Spanish Wine

This fairy-tale creature was on a bottle of wine from Spain. What a great luncheon E gave us on Thursday! We began with a Spanish cheese, and then had a French Salade Nicoise and a French Clafoutie! By the time we left I was feeling positively cosmopolitan~  I love the reflections and colors of light on the bottle in this photograph. I always wish I knew how to use pastels when I see something like this.

If I were to imagine a children's picture book, I could imagine one with this long-eared, long-legged sprite as its hero. What adventures we could have! And his picture on the cover should be embossed in silver-gilt.

I haven't found a poem for tonight. I know the Universe, the Internet and My Own Library should be sufficient for this purpose, but it has been a long day . . .

First Wild Strawberry Bloom and Buds

I wrote about the source of these little fellows several years ago. These are yesterday's very earliest blooms, near the front door.  For the whole story, here is the link! Besides a remembrance of an old friend who is gone, I am enjoying something else this year. I've always thought strawberry leaves were pretty, but look at the beautiful shape of the buds!

All day it has been raining steadily. Not a gullywasher, just a slow steady rain. This morning the oldest dachshund put her foot outside to test a small puddle on the deck in front of the door. Then she decided not to go out. It required a gentle push, because it was certainly time!


THE GARDEN

Far back, in the most remote times with their fresh colors,
Already and without knowing it, I must have begun to bring
Everyone into the shadowy garden, half-overgrown,

A kind of lush, institutional grounds--
Snugly or in groups, into that green recess. Everything
Is muffled there; they walk over a rich mulch

Where I have conducted them together into summer shade
And go on bringing them, all arriving with no more commotion
Than the intermittent rustling of birds in the dense leaves,

Or birds' notes in chains or knots that embroider
The sleek sounds of water bulging over the dam's brim:
Midafternoon voices of chickadee, kingbird, catbird;

And the falls, hung in a cool, thick nearly motionless sheet
From the little green pond to shatter perpetually in mist
Over the streambed. And like statuary of dark metal

Or pale stone around the pond, the living and the dead,
Young and old, gather where they are brought: some nameless;
Some victims and some brazen conquerors; the shamed; the haunters;

The harrowed; the cherished; the banished--or background figures,
Old men from a bench, girl with glasses from school--brought beyond
Even memory's noises and rages, here in the quiet garden.

Poem from Robert Pinsky Selected Poems, FSG, 2011

This beautiful poem is a lovely extended metaphorical idea. Memory's Garden. The three-line stanza works beautifully with the long lines. (The lines run over because I like the poem's font to be larger, and the blogger has an unexpandable space.)

The fine use of semi-colons strings together memory-people from many times and places.

I have my own memory garden, but mostly plants are in it.

Your friendly brain

We had a short consultation in a neurologist's office on Tuesday. Excellent, well-informed, good-communicator fellow. All well, no serious problems found. I couldn't resist this white china bust and was pleased to see that the right hemisphere had the big stuff. while all the many small divisions were on the left hemisphere. So you can tell that the Big Thinkers were already on part of the right track. I am sure there are some great Phrenology images on the web, but tonight I have been looking up home remedies for dachshund diarrhea. Pookie has been wormed and has no other warning signs that she needs the vet. We are trying rice water and 1mg of immodium (crushed in a tablespoon of plain yoghurt) for tonight. Interesting side-note, the website name Diarrheaindogs.com has recently been listed for sale. The link had looked useful, but no, that vet has vanished into non-paymentland.

We had a wonderful lunch and all-afternoon visit in Los Altos Hills with a long-time friend who taught literature with S for many years. Then we came home down the LONG FREEWAY during the fabled rush hour. Horrid! People change lanes way too much and way too fast.

More tonight from the poet, Edward Thomas. (1878-1917) Now All Roads Lead to France is the title of the excellent biography by Matthew Hollis, Norton, 2011. This short poem, which has become a much-loved favorite in England, is on page 204.

Adlestrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

--Edward Thomas, 1915, from a notebook experience in 1914.

It helps with the last line if you pronounce Glo'stershire in three syllables in the English manner. As a birder, of course I love the last stanza! And is not willow-herb a lovely name?

Nocturne

I'm a sucker for clouds; they always remind me of Constable and English landscape painting.
So, because they just stand there and let me take pictures, I have plenty of pictures of clouds; some people have said: perhaps too many.  .  .

A poet whose work I have loved for a long time returns again tonight with this night poem.

NOCTURNE

That scraping of iron on iron when the wind

rises, what is it? Something the wind won't

quit with, but drags back and forth.

Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just

beyond the screened door, as if someone there

squats in the dark honing his wares against

my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,

nothing and anything might make this noise

of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning

of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,

or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows

that should not bend. Something stiffens that should

slide. Something, loose and not right,

rakes or forges itself all night.

Li-Young Lee 

from Rose, Kindle location 318 of 848

Gecko; his frail and useful legs, his bumps

This is my daughter's pet, left behind when her sons grew up. He eats crickets and, in a pinch, mealworms. Look at the tiny bumps all over his body. See, also, how he matches the tones of the wood.
I am particularly fond of his feet. He lives in a glass aquarium on the top of her piano, and when she plays, he wakes up and does a sort of dance.

Today we had appointments, groceries and what I hoped would be a great enchilada, which was only a good one. Then I switched computers and misplaced my planned-ahead poem. But, hey! I did make some progress on Proust, early this morning. I read like crazy and got the Kindle-predicted hours to finish all seven volumes down to 73, but of course, I that means there really are weeks to go yet at this rate. The kid Marcel is still fussing about going to bed. I have read this part before, but one always starts at the beginning, doesn't one??? Well, doesn't one???

This evening I have spent on Now All Roads Lead to France; a life of Edward Thomas. Tonight, after a long apprenticeship at prose, churning out reviews and sch to support his family, he had begun to write poems. The first one he wrote was virtually completed in one day. The book only gives the beginning and the ending of the 115-line poem, in the voice of a barmaid he had conversed with and written about in his notebook. (When notebooks survive, there is a record of compositional struggles that is mostly lost in today's electronic fizzle.) But these parts are enough to tell what an interesting poem it is.

UP IN THE WIND

'I could wring the old thing's neck that put it here!
A public-house! it may be public for birds,
Squirrels and such-like, ghosts of charcoal burners
nd highwaymen.' The wild girl laughed. 'But I
Hate it since I came back from Kennington.
I gave up a good place.' Her cockney accent
Made her and the house seem wilder by calling up--
Only to be subdued at once by wildness--
The idea of London, there in that forest parlour,
Low and small among the towering beeches
And the one bulging butt that's like a font.

*******

Between the open door
And the trees, two calves were wading in the pond,
Grazing the water here and there and thinking,
Sipping and thinking, both happily, neither long.
The water wrinkled, but they sipped and thought
As careless of the wind as it is of us,
'Look at those calves. Hark at the trees again.'

There is a nice discussion in the book about the metrical qualities of this poem -- as it relates to a loosely applied iambic meter. See what you think about the metrical qualities,

And here is the whole poem! On a Website called The First World War Poetry Archive!

Pekinese puppy we didn't buy in 1956; a memory thread

My husband, the peacetime draftee, holds one of the puppies our landlady is selling for $75 each. This is the first time I have noticed how much my husband likes dogs. He is really drawn to this little guy, who is undeniably cute. And we do have $75 dollars--it's exactly the amount of wedding gift cash that we have saved for something special.
Here S sits on the ground in what serves both as our front yard, and as the chainlinked dog run. We are renting from a woman (I think I remember her name as Lucille) who lives in the house on the street side. Our place is visible behind S. He is serving in artillery (because he majored in literature) at Fort Sill, in Lawton, Oklahoma. The little cottage we live has a small kitchen, a hallway that passes the bath and a closet, and a front room in which the double bed lifts out of the sofa. Later, my mother ships us a small baby crib and we stick that in one corner for new baby Kimberli. Near the end of my pregnancy I have trouble avoiding hitting my stomach on the opened refrigerator door. Tight quarters.
We don't buy the puppy. We cannot realistically afford even dog food. We have no car and S takes the bus to Ft. Sill. Friends pick us up for church. Sometime later, we will use the $75 as a down payment on a 1952 dark green Chevrolet with a metal sun visor. In which we will go here and there toward the rest of our lives.

Here's some Li Po for the long view:

CONVERSATION AMONG MOUNTAINS

You ask why I live
in these green mountains

I smile
can't answer

I am completely at peace

a peach blossom
sails past
on the current

there are worlds
beyond this one

FIVE T'ANG POETS, translated by David Young, 
Oberlin College, Field Translation Series 15 page 69.

His aristocratic profile

We almost forgot to take the daily walk, and as soon as we started out it started to rain, but it was a very light rain, so we just kept on trucking. We went a different way, and passed this front yard with lots of bits of white sculptures. Not all of them had the classical hauteur of this curlyhead. He's quite striking, don't you think? One thinks immediately of questions of taste. Should one put sculptures into the garden? And I wondered whether it was a copy or an imitation. Then we heard someone singing the national anthem. Just now, looking at the news, I think it was Renee Fleming singing at the Super Bowl. Sorry we missed it, when we tuned in, the score was already 28 to nothing! Hardly worth the trouble of paying attention. And that Philip Seymour Hoffman just filled himself with heroin and now he's gone.

Thinking about something classical, I just started to read (again??) Proust. All 7 volumes in the fine old Scott Moncrieff translation available free on Kindle; Amazon suggested it to me last night. I have the newer translation in the living room, still in its pristine slipcase. I read part of it when I got it. Years ago. So this will make how many runs at this for me?? Hard to say . . . After the first few pages, I looked down at the bottom, where the Paperwhite Kindle shows you how much reading time you have left. It said 80 hours and 50 minutes. That's not so bad, I thought: I used to work 40 hours in a week. So then I paused for a bit to do some math. If I read an hour per day, how many weeks would it take me to finish?? Then I tried to figure about what month I would be in. After a bit, I glanced at the line at the bottom again; since the Kindle recalculates, when you change your speed, it now said 91 hours and some minutes. So I speeded up quickly, and soon was back in the 80 hour zone again. Quite a scare!

So, no poem tonight, I'm going upstairs to read!