Climbing Vine, Clematis

In bloom right now, when I went out to look at the late afternoon light. And once again noticed that I haven't been outside enough today. Now it is dark.

One of the new Poet Laureate's books is called Zone Journals. I have it on my Kindle now. It is a series of ten longer poems that all have the word "journal" in their titles. Each one begins by paying attention to the time and season (like haiku!) and are written in paragraph-like stanzas.

Here is a section from one of these poems:


---Function is form, form function back here where the fruit trees
Strip to November's music,
And the black cat and the tortoiseshell cat
crouch and slink,
Crouch and slink toward something I can't see
But hear the occasional fateful rustlings of,
Where the last tomatoes seep
from their red skins through the red dirt,
and sweet woodruff holds up its smooth gray sticks
Like a room full of boys
all wanting to be excused at the same time.


Charles Wright from "A Journal of True Confession" in Zone Journals, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988, Kindle location 294.

I am thinking about an arbor where I might think this kind of meditations and write them down. It almost feels like I would need a special pen. Here is a link to sweet woodruff. I love the part about the tomatoes and the sticks of the plant in November remind me that yarrow sticks are sometimes used in iChing divination.