Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Milkweed seedling with bare foot & rock border


I am sorry about last night; the internet failed me. I was finally able to send the sunset picture via the iPhone, and unlike all the other pictures it came out big. Don't know why. I think it qualifies as a post, so I am good for every day this year! When I tried to add text it didn't work; thus no poem. But it really was an amazing sunset with a huge deep-salmon-colored cloud.

This photo is the kind of thing I try when I am not photographing sunsets. I went out the other morning to photograph the dawn. After that I looked around for something else to do, besides going back to bed. Afterwards, I did go back to bed.

Milkweed seedlings lave been coming up all over all summer long; there have been several crops. They sprout in the paths, in the beds, in the proto-lawn. And still not a single Monarch butterfly.I guess it's tough when you are a bug that migrates over several generations, and your forest in Mexico is being cut or burned down.

Here is another passage from Transtromer's Baltics, which I discuss in a recent post. It's a wonderful book! One of the things I like about it is its specificity, At the end of the book, is the photographer's essay about how the photographs were taken at the Transtromer family's summer home over several generations. Her epigraph for her essay is taken from a Transtromer interview:, "...my poems always have a definite geographical starting point."  I am going to think more about this and work on locating some of my writing in particular places. Here is the passage. I never knew the monks had reached into these isolated Northern isles.

"August 3. Out there in the damp grass
slithers a greeting from the Middle Ages: Helix pomatia
the subtly gray-gold shining snail with its jaunty house.
Introduced by some monks who liked escargots--yes, the
       Franciscans were here,
broke stone and burnt lime, the island was theirs in 1288, a\
        donation from King Magnus
("Thes almes and othres he hath yeven / Thei meteth hym nu he
         entreth hevene.")
the forest fell, the ovens burned, the lime taken by sail
to the building of the monastery . . .
                                                  Sister snail
stands almost still in the grass, feelers sucked in
and rolled out, disturbances and hesitation . . .
How like myuself in my searching."

Tomas Transtromer, from Baltics,
translated from the Swedish by Samuel Charters, Tavern Books, 2012, page 51.

I love the bits of SPECIFIC information in this. I love books of poems with photos in them. I love Transtromer's poetry. And I love milkweed and the dawn. Good night.


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