Ithuriel's Spear

Late this afternoon I went looking for lupine on the Lupine-Covered Hill (another year) in Almaden Quicksilver Park. The link will take you there. But there has been so much rain over the past few weeks that there was mostly a rank growth of grasses. With, here and there, Ithuriel's Spear, Triteleia laxa. The wind was whipping the flowers and the grasses about, but I managed to get this shot. So, then I had to find out who was Ithuriel, anyway??? Turns out he's in the Kabbala. The last time I thought about the Kabbala (often an ignored topic, don'tchathink?) was when I read a big news story about Madonna's interest in it. She was supposed to be "studying" the Kabbala; I had to look that up then. I couldn't "look up" why anyone would be studying it anyway, but let it go, since Madonna might seem slightly weird to some people, anyway.

Tonight I was looking at Kate Greenstreet's Young Tambling. Instead of choosing a poem, I chose one of her epigraphs instead:

That same day M. stuck his

walking stick into the imprints

left by horses' hoofs on the

roadway---it had been raining 

the day before and they were

full of water. "Like memory,"

he said.

Nadezda Mandelstam

[from Hope Against Hope; A Memoir,translated from the Russian by Max Hayward]

Young Tambling, Ahsahta Press, 2013, page 73

M. is how his wife refers to the Russian poet Mandelstam in her amazing book about M. and their lives together and then apart. I left my copy in Michigan and hope to get back to it soon. I was disappointed tonight to find it is not available on Kindle. Ah, well. Goodnight.