Did I surprise you? When I get back to my ducks (these were waiting for a cracked corn handout last January) I will have to leave behind my glorious porch display of potted everything. A local grocery store has been tempting me with just one or two pots among the chrysanthemums in front of the store. I was so pleased with the variety of the first one, that if they have another one I get it it almost every time I go. I have a fantasy that there is a lunatic somewhere in a greenhouse just sticking plants in and fertilizing them like crazy. They are blowsy and almost bursting from the pots. Some of the plants are ivy geraniums, fibrous begonias in white, pink and red, lantana, white snapdragons, a tiny white pointed flower I do not know, angel-wing begonia, and a very rich wine-colored plant with maple shaped leaves. All are well grown, and I can only call them juicy. I am made happy every time I look at them. I long for my own greenhouse!
That was a tangent I didn't know I'd take or make. Idiom? And I just went out and took some iPhone snaps of these flowers under the porch light. Not bad, considering it is night.
Meanwhile, Metropolitan Opera Radio is playing once again the slightly frenetic Marriage of Figaro. This pretty music always makes me feel as if I were too sedentary. . . or they were too frantic.
Meanwhile back at the Poetry Ranch: tonight's poem is by the German poet Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Mark Anderson, and has BOTH music and flowers.
ARIA 1
Wherever we turn in the storm of roses
thorns illuminate the night. And the thunder
of a thousand leaves, once so quiet on the bushes,
is right at our heels.
Wherever the roses' fire is put out,
rain washes us into the river. Oh, distant night!
Yet a leaf that touched us now floats on the waves,
following us to the sea.
From The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by J. D. McClatchy, Vintage Books, 1996, page 124.
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