Late Sunlight on Crooked River

My grandson came home for a short visit and we managed to hitch up the boat to the Bronco and get in the water just before a late dinner.

I took 500 pictures with that digital camera viewing screen you cannot see in the bright light and some of them came out OK. If you have a digital camera, just keep shooting. Then you can fill up your hard drive with mediocrity, and be like me!

The pictures I like best are about the light on the water, like this one.

Here is a poem about light by Joseph Stroud.

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light.So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light's great
triumph, when fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun---
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, buts of night glistening in the grass.

It is on page 134 of A Bird Black as the Sun; Callifornia poets on crows and ravens, Green Poet Press, Santa Barbara, CA.

And here is more of the boat ride: Dream of water . . .

Evening Prayers

Here I am saying my nighttime prayers at the cribside of my baby sister. The Sunbonnet Sue baby quilt has miraculously survived and now rests in my linen closet. The year is early 1940. That another Great War is coming is not even suspected by the two of us. My sister is doing well after a rough start. Born prematurely, she weighed but three pounds, and lost a third of that before she began to survive. The hospital had only one Isolette for keeping too small babies warm and giving them extra oxygen, and it was already in use for an even smaller baby. By this stroke of luck my sister avoided Retrolental Fibroplasia, the eye problems that many of these babies developed in later life as a result of excess oxygen. This is an abnormal development of blood vessels in the retina, which can also be caused by not enough oxygen. So, doctors have a tough call to make while treating these babies.

Religion was an important part of my upbringing and during all my early life. I was brought up in a Mormon home, and although I am no longer religiously observant, the history of my maternal grandparents, my husband's grandparents, and their participation in the Mormon migrations and the Westward movement are very important and interesting to me, and a definite part of who I am.

This morning I awoke with the hymn As The Dew From Heaven Distilling sounding softly in my head. it has a beautiful melody and I have been singing it to myself all day. S just told me the words in Spanish the way they sang it in Argentina. So I had to look it up. It is a Mormon Hymn, some of the hymns in the LDS hymnal also are sung by other Protestant churches and some, like this one, were written for Mormon use., and most probably are not sung by other denominations.

As the dew from Heaven distilling

 As the dew from heav'n distilling
Gently on the grass descends
And revives it, thus fulfilling
What thy providence intends,

Let thy doctrine, Lord, so gracious,
Thus descending from above,
Blest by thee, prove efficacious
To fulfill thy work of love.

These are the first two verses, for the citation, the music and the other two verses, click on the link above.
I am talking about this tonight largely because of the rhyming and metrical pattern of these lyrics. A poet who can rhyme gracious with efficacious so effortlessly deserves our respect.

I have been thinking about hymns lately because the water exercise group I belong to sings hymns and other songs while we do about 45 minutes of water exercises. Often we sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. (Try it! It's a good exercise tune!) and I knew three verses, but now I have discovered that there are five!  I find the structure of the lyrics and the choice of vocabulary very interesting, and plan to discuss this in another post. But for tonight, Sing Me To Sleep. That's the title of a song my voice teacher, Mrs. Louise Newkirk taught, and matter for another memory thread.

Oh, those iPhone photo apps!!

 I got a Kindle book on the subject of Instagram yesterday, because I looked at Instagram again and wanted to do something I could not figure out how to do! I am only a little way into the book, but so far, it has just inspired me to get other apps it talked about. This one is called Shakeme and arranges selected photos in different patterns when you shake your iPhone. This is a combo of three photos that were already modified ed in other apps, like Glaze, Tangled FX and ColorLake. The child is "Little Red", the red-headed younger sister of the girl in this post, and one of the family of grandkids that recently visited us in this glorious summer up North.

Tonight's poem is a nod to Shakespeare, because so many of Akhmatova's other poems are so bleakly colored by the times she lived through in Stalinist Russia. This was written before all that; it's the first one in the book of Kunitz's translations of Anna Akhmatova, on page 39.

Reading Hamlet

A barren patch to the right of the cememtery,
behind it a river flashing blue.
You said: "All right then, get thee to a nunnery,
or go get married to a fool . . ."

It was the sort of this that princes always say.
but these are words that one remembers.
May they flow a hundred centuries in a row
like an ermine mantle from his shoulders.

Anna Akhmatova, Kiev, 1909

The last two lines are like a blessing or a consecration. Think of something you would like to bless with a hundred-century mantle before you go to sleep tonight! And rest well.
                               

That mixture of darkness and light

This is one of my favorite kinds of light. I think I have written about it before. This was the sky the afternoon my grandkids left for the long drive home. The later afternoon light comes in under the clouds, giving the verdure a golden tinge. And the clouds remind me of the watercolor painting the kids were doing while they were here. I'll be posting some of these later; I love children's art!

It has been a very strenuous day, lots of cleaning, my daughter having a bad reaction to a wasp bite. We got good help from the First Responders and an ambulance ride was avoided. And while they were here, they gave us a lot of good information about treatment of these stings, and the danger signs.
Everything is OK, now. though. But these events do take the starch out of me.

And the book of Stanley Kunitz's translations of Anna Akhmatova's poems is close to my hand. This is on page 79 of Poems of Akhmatova; selected, translated and introduced by Stanley Kunitz. Houghton Mifflin, 1973

The Muse

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
as I wait for her who no one can command.
Whatever I cherish most --- youth, freedom, glory ---
fade before her who bears the flute in her hand.

And look! she comes ; ; ;  she tosses back her veil,
staring me down, serene and pitiless.
"Are you the one?" I ask, "whom Dante heard dictate
the lines of his Inferno?"  She answers, "Yes."
                                                                              1924
Where is your muse tonight? Mine is off to bed. I hope for a gentler day tomorrow. Sleep well, and so shall I.

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.