She brought me a bouquet of Queen Anne's Lace

 My daughter has told me that Queen Anne's Lace was her husband's favorite flower. This morning, by coincidence, we ate pancakes in the restaurant that copied Will's art from their other location.

On the recent visit to our place in the north woods, this granddaughter brought me several bouquets of this common weedy flower. She always got a rubber band before she went out, and bound them with it, This really did make them easy to put into a vase. I was surprised at how pretty a bouquet they made, too, even though it dropped a lot of golden "sand" (pollen?) on the table.

Stanley Kunitz loved flowers, too, and was a lifelong gardener. In a sonnet from his first book, he set forth his ideas on mental processes. The poem is quoted in full in Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz, edited by Stanley Moss, Sheep Meadow Press, 1993, page 146.

Organic Bloom

The brain constructs its system to enclose
The steady paradox of thought and sense,
Momentously its tissued meaning grows
To solve and integrate experience.
But life escapes closed reason. We explain
Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell,
Only to learn of some insidious pain
Beyond the limits of our chartered hell,
A guilt not mentioned in our prayers, a sin,
Conceived against the self. So, vast and vaster
The plasmic circles of gray discipline
Spread outward to include each new disaster.
Enormous floats the brain's organic bloom
Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom.

Try binding your bouquets before you put them in water. It really makes them more like nosegays. A long time ago, when I was a young librarian, an older lady, Beth Fletcher, brought me these little bound bouquets that she called nosegays. She used strands of smilax vine wound round and round to bind them. She also brought me her old New Yorker's to read; I continue loving this magazine until this day, and night. Good night with this memory thread.

Logan Running

It will be weeks before I have dealt with the grandkid photos from the recent visit. This is another from the walk we took through the grassy field on the path my daughter mows to walk her dogs (and herself) on. What a great idea this was! We had some fabulous walks there during the Grandkid Visit. (I imagine I will stop talking about this soon, but it is still very present for me now.)

It's been an exciting evening with the accidental installation of some malware on S's laptop, and its eventual (we hope) removal! Right now S is doing his new balance exercises. He is getting more proficient at them, but cannot feel he has improved as much as I think I see. IT is about an 80-year spread between him and this running Logan, our youngest grandson.

Today, I revisited the garden we have made here over the past nearly 20 years; There are a lor of small pleasures, even though perhaps a great overreaching scheme cannot be detected. We wanted to sort of blend into the woods here, while still having a few cottagey pleasures close to the house. It's always fun to take flower photos, too!

Tonight's poem is another one-line haiku from Right Under the Big Sky I Don't Wear a Hat; the haiku and prose of Hosai Ozaki translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato which I described in this post.

A single garden rock placed, evening comes

and just one more:

Cold, tumbling, a dead leaf has stopped just by the water

These are both on page 52. I love the sensibility in this book! Sleep well, I must get up early tomorrow.

In the shallows of Crooked River, see us dance!

 

Another from Canoe Day, during the grandchild visit. These are the two oldest girls. It was a perfect day, not hot, not too cold, not windy. River water quite warm in the shallows. There is nothing much more graceful than the water play of children, really.
It's been a busy day for me, taking care of a bunch of annual maintenance chores; so now I am filled with a rare virtue. A bright spot was the tender email from a poetry friend back in California.

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Gary Snyder, quoted in the introduction to The Light Within the Light; portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin and Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham with engravings by Barry Moser, which I described in last night's post. I am going to bed early tonight, and really looking forward to dreaming a short poem, like I used to, many years ago.

Catch the water when I kick it!

 I'm still very tired. But these pictures from Canoe Day make me very happy! There is much to do, but fortunately it is the weekend, so I cannot make some of the appointments I need to make. I did get some wet Swiffers today for a little more extensive cleaning. I never thought Swiffering was a good idea until lately (seemed expensive and silly) when I found out that science has made some advances, after all. You should see what I just got off the kitchen floor. I will go to bed feeling SO virtuous!
Tonight I saw my 25-year old grandson for a short visit. He is is sweet as ever, as big as a tree, and played the piano for quite a while after dinner.
One of the books I got when thinking about Stanley Kunits was The Light Within the Light; portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin and Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham with engravings by Barry Moser. Whew! It is a handsome book of slightly less than 100 pages, a pleasure to hold in your hands. It is printed on creamy paper, and the cover illustration is a beauty! The engravings of the poets are masterly, while not exactly flattering, and seem a little harsh. Still . . .

I found this poem by Maxine Kumin in it on pages 49 and 50..

MORNING SWIM

Into my empty head there come
a cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out, oily and nude
through mist, in chilly solitude.

There was no line, or roof or floor
to tell the water from the air.

Night fog as thick as terry cloth
closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs
I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame,
In their green zone they sang my name.

And in the rhythm of the swin
I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn.

I hummed Abide with Me, the beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth,

My bones drank water, water fell
through all my doors, I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang Abide with Me.

Kumin's note as quoted in the same source: "Sound is of particular importance in my poems. And I know I write better poems in form--with the demands of a rhyme scheme and a metrical pattern--than I do in the looser line of free verse. Without form I'd feel like I was abandoned in flat Indiana with my eyes sewn open."

This is, I think, a good formal poem. (Are you waiting for the "but"?)  But, I am not completely convinced, It was interesting to me (although maybe I am just crabby tonight. . .) that my two strongest reactions to the text were in the nature of editing questions. I wondered about the title of the hymn; why isn't "with" capitalized? And why, after the comma, begin "In the green zone" with a capital letter?? I probably should head right up to bed and hope for a better mood in the morning. Good Night!

Grammy, take a picture of me jumping!

They left this morning, the family of grandchildren. This is from Thursday: the Day of the Canoe!
It was quite a time, they got to meet their aunt (and help her feed her sheep, goats and chickens,) bike, swim, canoe and bake pies with Grampy! I will get the poetry books out tomorrow and resume thinking about life and language, instead of living it as intensely as I have the past 10 days,

The hard rock maple blocks at Aunt Kim's house

 These belonged to his older cousins, The best blocks in the world! Logan knew instantly what they were for, even though he doesn't have ones like these. Tonight is the last night of THE VISIT, and poetry should resume soon. Tonight we made rhubarb pie and the leftover pie crust dough was made into
cookies embedded with chocolate chips. We have just taken them out of the oven, after the pie was baked. They will be the hit of the goodbye breakfast.
Good Night!

A Festive Meal

Our new friend, Carolyn, brought us all a meal: pizza, chicken, spinach salad with berries, juice boxes and ice cream treats. An excellent time was had by all. We had spent the day in a borrowed canoe, going up and down Crooked River in shifts. It was a beautiful day out on the river, I saw a great blue heron and swans among other things. The weather was well-nigh perfect with cotton-candy clouds; children paddled in the sand at the edge of the river, we took lunch, and then came home to this.
Back to poetry soon, and I haven't had a chance to look at today's pictures from the river. Good Night.