns to Ohio, like
some feathery creature
seeking the very moon and tree
where it was born,
I can smell the snow,
which seems to me,
against the dark trees
moving in slow procession,
a few birds stark and silent,
an essence close to love.
“No word in my ear, no word on the tip of my tongue. It’s out there, I guess, Among the flowers and wind-hung and hovering birds, And I have forgotten it, dry leaf on a dry creek. Memory’s nobody’s fool, and keeps close to the ground.” ~ Charles Wright, from “Buffalo Yoga”
Friday afternoon. Cloudy with drizzle, 76 degrees.
The weather has been amazing. Yesterday was perfect—sunny and warm, with a breeze, in the 70’s. Wild weather in June. Today is the first day of summer, and it is cooler than it has been in weeks. When Corey got home, he said that it was warmer in Ohio than here. But I’m sure that in a few days it will be in the 90’s with godawful humidity.
“Lilacs” (1948, oil on canvas) by Pyotr Konchalovsky
I had thought about having Olivia today and tonight but decided against it. Neither of us are feeling that great, so it wouldn’t be the best of visits. Can you believe my little bug is going to be a year old next month? Time moves much too quickly.
I’ve learned a new word: tendentious, which means expressing a strong, (biased) partisan point of view. I don’t know why I’ve never come upon this word before. Of course, I now cannot remember where I found this word because it’s been a few days. My brain is like a sieve. More and more I fear that the holes are overtaking the grey matter.
Truly, though, all of the migraines would have to have some effect on the brain, wouldn’t they? I cannot imagine an organ suffering such assaults and coming away completely unscathed. I tell myself that my cognitive impairment comes from the migraines. Laying the blame there keeps me from having to think too much about what is going on.
“Leave. Be like the clouds. Be like the water. Stand for the thing that will and will not change for reasons we will accept and still think bad— be like words, like vague words belonging to the whiteout of endless work.” ~ Lawrence Revard, from “Incantations to Snow”
I had wanted to post yesterday, but I kept falling asleep, truly.
Night before last, Corey and I stayed up to watch the last half of Game of Thrones season 3, which wouldn’t have been so bad if the puppy hadn’t wanted to eat at 7 a.m. Her stomach seems to be pretty regular—7, noon, 5 p.m. She has already grown so much. I had meant to post some pictures before now, but they’re on Brett’s phone, and he hasn’t forwarded them to me yet. I suppose that by the time I finally get around to doing so, she’ll already be much bigger.
“Still Life with Lilacs” (ca 1920s) by Aristarkh Lentulov
Anyway, the point was that I paid the price for staying up so late because Bailey insisted that I get up on time. She’s a funny dog, and I’m finally allowing myself to enjoy having her without feeling guilty about Jake.
The night that we watched GoT, Bailey came out to the living room, sat down and whined at me. I followed her, and she wanted to go to bed, but she wanted me to go to bed with her. It’s easy to forget that puppies are just babies. At this moment, she’s having her afternoon nap on the bed. Pictures soon. Promise.
“I wanted to say one thing so pure, so white, it puts a hole in the air and I’d pass through . . . ~ Robin Behn, from “Over 102nd Street”
The gardenias are in a bloom, a lovely, fragrant rhapsody of white. I missed the blooming of the lilac bush this year, and the spring storms thrashed my peonies; I was able to cut only a few to bring indoors before they were gone. So I’m harvesting fresh white blossoms each day.
“Lilacs in a Window” (1880, oil on canvas) by Mary Cassatt
I remember that my Aunt Ronnie in Great Bridge used to love the scent of gardenias. My mother would buy her a cologne called Jungle Gardenia, which might have been a musk. I, too, love the heady scent. It is such full smell, one that floats on the air long after the blooms have been cut.
I associate gardenias with a green scent, which is best described as cool and fresh, not sweet. I don’t have synesthesia like Brett, but I do associate scents with colors. Rosemary and mint are green scents. Peonies are a pink scent, deeper, richer, like roses, regardless of color.
I remember wearing a Jovan musk oil called Grass when I was a teenager. I couldn’t smell it after I had applied it, but other people could. I wonder if they still make it . . . probably not.
“Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire, Where the voice that is in us makes a true response, Where the voice that is great within us rises up, As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.” ~ Wallace Stevens, from “Evening Without Angels”
When I was a young girl, I remember the first time I found a wild honeysuckle vine. Suzanne showed me how to suck on the blossoms. So much of the neighborhood still had wild growth when we first moved here, the kind of growth that hadn’t yet been impaired by paving and building. Left unchecked, nature is an incomparable perfumer.
“Spring. White Lilacs” (1895) by Isaac Levitan
My mother has a bush in her front yard called Daphne Odora (odora L. = fragrant), which produces one of the best smelling flowers of any bush I have ever come across. It blooms in late winter/early spring, and its scent carries into the street so that passersby almost always stop to ask my mother where the smell is coming from.
I have tried at least three times to root this bush, unsuccessfully to date. Called jinchoge in Japan, the blossoms are white and pink, but the fragrance that they produce feels deep red, crimson. Don’t ask me to explain my scent categories as they are completely contrived; I can only say that something feels green or pink or crimson, sometimes yellow. Honeysuckle scent is yellow.
It’s all a lot of falderal, but the idea of color reminds me of a Merwin poem which I have actually been able to find (below).
“the infinite variety of having once been, of being, of coming to life, right there in the thin air, a debris re- assembling, a blue transparent bit of paper flapping in also-blue air” ~ Jorie Graham, from “The Swarm”
As an interesting aside, the Ruth Stone in the Merwin poem was a poet who actually taught at ODU while I was in the department. I think that she only stayed for a year, not really being into the whole idea of committed academe; someone once referred to her as the poet vagabond because she taught at so many different colleges and universities.
“Open Window. Lilacs” (1886, oil on canvas) by Valenin Serov
I remember an older woman with wild hair whose poems were intensely personal, who integrated the natural with her poems about her family, her late husband in particular. Merwin’s poem is an homage to a woman who, though blind, was still writing poems at the age of 96.
As you can imagine, the idea of Ruth Stone the woman, the poet, appeals to me greatly. Admittedly, I did not get to know her while she was in the department, and I really regret that. The timing was bad for me—I was pregnant with Eamonn and very self-absorbed at the time. It’s my loss that I didn’t enter even the periphery of this woman’s life. I could have learned so much from her.
But I can take her example, her complete dedication to her craft until the day she died, take that and imprint it somewhere on my consciousness. Stone serves as an imprimatur of sorts for me: She endured a lifetime of hardship, and was not even widely recognized for her poetry her late 80’s, when she received the National Book award for her book The Next Galaxy. (Click here for an NPR article and some of Stone’s poems)
No, I’m not comparing myself to Stone, only saying that I hope to be even a fraction as dedicated to my craft until the day I die.
More later. Peace.
Music by The Gourds, “Steeple Full of Swallows”
A Letter to Ruth Stone
Now that you have caught sight
of the other side of darkness
the invisible side
so that you can tell
it is rising
first thing in the morning
and know it is there
all through the day
another sky
clear and unseen
has begun to loom
in your words
and another light is growing
out of their shadows
you can hear it
now you will be able
to envisage beyond
any words of mine
the color of these leaves
that you never saw
awake above the still valley
in the small hours
under the moon
three nights past the full
Two for Tuesday: William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
~ William Carlos Williams
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
~ Wallace Stevens
Nuances of a Theme by Williams
It’s a strange courage You give me, ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!
I
Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.
II
Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow’s bird
Or an old horse.
~ Wallace Stevens
(The first four lines consist of a complete Williams poem, “El Hombre” from Al Que Quiere (1917), in its turn possibly inspired by Keats’ “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art”)
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 