Flowering Annuals

The guy who lives a few houses away from us is doing this

and making me very jealousssss!

I had to stand on the dog's leash to get a picture on today's Daily Walk.

She isn;t interested in pausing for me to frame a photo.

In the Great Scheme of Things, growing nice flowers in your yard

may not count for much, but aren't they sweet??

The yellow ones are Plumed Cockscomb

and I think they are quite striking.

cockscombs… 

must be 14, 

or 15 

Shiki

Which made me think about the controversial haiku

by Shiki. He wrote it when a number of his poet-friends were

present. Mostly they didn't like it, according to the story.

Some of them later tried to add things, to try to "fix" it.

I think it is quite "cool" the way it is.

Thinking about annual flowers reminds me of 

my mother-in-law. Against the side 

of her little retirement house in Grace, Idaho,

she grew cosmos, a tall annual I was not familiar with then,

and which often reseeds. I asked her the name;

when she told me, she said they were easy to grow

but she had never really liked them.

When I asked why, she said that in her childhood home

(click this link to go to the great picture of that house)

they always grew by the outhouse

and she thought of them as "outhouse flowers."

She didn't even like their scent. 

as a bird, as a bird

The really hot weather continues and we have to take the Daily Walk just before dark.

Which is not a bad plan, really . . .

  

The Knowers

Little bird bones come back

as a bird, as a bird

loudly singing

again

in the dead leaves

come back as green

leaves: only

we

don't return.

Franz Wright

God's Silence, Knopf reprint, 2008, page 52.

The ways the lines are broken is very important in this poem.

Check it out!

Mary Lou Taylor in Fauve Palette

This is Mary Lou Taylor at our Poetry Salon Writing Group several years ago.

I like what happened to the colors in the lamplight.

Mary Lou has a new book just out; my copy came today.

Below is the first poem in the book.

WINGS

The urge to copy birds

began at three

when I leaped

from the flaking banister

of our apartment building

first floor

arms extended

I was so sure I could fly.

I was a child

with a small plot of green

in the asphalt of apartments

where a hundred families lived

that little spot my sanctuary.

Covered in winter by unspoiled snow

angels appeared, wings and gown

outstretched in perfect patterns.

Mary Lou Taylor

Bringing Home the Moon, 

Apldrich Press, 2015, age 13.

(clicking above on the title of the book will take you to Amazon
where you can buy the new book by Mary Lou Taylor.)

Light through a kitchen window

This is one of the black and white snapshots that I think my father took when he was scouting this house for the move to Shaker Heights. The house was built in the 1920s (I think) and this kitchen probably dates from that time. By the time I got there, it had been reconfigured with turquoise metal cabinets (noisy, surprisingly hard to clean and really didn't hold up well!) and a wall refrigerator by GE (naturally) than was also loaded with design flaws, like a tendency to pool water in the bottom. Later my mother made this into a still-life window. She stayed here until she turned 86 and then moved to Utah to be near my sister's family.

   A Room in the Past

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill
with a morning light so bright
you can’t see beyond its windows
into the afternoon. A kitchen
falling through time with its things
in their places, the dishes jingling
up in the cupboard, the bucket
of drinking water rippled as if
a truck had just gone past, but that truck
was thirty years. No one’s at home
in this room. Its counter is wiped,
and the dishrag hangs from its nail,
a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,
blue aprons of rain, my grandmother
moved through this life like a ghost,
and when she had finished her years,
she put them all back in their places
and wiped out the sink, turning her back
on the rest of us, forever.

Ted Kooser

One World at a Time, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

(I was reminded of this snapshot by this poem;
it is interesting to think about kitchen windows in relation to your family.
There should be at least one poem per person in that.)

Slowly the days grow colder . . .

This is another of the views of the beauty of the American landscape

that I cannot resist taking photographs of. 

They pile up on hard drives and in cloud storage.

How did I ever manage before I had these things???

FALL GRASS

This is the season when the darkest grass
Flows in its deepest waves, on fading stubble;
The time of cloud; and cattle brought to stable
At dusk; and moonlit water still as glass . . .

Smoke in the mornings, and always a crow caws
On wagging wings. Across the first strewn litter
of leaves a squirrel scurries, and children loiter
In roadside pastures after ripening haws.

Time to be thoughtful; time to be getting on
With threshing, and fall plowing; time to gather
Eelgrass, for banking house . . . A frail white feather
Of frost shines in the grass blades and is gone.

Slowly the days grow colder, the long nights fall;
Plows turn the stubble, fires are tended, and apples
Mellow in cellars; and under the roots of maples
Mice are burrowing. And the high geese call.

Charles Bruce
The Mulgrave Road; selected poems of Charles Bruce,
Potterfield Press, Nova Scotia,1985, page 41.

I chose this poem tonight for the line "slowly the days grow colder."  It's a magic incantation against this terrible heat. I also like that apples mellow in cellars, although I don't have a cellar here. And I am not planning to harvest any eelgress, although I love the name and wonder what it looks like.

Old Library News from the Gilroy Dispatch

 

A couple of years ago I found this photocopy of part of an article from the Gilroy (California)
Dispatch. So I scanned it and waited for the rest to turn up. It hasn't yet. So here we are:
at the left Gail Leslie, one of the dearest and smartest people I ever worked with during my library days; at the right me, as my younger self. The article talked about two small mechanical reading practice machines (the Bell and Howell Language Master and the Controlled Reader) that had been purchased to help people who were learning English. I don't remember the details now, but think it was funded by a grant. Gail and I were demonstrating them for the reporter. I'm thinking the time was the early 1980s. So much time has gone by; in todays; world these devices would be laughable, but then they were very interesting,

DROPLETS

Even when the rain falls relatively hard,

only one leaf at a time of the little tree

you planted on the balcony last year,

then another leaf at its time, and one more,

is set trembling by the constant droplets,

but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,

you at the piano inside, your hesitant music

mingling with the din of the downpour,

the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,

the iron railings and flowing gutters,

all of it fuses in me with such intensity

that I can't help wondering why my longing

to live forever has so abated that it hardly

comes to me anymore, and never as it did,

as regret for what I might not live to live,

but rather as a layering of instants like this,

transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,

yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne

you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading

into its own radiant passing, you practice again.

C. K. Williams

Love About Love. Ausable Press, 2001.

C. K. Williams poems have stopped me in my tracks several times!
Once it was in American Poetry Review and once in The New Yorker are the ones I remember specifically. All of his books of poems are wonderful. And this one had quite the relevance to go with the memories that that old newspaper article evoked.

Weather

A pansy's face from a long-ago summer.

Today in Idaho it reached 101 degrees; if I had been a blossom, I would have wilted.

August 1, 1956

It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what is said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled "Rain" pour in from across the nation.

Silvia Plath

The Assassin's Cloak; an anthology of the world's greatest diarists; edited by Irene and Alan Taylor. 
Canongate Books, Great Britain, 2000, page 380. 

Another entry from the diary anthology. I wish I had a diary, but never enough to keep one for very long. Sleep tight!