Addison's Walk

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

That's from a poem by C.S. Lewis, a Fellow of Magdalen College, referencing this footpath in the college, where he often walked. (There is a plaque with the poem on one of the gates.) Unlike the walk around Christ Church Meadow, it's not open to everyone; it's inside the college and you have to buy a ticket to visit.

I went there early on a Saturday morning, and while the other tourists clustered in the quads, I mostly had this walk to myself, through these long tunnels of trees around the water meadow where the college's herd of deer live in the summer.

Because of course they have a herd of deer in the middle of the college in the 21st century. Christ Church College has cows, doesn't it?

Here's an iceberg

Plus a poem:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

That's Mary Oliver, from When Death Comes.

We talked about the Harlem Renaissance in my class on Saturday, and read a couple of Langston Hughes poems, which the students loved. One student suggested that they could memorize a poem in English as a homework assignment, so I spent yesterday putting together 15 poems/excerpts that I think they would understand and enjoy. (Not necessarily to memorize, although if anyone wants to do that I'd be thrilled.)

The Rossettis

This is the grave of the poet Christina Rossetti and most of her family, who were apparently just stacked on top of each other.

Missing is Christina's brother, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had reportedly insisted that he not be buried in Highgate; he is instead buried in Kent, where he died in 1882. His wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who died twenty years earlier after only two years of marriage, is buried with the family though, and that may be one reason he didn't want to be buried there.

Lizzie Siddal was model and muse to several of the Pre-Raphaelites (most famously posing as Ophelia for Millais—taking laudanum for the pneumonia she caught after posing in a bathtub full of cold water for hours may have started the addiction that eventually cost her her life.)

She was a poet and painter in her own right, and though she was probably less talented than her husband, and certainly less accomplished, honestly I find her much more interesting as a person. It will probably not come as a surprise to learn that he treated her badly—he was chronically unfaithful, and the Rossetti family's disapproval of her working class background kept him from marrying her, although they first became engaged ten years before they actually married. By then her health had deteriorated to the point that she had to be carried to the church. She became pregnant, but the child was stillborn. During a subsequent pregnancy she died from an overdose of laudanum, though whether it was an accident or suicide isn't clear.

After her death, Rossetti was so consumed with grief that he refused to let her coffin leave the apartment for six days, and he enclosed the only copy of a manuscript of his poems in the casket, wrapped in her long red hair.

This is where the story takes a macabre turn. By 1869, seven years after her death, Rossetti became convinced he was losing his eyesight, and wanted to focus on his poetry rather than painting. The problem was that the poems he considered the best he'd ever written were buried with Lizzie in Highgate. His business manager, Charles Augustus Howell, arranged for a secret exhumation. The book was retrieved, and Howell reported to Rossetti—who wasn't there—that Lizzie was perfectly preserved, and that her red hair had continued to grow and now filled the coffin. Howell almost certainly made all of that up in an attempt to ease Rossetti's guilt, but Lizzie received some poetic justice—literally. The poems were published, along with newer work, to a scathingly negative critical reception. Rossetti regretted having agreed to the exhumation for the rest of his life (as well he should) and the man who facilitated it for him, Howell, ended up dying with his throat cut in a Chelsea pub.

These are some lines from the last poem Siddal wrote:

Life and night are falling from me,
Death and day are opening on me,
Wherever my footsteps come and go,
Life is a stony way of woe.
Lord have I long to go?

Hallow hearts are ever near me,
Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:
Lord, may I come to thee?

Life and youth and summer weather
To my heart no joy can gather.
Lord lift me from life’s stony way!
Loved eyes long close in death watch for me:
Holy death is waiting for me –
Lord, may I come to-day?

Urban poetry

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue...piano.

In Mill Ruins Park.

Minnehaha Falls

The waterfall the park is named for.

Though Longfellow never visited this waterfall, he stole the name for the heroine of his poem The Song of Hiawatha. I still shudder remembering our awful sing-songy recitations of portions of that masterwork in grammar school: 

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

But the waterfall, and the park, are lovely.

Breakers

The colors and detail in these images of waves fascinate me. This is one way photography has a definite advantage—freezing the moment so you can look at it without the distraction of motion.

It makes me think of Sylvia Plath: the freakish Atlantic/Where it pours bean green over blue. I do see what she meant.

Life in the time of coronavirus

We are in air conditioner season now, and it hasn't been as claustrophobic as I'd feared. I open the windows in the morning, and generally make it until mid- to late afternoon before I slam everything shut and turn on the AC.

When the windows are open, I do hear traffic and construction outside, along with the birds. It feels a little more like there's an actual city out there than it did during the bleak days of peak virus, and that's one more reason to put off closing them as long as I can.

This is a villanelle I wrote during the worst of it, when I was more than a little stir crazy.

The sirens wail their anxious song.
It rebounds through the empty street.
This night’s a hundred hours long.

A cough across the neighbor’s lawn;
Its percussion is my heart’s drumbeat
While sirens wail their anxious song.

And everything inside is wrong –
It’s sweaty blanket and tangled sheet.
This night’s a hundred hours long.

Distractions chug my days along,
Read, snack, Netflix – rinse, repeat.
The sirens wail their anxious song.

No nighttime charm I have’s that strong;
In the dark there’s no retreat.
This night’s a thousand hours long.

The window fades to a pale oblong.
I tick off one more day’s receipt,
Where sirens wail their anxious song
And night’s a hundred hours long.

Sunday bird blogging

        Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
        and all the tricks my body knows—
        the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
        and the mind clicking and clicking—    

       don't seem enough to carry me through this world
       and I think: how I would like 

       to have wings

-- Mary Oliver

If this gannet had just dipped a little to the left this would be a much better picture. On the other hand, you can actually tell that it is a gannet -- golden head, clear eye -- which is not always the case with my attempts to catch birds in flight.

Sunday bird blogging

Crow is crow, you say.
What else is there to say?
Drive down any road,

take a train or an airplane
across the world, leave
your old life behind,

die and be born again--
wherever you arrive
they'll be there first,

glossy and rowdy
and indistinguishable.
The deep muscle of the world.

                                -- Mary Oliver

This particular crow was in Albany, but they're everywhere in the East Bay. Crow and raven populations have exploded in the Bay Area in the past few decades -- there's plenty of food and no one shoots them.

I was mostly oblivious to birds when I lived there, but even I couldn't ignore a crow, and I know I never saw a raven. Now there are dozens of crows in every park and the occasional solitary raven, and empty crow's nests in most of the bare trees lining the streets of Pleasanton, waiting to hatch the next generation.

Saturday reflections

Another Chilean interlude: looking through the window into the bar at La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's house in Santiago, on a sunny summer afternoon.

Beauty break

To wander in the fields of flowers, pull the thorns from your heart. -- Rumi

I don't know about you, but any thorns I pulled from my heart this week would probably have been left as little surprises on the seats of the many people who annoyed me to the point of tears.

These flowers are cheap shrink-wrapped roses at the corner deli, and the pictures were originally intended just for Instagram. But after Photoshopping them into abstraction I liked the results so much I'm cross-posting here.

I'm making no promises about those thorns, by the way, so let's hope everyone is nicer to me today.

Urban poetry

Since we've just passed the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I, here's a tribute to one of the Yanks who went Over There, a statue in Dewitt Clinton Park in Manhattan.

What makes it true urban poetry though is that it gets the poetry part wrong -- the inscription from  In Flanders Fields is incorrect. It should be:

    If ye break faith with us who die
    We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
    In Flanders fields

That poem is one of the millions of random facts rattling around in my brain, taking up neurons that could be more productively used in remembering which server I saved those files on and what I need to pick up on the way home from work. When I was in sixth grade, we each had to pick a poem to memorize and recite for the class, and my friend Lizanne chose In Flanders Fields. (I recited a ghastly lyric called The Bridge Builder, and didn't realize that I was mispronouncing the word “chasm” until many years later. Just a couple of weeks ago on Big Little Lies, Reese Witherspoon's character corrected her ex-husband for pronouncing it exactly the way I used to. He was an unattractive character in general, but for a minute there he had my complete sympathy.)

Yes, I can still recite The Bridge Builder. And no, I won't.

A few more carpets

Let's give the last word to Rumi:

            I can't stop pointing to the beauty.             
 Every moment and place says,
            “Put this design in your carpet!”

Let's see what Hafez has to say about that

For a few tomans, these parakeets will select a random verse of Hafez just for you.

Golnaz translated mine for me, so I know what it says, but I haven't been able to find an English version yet.

One big cultural difference

That Iranians have a great deal of national pride -- they have been a country for 2500 years, after all -- is not news to any of us on the tour at this point. And yet, I was still surprised by the crowds at Hafez's tomb.

Hundreds of people, busloads and busloads of them, coming to pay their respects to -- a poet? Who lived in the 14th century? It's impossible to imagine Americans, or the residents of any Western nation, for that matter, having this kind of devotion to poetry. There aren't any shrines for Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, and poetry is sadly something that only a very small minority takes any interest in.

Goli has recited poems for us on several occasions; she says everyone knows them by heart. I can't pick out more than the occasional word, but I love the way the sounds entwine and repeat, like the mosaics on mosques or the brickwork in old walls. 

For a minute, it makes me feel that I understand something of what it is to be Persian, to make lush gardens in a harsh desert country, to build your houses around secret courtyards but invite strangers to stay, to decorate mosques with a few simple patterns repeated and embellished into astonishing complexity, and create mosaics for palaces with pieces of broken mirrors.

Hafez

I

Do not

Want to step so quickly

Over a beautiful line on God's palm

As I move through the earth's

Marketplace

Today.

I do not want to touch any object in this world

Without my eyes testifying to the truth

That everything is

My Beloved.

Something has happened

To my understanding of existence

That now makes my heart always full of wonder

And kindness.

I do not

Want to step so quickly

Over this sacred place on God's body

That is right beneath your

Own foot

As I

Dance with

Precious life

Today.

                                                                -- Hafez, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Iranians say that there are two books in every home -- the Quran, and the poems of Hafez. (Sometimes anglicized as Hafiz, but Hafez is closer to the way Iranians pronounce the name.) I love Sufi poetry -- the assumption that God does not require us to overlook the delights of this world is very refreshing to a former Catholic schoolgirl -- so paying my respects at Hafez's tomb was one of the things I was most looking forward to on this trip. (And he was our second Sufi poet of the day -- we visited the tomb of Sa'di earlier.)

First we sat under the trees in the cafe, and ate Shirazi faloodeh -- strands of starch that look like vermicelli noodles, frozen and doused with lip-puckeringly tart lime juice. We read poems out loud while we ate (I read the poem above). It was hot, and we'd been dashing from one place to another for hours, trying to see all of Shiraz in one day, and those few moments in the shade, eating and laughing and talking about poetry, were a lovely respite.

Hafez would have approved.

For example

These are two poems by the great Persian Sufi poet Hafez (or Hafiz, if you prefer -- Hafez is a more common spelling here) -- the top one, in the Nastaliq style of calligraphy, is from the late nineteenth century. The bottom one, in a style I'm guessing the artist Reza Mafi made up, is from 1973.

Winter evening

            Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.
       Margaret Avison -- New Year's Poem

Icy winds today, whipping scraps of paper so high up in the air I thought they were birds. There's no doubt that one of the great pleasures of winter weather is being inside, away from it, and I am reveling in the quiet warmth of a day when blessedly little happened.

Saturday geometries

Well, sort of. There are angles enough here, against that washed out sky, but it's not the first thing you would notice about this picture. I want to call it “The Lighting of the Lamps", which makes me think of “Prelude":

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

That's T.S. Eliot, always good for a chuckle and a bit of cheer when you could really use it. Many years ago, I went to a reading by Stephen Spender, and he talked about Eliot, and said that the voice in his poems was the way he actually talked. He imitated him saying, “I don't like bread and butter, and jam's too much trouble," in a deep, ponderous drawl, and suddenly idle tea table chatter sounded like something out of “The Waste Land."

Sunday bird blogging

Pigeon wallpaper.

People tend to dismiss them as "rats with wings" but when they fill the sky out of nowhere like this, a tornado of wing and tail, they're as beautiful as any other bird.

          At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
          Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
          Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
                                                      -Wallace Stevens

I think those pigeons only appear in dreams (or poetry). In my experience, there's very little undulation, ambiguous or otherwise. Mostly a lot of wild flapping.