Christine Boyka Kluge

Last Day of the Year

2011-12-31T18:42:00.004-05:00

The perfect last day of the year activity: a long, long walk at the reservation with a friend. It turned into a positively balmy, blue sky afternoon, so we wandered until dusk. Along the way, my camera was drawn to this rock wall decorated like a work of art with moss and lichens. What a great way to say farewell to 2011 and get ready to say hello to 2012. Happy New Year!

"Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense."
-- George Ade

Piece by Piece

2011-12-07T12:50:00.004-05:00

"Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world."
-- Adrienne Rich, from Necessities of Life

The photo was taken 12/2/11 at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. Click on image to enlarge.

Slowing Down Time

2011-10-07T22:33:00.004-04:00

My current project: slowing down time. Today: successful. These milkweed seeds caught the afternoon sun in the most beautiful way. Watching them escape in the breeze changed time from linear to billowy.

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner -- and then to thinking!"
-- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

He also wrote:

"Horus non numero nisi serenas is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled." -- William Hazlitt

("I count only the hours that are serene.")

The photo was taken this afternoon at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York.

Tenderness

2011-09-30T09:27:00.005-04:00

Thank you to Will Nixon, who invited me to be a guest blogger on his Hudson Valley Poetry Blog. I'm not sure exactly what Will anticipated, or actually wanted, but this is what I felt like writing about: Tenderness. In poetry. Here's how my essay begins:

Tenderness

"I want to feel my life. That unbidden line keeps circulating through my mind these days, reminding me to pay attention, to be open, to let the world in. To say yes. Toward that end, poetry widens and deepens what I feel. It colors and enriches my existence, joins me to humanity.

One of the ways a poem awakens the heart is through revealing our human tenderness. In a fabulous piece by Stan Rice, "Monkey Hill," there is a gift of a line: "Over and over the egg of tenderness will break in our hearts." That kills me.... " (Simply click on the "Tenderness" link to leap to Will's blog and finish reading the essay.)

Scrolling through my photos for an image to accompany the piece, I came across this picture. By contrast, the essay is serious, but somehow this bit of over-the-top visual silliness works in tandem. Look, apparently I'm incapable of keeping my camera away from my mother-daughter monkeys, one of my favorite gifts, from my dear CSJ, who knew I needed them.

Click on image to enlarge.

Fate

2011-09-18T23:19:00.005-04:00

Here is a passage from a book that beckoned to me to pick it up the other morning, to let my finger (like a dowser's divining rod!) find a meaningful passage. It was an "aha!"

People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many ... people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet, tr. by Stephen Mitchell

Just love Rilke's way of thinking.

The photo of the leaf was taken 8/30/11.

Swallowing a Cloud

2011-08-26T12:03:00.006-04:00

White porcelain cup:
bindweed swallowing a cloud
The eye brims with light

The middle line arrived when I turned back to look more closely at the bindweed and noticed the cloud disappearing "into" the flower. Wednesday's line was joined by two others this morning, two days later. A gift. I don't generally use formal structures or rules in writing poetry; my pieces tend to evolve, creating (summoning) their own shapes. However, the haiku-like form's simplicity seemed to suit the snapshot's capture of an expansive August moment.

This Evening's Enchantment

2011-08-10T21:26:00.003-04:00

Magnificent evening walk at the reservation. I wondered if the particular dragonflies I love would be out, and there they were ... magic. It was like an enchantment observing them in all their glittering glory. As before, they invited my camera in, right up close. It was breezy, but they cling like little pennants to the plants. In fact, that's what they are named: Halloween Pennant, Celithemis eponina.

How invisibly
it changes color
in this world,
the flower
of the human heart.

-- Komachi

Solitude

2011-05-13T23:26:00.004-04:00

"To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet."

--Charles Caleb Colton

"Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster."

-- Charles Dickens

Yes, just love these words. I'm back.

A Small Serving of Spring Darkness

2011-03-29T07:55:00.009-04:00

As an antidote to this brilliant (but cold) spring sunlight, here's a small serving of poetic darkness. The editor of RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities asked to reprint "Arms of the Snake," a piece of mine that first appeared in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. This is a poem that arrived unbidden, a duende-fueled surprise, even to me. Read on:

Arms of the Snake

Click on photo to enlarge image.

Skeletal Ice

2011-03-16T11:43:00.005-04:00

The Soul should stand in Awe --
-- Emily Dickinson

Delicate claws, skeletons, spiderwebs, daggers and ripples of ice. I suffered a wet sock and shoe getting this picture -- twice -- but it was worth it. This was the most beautiful, intricate ice I have ever seen, a gift formed by the crazy weather at the end of February. Now we are on the cusp of spring; even the last gritty rinds of snow have been washed away by the rain. The world is dripping, thawing. Things are about to happen.

The photo was taken 2/26/11. Click on image to enlarge.

Simian Awe

2011-02-19T14:13:00.004-05:00

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom
in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
-- Aldous Huxley

Humor is just another defense against the universe.
-- Mel Brooks

I agree. I believe in what I refer to as "the dark and twisted little laugh." It saves me from the shadows every time.

Click on image to enlarge. The photo was taken 2/16/11.

Monkey Love Tulip

2011-02-15T23:26:00.005-05:00

Monkey love tulip. Spring. Soon. Really.

The monkey also has a baby. The baby is its own kind of wonderful. (Beware, I'm sure other photos will follow.) The attached antique shop price tag was highly entertaining: "Celluloid monkeys AS IS -- wind up not workin, hole in baby's face." You can't wait to see that baby, now can you?

The photograph was taken this afternoon at my house. Thanks, Cindy S-J for the fabulous birthday monkey and baby. You knew I could no way, no how live without them. Simian bliss.

Simply click on photo to enlarge image.

Magic Skylight

2011-02-09T09:43:00.005-05:00

I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses.

-- Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny [May 15, 1871]

This is my magic skylight, sharing its own odd perspective on the world through its frame of thawing ice. When you look up through it, it toys with your orientation in space. I like that dizzy sensation, the momentary vision of the world as a new and thrilling place. In one of its earlier incarnations, fully covered with layers of ice, the skylight allowed enough light through to become a three-dimensional Mark Rothko painting. This morning its frame has melted and cracked, leaving the naked trees looming like crackled varnish, patterns backlit by February sun. I praise its kaleidoscope eye.

The photograph was taken 2/6/11.

Dream Horses

2011-01-15T20:37:00.004-05:00

For man, as for flower and beast and bird,
the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

-- D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

The photo was taken late this afternoon, on my way back from upstate NY. The horses caught my eye as I drove past; I immediately had to find a place to turn around so I could come back, tiptoe through a snowbank, and simply watch them. They were so beautifully still, so dreamlike, so part of the wintry world.

YES (Again)!

2010-12-31T17:55:00.007-05:00

Here we all are, at the last night of 2010. I have already been out for a sunny walk and late lunch with a friend and am waiting to go to a New Year's Eve / birthday party at another friend's house. It feels good to celebrate the changing year on the calendar, the changing year in my life. Tomorrow will be a fresh start.

Back in October, my poet friend Guy Reed described his wife Beth Humphrey's wonderful idea for each incoming year. "My wife, Beth, likes to pick a word for the year. Last year it was savor and we did. This year it is nest and we are doing that. It's amazing how well it has worked in our lives to pick an 'organizing' principle to shape the year." I love this idea! Looking ahead to 2011, two simple possibilities fluttered into my mind: yes and love. Another word came up at late lunch: open. Since love should always be the overlord of the days anyway, I select the word YES to carry me through 2011. To remind me to place yes before no, to be positive and compassionate -- and, yes, open to new ideas, friendships, adventures and possibilities. What's your word for the new year? Let me know, if you feel inspired to share. Happy New Year!

Thanks to Beth and Guy for giving me permission to mention Beth's idea and to quote Guy. The photo was taken this past summer at my cousin Laura's graduation party. Thanks for the festive lights, a perfect celebratory touch for this New Year's Eve as well!

Almost Winter

2010-12-19T22:29:00.003-05:00

Now winter nights enlarge
This number of their hours ...

-- Thomas Campion

The photo was taken this evening in Rhinebeck, New York. Click on image to enlarge.

Shadows Over Rilke

2010-11-20T11:41:00.009-05:00

I love these shadows, cast by a glass over the cover of a collection of Rilke's poetry. The patterns on the glass fell with beautiful, matching grace across the spiraling design of the book on my table. A November gift: found art. Rilke is one of my favorite poets. His words, so perfect for today:

... But, listen: a rake at work this early.
Above, alone, in the vineyard,
a man is already talking with the earth.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Essential Rilke, Selected and Translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann

The photo was taken 11/7/10. Just click on image to enlarge.

Watched

2010-10-30T16:48:00.007-04:00

On a walk just a short while ago, I had fun setting up this photo. Perfect for tomorrow's holiday and the wheeling season. Happy Almost-Halloween!

For an eerie experience, click on Her Kind on The Academy of American Poets site to listen to Anne Sexton read her famous witch poem. Here's the first stanza of "Her Kind" to get you started:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind ....

-- Anne Sexton

Continue reading and listening to "Her Kind" by following the link above. For more about the troll, visit this earlier 2008 post, "Troll, Raku, Orkney Islands."

Click on photo to enlarge image.

Interstices

2010-10-28T08:43:00.005-04:00

Thank you, Charles Wright, for the following beautiful lines from "Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Manner" in Black Zodiac:

Interstices. We live in the cracks.
Under Ezekiel and his prophesies,
under the wheel.

Poetry's what's left between the lines --
a strange speech and a hard language,
It's all in the unwritten, it's all in the unsaid ...

-- Charles Wright, Black Zodiac (1997)
(Please forgive the formatting.)

The photo of lichens was taken 10/22/10 at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York. Click on image to enlarge.

Heart Like a Compass Needle

2010-10-09T19:52:00.008-04:00

These days my directionless heart twitches like a compass needle. The mind wants to hold it firm -- steady north -- but the heart longs for the wild meander; wants to skip a beat; to race, breathless; to dance to its own syncopated music. Shrugging off the mind's stubborn grip, where will the heart point? Where will it wander? And toward whom?

I want to feel my life, even when it jangles the heart. I want to exist fully, intensely, inside its expanding borders. The world has suddenly opened up in all directions, revealing both turquoise seas and thorned thickets, blinding sunlight and startling darkness. I want to look both joys and shadows directly in the eyes. My pupils constantly dilate and contract. Which way shall I head out into this flickering light?

As guidance, my friends and family offer amazing advice, comforting wisdom, and their own experiences. One of my "invisible friends," superb singer and songwriter Wendy Lewis, came to me as an unexpected gift through poet Guy Reed. A fellow participant at a group Riverine anthology reading in Poughkeepsie, Guy thought Wendy and I would appreciate each other's creativity. We absolutely did. We have never met or even heard each other's speaking voice, but I have listened obsessively to Wendy's powerful singing and lyrics on CD's of her music she assembled and mailed to me. She gave permission for me to quote some of her wise words from our e-mail correspondence.

Chris: I like what you said: "You seem lighter -- and denser, all at once." You're insightful ... that sums it up somehow. I do feel lighter, but more intense, more focused, more me. After all those months of being in robot warrior mode, it feels good to start peeling off some of the armor. Only problem is, it makes you vulnerable. Hey, it was good/essential to get stronger, just don't want to permanently impair the sensitivity and trust.

Wendy: Yeah—"stripping off of armor" does make a person more vulnerable, but I guess I've always seen vulnerability as strength. It takes a lot of courage to surrender to ones' circumstances, roll on your back and just float down that river, trusting the current to take you somewhere, anywhere away from where you've been. The armor is all about protection—and I think both you and I would agree that life doesn't work that way for long, if ever. Clearly, from your entries over the last year, your sensitivity has been intensely illuminated and I've come to understand that trust is as ethereal as humanity is fallible.

Yes, "vulnerability as strength." Thanks, Wendy ... and thank you to all the others who have stood by me, pointing my heart in the right direction.

The above photo seemed like a good match to Wendy's words, as well as the post topic. It's another meaningful/symbolic shot, taken on July 12, 2008, a day of momentous decisions, at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY. (Yes, I will float. Onward!) To enlarge the photo, click on the image.

The Newborn Face of the Poem

2010-09-22T23:05:00.007-04:00

At the end of August I went with three of my oldest friends to the wonderful sculpture garden at Art OMI in Ghent, New York. So many intriguing and mysterious works of art grace the fields and woods. A huge sheet of riddled metal suspended among the trees captivated us for quite a spell. The reflections were a funhouse mirror paradise. Later, the resulting self-portrait above gave me a little surprise. Examined more closely, I can see my mind being siphoned by one of the powerful black holes. When I looked even more carefully, I noted a strange little newborn face emerging from my pointed head, near the rim of the bullethole abyss. Must be the face of a poem just being born. Yikes -- it's slippery, somebody catch it before it vanishes into the darkness.

Saturday night I joined editor/poet/musician John Amen and The Pedestal Magazine to read at KGB Bar in NYC. Thanks, John, for the invitation to read. What a delight to be in a room crowded with people who respect and believe in the power of the poem. How rewarding to look up while sharing a prose poem and see every face actually paying serious attention. One of the pieces I read was "They Seek an Inky Elixir," which first appeared in Cerise Press. It was just recorded and is now available online at Whale Sound , a terrific new audio anthology of poetry. If you would like to hear this prose poem read by another voice, the haunted and elegant voice of Nic Sebastian, click here to listen:

They Seek an Inky Elixir

For additional references to the piece, scroll down to the July 1st post, reached by clicking "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page. The words to the prose poem are there, with links to Cerise Press.

The photo was taken 8/28/10 at Art OMI in Ghent, New York. Click on image to enlarge.

YES

2010-09-03T18:45:00.002-04:00

YES.

This photo was taken in my yard on May23, 2009. I have been eagerly awaiting the perfect day to post it. To enlarge, merely click on the image. Feel lighter? Oh yeah.

Orange Unfurling

2010-08-14T19:01:00.005-04:00

I love this blossom! Just took this photo a little while ago in my neighbor's vegetable garden, on a stop on my walk. I went back uphill to get my camera to capture its intricate unfurling. It makes me want to draw.

From Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

The glories strung like beads on my smallest
sights and hearings, on the walk in the street
and the passage over the river.

-- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

And a perfect thought -- why not? -- from Whitman's "Song of the Open Road":

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am
good fortune.

-- Walt Whitman

Click on photo to enlarge image.

The Staircase in Her Eye

2010-08-01T09:13:00.006-04:00

While doing sit-ups the other day, I looked up to see this riveting reflection. My line of vision and the angle of light combined to create this collage of my younger and older daughters' self-portraits from high school. I love the way my older daughter's face looks down the stairs from the landing into the eye of my younger daughter and the way my younger daughter's eye contains the staircase leading to my older daughter. The way my eye holds them both.

Here are some related words from John Steinbeck:

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

-- John Ernst Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

The picture was taken 7/25/10. Click on photo to enlarge image.

Nature's Infinite Book of Secrecy

2010-07-18T08:52:00.004-04:00

In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.

-- William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra (Act I, Scene ii.)
The Soothsayer's words

Apparently, I keep reading the same passages over and over in nature's infinite book. Every summer I take countless photos of the wine berries on my road, gorgeous in color and texture at every stage of development. I never tire of those multi-hued jewels that emerge from the purple-whiskered casings. I keep coming back to the crimson, orange and chartreuse of the ripening berries, glittering against the green foliage.

The picture was taken on the 4th of July this year, uphill from my house. Click on the photo to enlarge the image.

Box of Green Light

2010-07-14T07:43:00.007-04:00

There were plenty of twinkling lights at my cousin's graduation party, but there, in the shadows of the garage: a box of green light, glowing like a treasure chest of kryptonite. In reality, it was a cardboard box of glow sticks and glow toys. One of the youngest cousins shared my delight at discovering this container of celebratory light. Inspired, he quickly and decisively selected pieces from the collection to create a bold and clean design on the floor. It looked like a neon hieroglyph. Then he wanted to photograph it. At eight, what an eye! I loved observing the young soul of an artist, glowing.

An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.

-- Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, from a letter to A. S. Suvorin, October 27, 1888

Click on the photographs to enlarge the images.

Spathe, Scratched Light

2010-07-10T17:02:00.004-04:00

Spathe? No, that's not what it really is. I don't want to erase the mystery and atmosphere of this photograph by revealing the subjects. (Perhaps you have a suggestion or inspiration?) I took the picture this afternoon, found this shrunken world while playing with light and elusive reflections. To enter, click on image, lean forward, and disobey gravity.

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

-- Max Jacob (1876-1944), Art Poetique

They Seek an Inky Elixir

2010-07-01T18:50:00.011-04:00

Okay, I know this is an unfocused photo, but it's got its own fuzzy-dreamy energy, and I like it. It throws you off for a split second, until you realize the moth is clinging to the kitchen window, not floating. It's a bit unsettling the way the moth stares inside, directly into your eyes. Watching you. Odd, how you have the inclination to stare back. To be absolutely still and silent. I found this picture while searching through my photos for a match to a prose poem of mine, "They Seek an Inky Elixir." The prose poem was just published in the summer issue of Cerise Press, a fascinating literary magazine, along with "My Flickering Body," a lyric poem.

Here's the beginning of "They Seek an Inky Elixir":

THEY SEEK AN INKY ELIXIR

Poems cling to the trees in the dark, glowing like white bandages. They have traveled unimaginable distances, arriving in flocks from all directions. Windblown, tattered, they are exhausted from flying. They are half-dead from endlessly circling human heads, searching for an entrance to those moist and dreaming brains. All but a few have failed to do so.

The sound of the poems settling is a many-voiced hiss. Here, in the thickest part of the woods, they cover every trunk and branch. Their thirst is terrible. Sticky and breathless, they seek an inky elixir drawn by roots from the underworld. They crave that earthy flavor, the taste of clay and rust. Their unfurled tongues bore into the sapwood.

In an earlier life, they gathered in the crowns of trees and chewed. Now, in their fullness, graced with wings, they desire only that which flows. The words they seek have nothing to do with sunlight and chartreuse leaves. They wriggle deeper between the shingles of bark. All night long they siphon what they need from the trees. They greedily swallow cold shadows ....

--continued in Cerise Press--
--CBK

To finish reading this piece, click on the title (in bold, above) to be transported to Cerise Press. You will also find "My Flickering Body" there. Here is the first section:

MY FLICKERING BODY

Unwrap the silt-blanketed stone
at the bottom of your heart.

Reveal yourself.

Dredge the pond.

Find your other body.

Bring her back to the surface,
where the bobbing copper sun
will balance again
like a penny on her lips.

The water is covered with weightless coins:
copper, gold, silver, bronze –
blinding.

She keeps her eyes pinched tight.

Shake her awake.

For a moment,
there is no one inside the body.
The body is mere reminder,
receptacle for the lost stone,
the stone that skipped across the mirror
in defiance of gravity,
then finally obeyed.

*
--continued on Cerise Press--
--CBK

Again, to read the rest of the poem, just click on the title in bold above. Thanks to the fine editors of Cerise Press for including my poetry. I'm honored. Do visit the summer issue online to savor an impressive assortment of writing and art.

The photo was taken from my kitchen, a couple of years ago. Click on the photo to enlarge the image.

Grokking the Toad

2010-06-19T09:46:00.009-04:00

Coming home from work on June 10th, I encountered a toad at the bottom of the stairs, as if waiting for me. I ran in to get my camera before the toad disappeared and came back to find it still peacefully sunning. I took several shots, very close, amazed that the toad didn't leap away. I sat on the stairs, enjoying the late light and watching the toad, checking out the wild designs on its back, its topaz eyes.

Surprisingly, the toad jumped toward me, positioning itself between my feet, then turning around to face west with me. We watched the sky and trees, thinking our thoughts. This companionable silence seemed to go on for quite a while. It was probably no more than five or ten minutes of stillness and complete ease, that shared, comfortable space illuminated by the gold evening sun of June. Time got nice and slow. I felt I "got" the toad, that I "grokked" the toad. Do you recognize that Martian word from Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land? Here is Heinlein's definition of grok:

"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed -- to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience."

To my delight, the word was also listed in The American Heritage Dictionary:

Grok -- slang -- To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.

And, here, from the Oxford English Dictionary:

"To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment."

From Heinlein again, grok is "associated with literal meanings such as 'water', 'to drink', 'life', or 'to live'."

Good word. Those Martians are deep. Here are more good words, from Marianne Moore (forgive the formatting):

.... One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination" -- above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

-- Marianne Moore, from the last two stanzas of "Poetry"

To enlarge the photo, click on the image.

Purple Umbrella

2010-06-12T15:43:00.004-04:00

When I went for a walk with a friend earlier this afternoon, we discovered a young neighbor and her friend sitting on a rock eating Italian ices. Too cute. Since the drizzle had eased up, one of the girls had left her purple umbrella upside-down on the lawn. The crazy cat is the base of the handle. I just realized that if you squint, you can see me and my camera inside the cat's brain.

Click on image to enlarge.

That Dark and Twisted Little Laugh

2010-06-09T18:46:00.006-04:00

Communication by e-mail and instant messaging can be the casual flounce of words screen to screen, ideas tossed lightly, loosely, telegraphically. The mediums seem to encourage the immediate and impulsive. Of course the words can also go deep and convey hard thought; the exchange can have the feeling of a serious conversation. The other day I received a wise and beautiful e-mail from a high school friend, Tom. Here's a brief excerpt:

... my learned lesson that I attempt to abide by these days is this: There are really only two things that for me warrant any prolonged concern - love and health. Everything else takes a distant back seat and ultimately is of fleeting value. This of course is not to say that other things aren't good, fun, sad, debilitating or something else; but they don't really alter life very much or at least should not be afforded the opportunity.

Here is part of my response:

I like your philosophy. Love and health. How about creativity/art (in the broadest, most inclusive sense)? What also surfaces in my mind: truth (yeah, even if it hurts), and, strangely, humor. Somehow the dark and twisted little laugh is what saves me again and again. I see a strong link between comedy and poetry ... they can work the same way. Metaphors and jokes ... think about it. Disparate things magically/absurdly linked. The way they cinch together the far edges of the universe. The way they turn things inside-out. The beautiful surprise of both. (Back in time, during an author interview, the interviewer asked me if there was anything I had left out in our discussion of poetry. Yes, humor! I've been meaning to revisit this topic on my blog. Maybe you've just helped me write the post.) How about Soul and Spirit? (Soulful and spirited?) Compassion? Yes, and hope, that flickering flashlight. And back to that word, magic. The sudden bursts of sparks in life. But I agree, love is the top item, and possibly the overlord of them all.

-------------------------

Note: I decided not to edit this exchange, since in its direct and unpolished way, it conveys the ease of communication ... and tells the truth.

Tom's words were reprinted here with his permission. The photo of bark was taken up the hill from my house. Click on image to enlarge.

Eyes of Niles

2010-05-28T09:39:00.004-04:00

Niles, my friend Cindy's cat, posed so patiently and elegantly for the camera. Gorgeous, the way his pale green eyes caught the spring light.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie
is that a cat has only nine lives.

-- Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)

To admire Niles' glory more fully, merely click on the image.

Something of the Marvelous

2010-05-23T22:48:00.005-04:00

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

-- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Parts of Animals, bk. 1, ch. 5

Funny how you set out to take a photograph of one thing, then something else catches your eye and takes you in a whole other direction. This podlike, mummified ... thing ... was part of a box of potpourri. (Could it possibly be a slice of orange?) As I headed out to the deck, it was literally underfoot, aglow in the light streaming through the sliding glass doors. Outside, I held it up to the muted sunlight, played with the way it cast a shadow, then realized what a terrific composition it formed against the bold wood grain of the picnic table.

Click on image to enlarge.

Clematis Shadows

2010-05-16T18:20:00.004-04:00

I can't resist the immediate thrill of posting this photo of the clematis my neighbor brought me last night. She knows I love to arrange the flowers that arrive from her garden in vitamin jars, cans and juice bottles. Late this afternoon I lost myself in admiring the individual flowers with my camera. That rich purple ... those textures and shadows!

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

-- Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

The photo was taken 5/16/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Strangeness in the Proportion

2010-05-15T18:45:00.007-04:00

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
from Of Beauty, Essays

Thank you to Thea and Mark for the Mother's Day roses, and thank you to Shane for the Mother's Day creature, all featured in this picture. Emma, thank you for trying so hard to get here! The tinyitis "monster bug" was made by Deanne Neiburger of Deetsy on etsy.com. The photo was taken this afternoon, 5/15/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Reading the Sky

2010-05-10T07:01:00.007-04:00

Walking downhill on my road at the end of April, my friend and I came across clouds like smudged words in the sky. I wandered ("lonely as a cloud"?) through a book here on North American weather, a thrilling find. According to the photos -- and with no true understanding -- the closest I came to naming them was altocumulus undulatas, under "middle clouds." Well, whatever they were, they were quite beautiful and mysterious. It was like finding an erased message written on a blue chalkboard. What did it say?

The poet is like the prince of the clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

-- Charles Baudelaire, "L'Albatros," st. 4, from Les Fleurs du Mal (1861)

The photo was taken 4/29/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Speak, Tree

2010-04-21T09:21:00.007-04:00

Open to its inner map of color and texture, this dying tree on my street longs to tell its story. There, to the right, is its crackled, knowing eye. In the words of Shakespeare's Macbeth:

Stones have been known to move and trees to speak.

-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act III, scene iv.

While searching for this quote, I got hooked on the vivid language and eagerly traveled on, arriving at the following familiar and beautiful passage several pages later:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, scene v.

And now, I suppose, it's time to revisit Faulkner's book and meander through those pages.

The photograph was taken 4/11/10 on my road. Click on image to enlarge.

Float the Earth

2010-04-11T10:39:00.007-04:00

Up way too early, I decided to walk up to the pond to see what was happening. I relished that lovely stillness, all quiet except for a mourning dove's lonely call and the distant tapping of a woodpecker. One to lull you, the other to wake you and make you pay attention. Thrillingly, countless black polliwogs were wriggling through the water like three-dimensional commas, or resting on submerged leaves, tiny tails pointed. I balanced on two rocks to get a close-up photo of them, which obviously was just not that great. (At least this time I managed to escape without a shoe full of muddy water.) That beautiful eastern light illuminated the muted April setting, placed the sky in the pond's silver bowl, and set the reflections dancing.

Here are two fitting quotes from Walden by Henry David Thoreau:

"It is well to have some water in the neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth." -- Henry David Thoreau

Later in Walden he writes:

"There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still." -- Henry David Thoreau

Truth.

Click on images to enlarge. Maybe then you can see the polliwogs in the lower picture. Both photos taken 4/11/10.

Startling Little Brains

2010-04-06T09:36:00.009-04:00

I was startled when I crouched down to take a close-up photo of skunk cabbage and saw this alien presence nestled inside. (It's actually the spadix, covered with minute flowers.) Like a cross between a sprouting potato and a little pink brain, it was just waiting to surprise me on a glorious spring afternoon this past weekend. Our paths happily intersected when I went for a hike with a dear friend at Macedonia Brook Park in Kent, Connecticut.

This image reminds me of a piece from my latest book, Stirring the Mirror. Here is the opening paragraph to the flash fiction piece/prose poem, "Brain in a Birdcage." To read it in its entirety, simply click on the preceding title and you will be magically transported to The Diagram, an unusual and wonderful online literary magazine. Okay, hang on to your chair, here we go:

The little brain looked like a gray walnut, splotched in places with pink iridescence. At the bottom of a rusty birdcage, it reclined on a balsam sachet, one with a picture of a bull moose foraging, and thought its wicked thoughts unencumbered by a body. If it had vocal chords, it would have cackled heh-heh-heh under its breath. It did have one good eye. The eye floated above the brain in a baby food jar filled with oil, perched on the bird swing, optic nerve connected to the brain by a coiled copper wire. Iris up, it swam back and forth, flashing opal then emerald, pupil dilating and contracting, scanning the dome of its prison for a way out. Its unused vessels, tied in a knot, swished behind the eye, like a red squid chasing a beach ball ....

If you didn't dare open the story with the link above, but now want to see what happens next, you may enter the story PORTAL HERE. Happy motoring ...

To see the true beauty of the spadix, simply click on the image to enlarge the photo.

No Permanent Planting

2010-03-27T10:41:00.003-04:00

I don't know about that. It sure looks pretty permanent to me.

This cemetery sign always makes me laugh to myself as I drive past to visit a friend. I've always wanted to take a picture of it, so yesterday I finally did. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Frog Eggs

2010-03-21T14:25:00.010-04:00

Second day of spring. I just walked back from a visit to the pond at the top of my hill. For those of you following the amphibian progress up there, here's today's (3/21/10) photo of the sunlit clusters of thousands of eggs. The party is still going strong ... wild and noisy. Harper & Row's Complete Field Guide to North American Wildlife describes what I referred to as the frogs' "chuckle-grunt" as "A short rasping clacking almost like clucking (not quacking) sound of domestic ducks." To me, their combined effort still sounds like a TV laugh track. Apparently they call only during breeding season, which begins very early in the spring, "even before ice has completely melted." Their range extends north of the Arctic Circle. Rana sylvatica doesn't hibernate under the water, but in logs, stumps, and under stones.

The top two photos of frogs are from their arrival day, St. Patrick's Day, 3/17/10. There were so many photogenic amphibians on hand! Just click on the images to enlarge the photographs. (Then you can admire the frogs' "prominent light dorsolateral folds.") See previous posts for more on the pond. You can do a blog search for the word "pond" and see what comes up as well. I think I am going to check that out right now .... Okay, I'm back. I did the "pond" search of the blog -- how clear it is how much that place means to me. And since the frogs' 2009 arrival comes up, it was fun to revisit those posts and see how closely they correspond with this year's observations.

Spider Zero

2010-03-17T08:30:00.011-04:00

A week ago, across from the path leading up to the pond, this hardy March spider posed at the exact center of the zero on a house number sign. Snow still on the ground, ice on the pond, and -- strangely -- spider on the cold metal zero. Bull's-eye! I was able to get one shot right up close (he/she patiently waited for me), but when I blinked, the spider had vanished. The striking black and white pattern the spider had formed was like a fleeting, coded message, if only I could decipher it.

Here's another bull's-eye from poet Paul B. Roth, "Invisible":

Invisible

I know well
the black spots
opening
in apple leaves

I'm intimate
with the moist dust
around
each eaten center

with blonde-green
spiders
threading webs
through each one
of these holes

and who
when they see me
flash
through this emptiness

hide
by balling up
as if each
were one
of my unknown selves

-- Paul B. Roth

This piece is part of Paul Roth's beautiful and whispered collection, Cadenzas by Needlelight: Three Winters of Poems from Cypress Books (Rio Rico, Arizona, 2009). When someone whispers, you listen. "Invisible" was first published in Timber Creek Review. To read an excellent review of the book, visit Cerise Press online. "Invisible" is reprinted here with the author's permission.

The spider also reminded me of a poem that was one of my favorites as a teenager, "Design" by Robert Frost. You can read this poem on The Academy of American Poets Web site.

Pond update: Instant frogs! When I walked up to the pond this morning, the frogs had arrived. I could hear the loud chuckle-grunt of their mating calls from the road. When I got up there, there were countless sparkling little heads at the surface of the water. Noticing me, they suddenly disappeared underwater and all went silent. I was patient and quiet until the wild song began again. I stayed for a long stretch, surrounded by the noisy action. Then I heard rustling in the leaves. More frogs were appearing, converging on the pond, leaping toward the water from several directions. (And those were amazingly long, eager leaps!) I've never witnessed their actual arrival before. Lucky. (You can read two previous posts about the pond by scrolling down.)

The photograph was taken 3/10/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Six Days Later

2010-03-16T23:12:00.007-04:00

Same pond, this morning, six days later. No snow, no ice, but still no visible wood frogs. I did see the leaves move under the water in one place, so something is in there. After the wild rains, the path to the pond had become a running stream, gurgling out into and across the road.

All they could see was sky, water, birds, light and confluence. It was the whole morning world.

-- Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter [1978]

Note: See the 3/17/10 post to read about the frogs' overnight arrival.
Click on image to enlarge.

Thawing Mirror

2010-03-10T22:00:00.008-05:00

The pond begins to pull back its curtains of snow and ice, revealing layers of mystery. It holds the sky and still-naked branches in its thawing mirror. With narrow fingers, the upside-down trees reach for last fall's leaves.

This afternoon I walked up to the pond in search of returning wood frogs, but all was silent. Soon, soon.

The photo was taken 3/10/10 at the pond at the top of my hill. Click on image to enlarge.

Unblinking Stare

2010-03-09T11:33:00.008-05:00

Back to anemones, only closer. This flower's bold eye radiates energy. Its unblinking stare is a hypnotic explosion in red, black and white. It's March. Time to wake up.

Somehow the following words from Joseph Campbell, from the prologue of The Hero of a Thousand Faces [1949], fit this image:

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

-- Joseph Campbell

Yes. "The very dreams that blister sleep." Beautiful, that.

The photo is of a hybrid anemone I got at Battenfeld's Anemone Farm. Click on image to enlarge. Scroll down two posts to read more about anemones.

Never-ending Snow

2010-02-26T19:52:00.005-05:00

My yard. Today. The snow just keeps coming, transforming the trees into something magical, dreamlike. The sleepyhead pines and cedars bow their heavy heads. Like a visitation, a hawk swoops overhead to land in a nearby tree, shaking down clots of snow. Then perfectly still, he/she watches me back.

From "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," a short story by Conrad Aiken:

The hiss was now becoming a roar -- the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow -- but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.

Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)

Click on image to enlarge.

Anemone Eyes

2010-02-23T09:13:00.007-05:00

Listening to the mix of sleet and rain and snow coming down, I turn away from the ping and drip to look in the eyes of these splashy anemones. On a recent wintry day, a friend and I visited the light-filled greenhouses of Battenfeld's Anemone Farm in Red Hook, New York. It's a great place to go with a camera, in search of color and light. (What were Goethe's legendary last words? Supposedly "More light!" Is that true? Even if not, they're perfect words.) While at Battenfeld's, you can pick up a small bouquet of hybrid anemones at an extremely reasonable price, leaving your money at their self-serve station.

Click on image to enlarge.

More Shadows Filled with Light

2010-02-19T08:40:00.004-05:00

I love the way this paperweight casts a golden, swirling shadow while holding the sunlight captive inside its little world.

The photo was taken yesterday, 2/18/10. Click on the image to magically enlarge the photo. Thanks to Kim from my women artists' group, who gave me the paperweight before she left for Bhutan.

Pretty Candy Shadow

2010-02-18T13:34:00.007-05:00

I took this picture just a little while ago. I don't know ... it just makes me happy to look at it!

Merely click on the image to enlarge the candy and shadow. Thanks for the holiday candy, Thea. Too gorgeous to eat ... and I don't think I really want to taste a sugary treat that is bourbon-flavored. What can I say? My kids like to give me weird candy. Scroll down to the "Cosmic Piglet" post to see the marzipan pig Emma gave me at Christmas.

Heart Swollen with Secrets

2010-02-14T10:05:00.006-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day. For you, a prose poem, "Heart Swollen with Secrets," from the new manuscript I'm working on:

HEART SWOLLEN WITH SECRETS

The heart, swollen with secrets, learns to disguise its voice.

It mimics the reedy peep of a schoolgirl reading, nail-bitten thumb prodding each perplexing word.

It pleads in the cracked baritone of a prisoner begging for water, pressing the pattern of bars into his glistening forehead.

It complains about the heat wave with the bitter whisper of a ballerina in a body cast.

In a teenage voice, it wheedles with the speed of an auctioneer, needing car keys for cruising.

Sometimes, grinning, it charms even you with the oily tones of a politician. Yes, even you, standing there with the empty leash in your hand, blinking and scratching your chin. Too many false voices. Where oh where did your real heart go?

Lately the heart pretends to have no voice at all. Stone-lipped and sulking, it glares out at the world through its gray-green mask of lichens and moss, silent as a boulder.

This evening, in the steamy dusk, you think you hear – at last! – the beautiful, watery song of the wood thrush deep in the oaks. But it is only the heart, that brassy little mockingbird, stealing another song. It practices throwing its own voice, its true and dark and sparkling voice, as far away as it can.

-- CBK

For your holiday entertainment, do a search of the blog, entering the word "heart."

"Heart Swollen with Secrets" was originally published in The Bitter Oleander. The photo is of a tree's heart, up my road near the pond. Click on photo to enlarge image.

Salt Art

2010-02-13T08:59:00.006-05:00

During snowstorms, I cringe when the flashing lights of town trucks blink past on my steep hill. The trucks hurl arcs of huge salt crystals in their wake. Sigh. (No, I do not drink my well water.) However, in the aftermath, the sun reveals an ironic beauty: these crackled mosaics of salt-encrusted pavement.

Thank you for the poetic words of William Blake, which always hold strange truths:

Improvement makes straight roads; but the
crooked roads without improvement are
roads of genius.

William Blake, 1757-1827

I'm all for the meander.

The photo was taken yesterday afternoon, 2/12/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Hungry for Color

2010-02-10T11:29:00.009-05:00

The snow continues to fall, drifty flakes spiraling down. All sounds are muted into a muffled silence; the pace of the day thickens and stalls. Yes, the view from my window is beautiful, but I'm so hungry for color. Although I'll likely take some wintry photos later when I venture out for a walk, right now I want to see something vivid and alive. Scrolling through last spring and summer's photos on my quest, I came across this glorious, opening rose, captured at the cusp of fullness. Just looking again into its face thaws the spirit.

John Keats wrote these stunning lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes":

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.

-- John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Those three words instill spangled commotion in your mind, don't they? "Made purple riot"! And inside the "pained heart." Perfect. Wandering through Keats' writing, I came across these additional powerful and unsettling lines from "The Living Hand," a fragment. I wasn't expecting this haunted feeling, this visitation, to overcome me. See what happens to you after reading these eight lines:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd -- see here it is --
I hold it towards you.

-- John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Shiver. This makes you want to leap fully into your skin, fill your lungs, and take off running to live your life in the deepest way you can. Do you remember what you needed -- with your whole heart -- to do?

The photograph was taken at White Flower Farms in Litchfield, Connecticut on 6/7/09. Click on the image to enlarge.

Windshield Feathers

2010-01-30T09:33:00.005-05:00

This so-called "arctic blast" has us hibernating. On soul-chilling Saturdays like this, I welcome the morning mug of coffee with both hands. This has been another season of spectacular ice formations -- fantastic, fleeting patterns only the camera can hold on to. These swirling ice-plumes surprised me on December 14th, as I hurried to my car on the way to work. I had never seen such an intricate windshield bas relief. I found my camera and took this photo from the driver's seat. I love the way the bare black trees loom like giants beyond the glass. Hard to stop looking; harder yet to scrape away the art and head toward my other reality.

To enlarge the photo, click on the image.

Disobey the Current

2010-01-17T10:31:00.005-05:00

Drawn by the curled wave of snow and ice against black water, I stood as close as I dared, not knowing where the ground ended and the stream began beneath the snow.

Thoughts jotted down while revisiting the image this silent Sunday morning:

Thinking of all the forces that rush past – unstoppable -- that freeze and melt our edges, that swirl our thoughts into beauty and darkness, that form patterns of poetic clarity, that ripple cold and warm past the heart, as boundaries thaw then re-form, then give way again, as -- quivering -- we inhabit shape after shape. Yet, how still and immutable, how solid: that place at our core that disobeys the current.

The photo was taken 1/9/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Cosmic Piglet

2010-01-13T08:37:00.005-05:00

Up way too early this morning, I was playing around with my camera, a Christmas marzipan pig from my younger daughter, an old etched copper plate from printmaking days, and some bubbled glass. Oh, and the muted morning light coming in through the sliders. I don't know what there is about this photo, but it makes me laugh. The floating pig seems to be looking down on Earth with goofy wonder. Just something silly to start the day, a little effervescence for you.

Does anyone actually eat marzipan? To enlarge the image, just click on the picture.

The Real Sky Was Better

2010-01-06T19:50:00.006-05:00

Tonight's sunset: the inky trees were crosshatched over the blue and rosy stripes of clouds. I like the tangled nest of lines gathered at the lower right, with the last pastel light peeping through. It was well worth braving the icy air to go for a walk earlier in the day. Later on, coming home with groceries, I drove beneath these gorgeous colors. I grabbed my camera to try to capture the fading sunset from my neighbor's driveway. The real sky was so much better, unwilling to live inside my camera.

I wish you all a creative and colorful 2010!

To enlarge the image, click on the photo.

Shoveling by Moonlight

2009-12-20T23:38:00.004-05:00

At sunset, my neighbors' holiday lights cast an eerie glow from beneath the new snow. Like four miniature suns, they formed part of an alien wintry landscape. After my walk, I finished shoveling by moonlight.

La Fovea

2009-12-17T20:24:00.013-05:00

I was invited by wonderful poet Pamela Hart to join in the fun on La Fovea, an online literary magazine with an intriguing concept. Editor Frank Giampietro just posted two of my prose poems, "Tortoiseshell" and "Bride Number Two." If you want to read them, simply click on this link:

La Fovea

Then make sure to travel on and explore this expanding community of poets!

I was fascinated by the unusual way this publication works. Here is a description from the Web site explaining "the rules":

•Each nerve editor (found on the main page) is in charge of a nerve. The nerves are made up of poets who are invited to submit to La Fovea. Click on the editor's name to see all the poets and poems in his or her nerve.

•The nerve editor asks a poet to submit two poems. After that poet has had his or her poems published on La Fovea, he or she will ask another poet to submit poems.

•If the last poet on the nerve does not find a poet to submit poems for whatever reason, the nerve is called "dead." It's okay to have a "dead nerve." The important thing is for the nerve editor to notice that a nerve has died and begin a new nerve from their first page of poems.

I also enjoyed the inspirational quote from a letter Frank O'Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch, which explains the title, La Fovea. Here are O'Hara's words:

"Kenneth you really are the backbone of a tremendous poetry nervous system / which keeps sending messages along the wireless luxuriance / of distraught experiences and hysterical desires so to keep things humming / and have nothing go off the trackless tracks"

--Frank O'Hara

And now, a brief biology lesson about the eye from La Fovea's editor, Frank Giampietro:

The fovea is the place on the back of the eye where the nerves gather and take signals from the eye to the brain. Ironically, the fovea is the only place on the back of the eye that does not imprint an image. Instead the brain fills in the image based on information around it so that we don't have a small spot in our vision.

We think the term is, well, poetic and sums up in a metaphor a lot of what it means to find, and "to see," excellent poems.

The poets whose work appears on this website agree in part or in whole with the following manifesto:

1. We believe that it makes no sense to say one form of poetry is more valid or more artistic than any other.

2. We believe that the old model of submission/rejection is but only one way for finding and publishing the best poetry.

3. We want poets rather than poet/editors to have more editorial authority in general. Poets should be able to champion people they love and have their opinions "matter."

4. We think La Fovea will encourage poets to read each other's poems because they will want to know who else is on their nerve. They will want to ask, "With whom am I related?"

Thanks to Pam for inviting me to join her nerve on La Fovea, and thanks to Frank for posting the prose poems. Stay tuned to find out who I invited to join the nerve.

Oh ... the wildly gorgeous eyes above belong to a very laid-back ragdoll cat, Poodiddy, who belongs -- sort of -- to my younger brother and sister-in-law. He didn't even seem to mind my camera right up next to his whiskers. Click on the image to enlarge.

Tree with the Moon in the Palm of Its Hand

2009-12-13T13:58:00.005-05:00

Yes, I'll say that again: tree with the moon in the palm of its hand.

This photo was taken at the very end of November. Standing there, looking up, I felt like that pearl of a moon was being offered to me. I guess it was. I took it. Now I'll pass it on to you.

For a closer look, simply click on the image.

Ice Thorn

2009-12-06T18:38:00.004-05:00

Late this afternoon, at the top of my hill: an ice thorn encasing the last of the light.

The Face of the World

2009-11-30T20:56:00.007-05:00

Yesterday, this milkweed plant captured the austere beauty of late November. I love the shape of the pods as they dry and twist, having released most of their silk-haired seeds. The forms grow simpler, the colors muted. The eye exalts in the stark new patterns that reveal themselves at the end of fall.

Ralph Waldo Emerson comments on this in Nature:

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, -- that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, -- the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty, "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Liberman's Castle

2009-11-11T19:45:00.004-05:00

"Castle," a painted steel sculpture by Alexander Liberman, graces the grounds of Ward Pound Ridge Reservation as part of Art in the Parks. I love the Picasso-esque composition this section creates with its bold orange curves, crisp shadows, and black cables in beautiful contrast to the sky. It's huge: 42' x 30' x 40'. Part of the fun was watching its construction by crane. One afternoon, while I sat on a bench in the sun, I looked on with delight as a small boy leaped from a van and raced toward the sculpture, arms raised, awestruck.

Milkweed Bugs

2009-11-08T20:15:00.005-05:00

In "The Ninth Elegy" from The Essential Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these powerful lines:

Here is the time for the sayable, here its home.
Speak and avow it. More than ever
things that can be experienced fall away,
shunted aside and superseded by unseeable acts,
acts under crusts that readily shatter
when the inner workings outgrow them and seek new
containment.
Between the hammers
our heart endures, like the tongue
between the teeth, which yet
continues to praise.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann

I praise these milkweed bugs (yes, that's really what they're called), observed in all their orange-red glory at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York. The photo was taken on 10/11/09. To see the milkweed bugs more clearly, simply click on the image.

The above excerpt was found on p. 133 of The Essential Rilke, translated in 1999 by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, The Ecco Press. Rilke lived from 1875-1926.

Paula's Dahlia

2009-10-31T18:54:00.005-04:00

Countless thanks to my family, to my friends both old and new, for forming the human bridge that spans the abyss! Your compassion, your laughter, your almost magical appearance/voices at just the right times, combine to carry me over darkness.

I love this glorious dahlia from my sister-in-law's garden, found drifting in a crystal bowl on her kitchen counter in Colorado. I was mesmerized by the gradations of pink.

Just now, I absentmindedly chose Breathing the Water by Denise Levertov from my shelf. (I know you are tired of hearing about my coincidences, but here's yet another.) There was a lovely rose-colored envelope inserted between pages 74 and 75. When I opened the book there, what did I look down to read? These lines from the end of her poem, "La Cordelle":

"... fading goldenrod, / fresh marguerites and / ardently pink / dahlias, dahlias / of bright / scarlet, dahlias / of garnet crimson, / almost black, / both reds / bloodred, // the entire bouquet / singing its colors / the livelong / empty day, the stones / resanctified."

-- Denise Levertov

"Ardently pink dahlias," indeed. Family and friends, your radiant words blossom in the shadows. Again, my thanks.

The photograph was taken 9/25/09 in Colorado. Just click on the image to enlarge. Breathing the Water by Denise Levertov was published by New Directions in 1987. Original copyright was in 1984.

Overnight, She Is Different

2009-10-14T18:14:00.008-04:00

The Absence of a Heart Leaves an Hourglass Shape

If you click on the link/title above, you will be magically transported to an interactive online collaboration that I worked on with Rick Mullarky, artist/designer extraordinaire, and Kala Pierson, talented experimental composer, for Born Magazine: Art and Literature Collaboration. Make sure to turn on your sound first, click on "start," then move through the piece by clicking on the white plus signs.

Here's what I wrote about this heady experience in an interview with Dan Wickett from Emerging Writers Network:

This was the most fun I had had in a long time. It was a delightful experience. I worked with Rick Mullarky, an artist/designer, and Kala Pierson, a composer, doing an interactive collaboration for Born Magazine. Rick was very open to suggestions, and we had a lively and humorous correspondence. I have an art background myself, so I was curious to see how he would visually interpret the poem. I felt both free to come up with ideas and yet receptive to letting Rick experiment in his own way. His concepts were thrilling, parallel to the feeling of the piece, but capable of opening it up in new ways. Kala had previously asked me for use of a prose poem, “One Claw into the Dream,” as text for an experimental opera she was working on. In return, when Rick and I started the collaboration, I suggested asking Kala to participate in our project. She said yes and joined in the fun and e-mailing, supplying the innovative and eerie sound. It was a process of discovery and play throughout. So, yes, I had some input, but tried to let the other artists add their own unique contributions .... For fun, Rick and I just finished another interactive collaboration using one of my prose poems, “Guilt.” We may also do one for the first poem in Teaching Bones to Fly, “Secrets of Blood.”

If you would like to read the interview in its entirety, click here:

Interview with Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network, 1/31/05.

Looking back -- and I find it hard to believe this collaboration came out in 2003! -- it's fascinating that the three of us worked on this project without ever meeting each other, without ever even hearing each others' human voices!

Update: Rick Mullarky and I placed "Guilt" on The Diagram, much to our delight. I'll write about this second collaboration in another post. Since then, we've made a few initial attempts at a third piece, tentatively titled Cross-Section of a Man. We'll see what evolves ...

Plug in the Unplugged Heart

2009-10-11T19:11:00.007-04:00

Nothing like the sound of the wind combing the tall grass, rattling the maples, to soothe the scurrying mind. Nothing like the electric splash of October color to plug in the unplugged heart. I walked all over the park today, but the most gorgeous thing I saw was the poison ivy growing in the deli parking lot. Spectacular.

The photo was taken 10/11/09 in Cross River, New York. Click on image to enlarge.

Frog at the Window

2009-10-03T18:30:00.004-04:00

This rainy Saturday: a frog at the window just now, as I walked back from the mailbox. I needed that sweet little surprise.

Unclasped

2009-10-01T21:16:00.003-04:00

UNCLASPED

Overnight, the wind
delivers a gift to your sill:
a dead yellow jacket,
rocking on its back --
summer's gold brooch,
unclasped.

-- CBK

From my first full-length book, Teaching Bones to Fly, Bitter Oleander Press, 2003

Congratulations, Thea and Mark! Congratulations, Amanda and Michael! Love to all!

The photo of the two bees on the thistle flower was taken 9/18/09 at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation.

Shimmer

2009-09-07T22:34:00.005-04:00

Several weeks ago, while walking through the park, I looked down to discover a bouquet of peacock feathers on the side of the road. They captured the late light with an emerald and turquoise shimmer. I'd like to think that someone left them there as an iridescent surprise for a child to find.

Great quote from Franz Kafka:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

-- Franz Kafka

The photo was taken at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York on 8/3/09. Click on image to enlarge.

Timelessness

2009-08-31T22:10:00.004-04:00

For those who have ever been delightfully lost in looking, who have willingly drifted into a timeless place when surrounded by beauty, this excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov's riveting Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited will recapture that feeling:

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

-- Vladimir Nabokov

The photograph of the Renwal doll was taken at the pond at the top of my street this spring. Click on image to enlarge. The paragraph is from Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov, page 139, Vintage International, 1989. It was originally published, in different form, by Harper & Bros., New York , in 1951.

The World Wants To Tell Me Something

2009-08-23T00:20:00.009-04:00

While thinking that lately so many coincidental things have happened, that so many shimmering details are coming together to form a larger, clearer picture, I came across a book by Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler. It was wedged in an odd place, half-hidden, waiting. I had bought this book years back, holding off reading it until I would have the necessary quiet, focus and time to savor its strangeness. (I have yet to let myself fall into its mystery. When the time is right, I will.) I opened the book (as with Hesse's Steppenwolf in the previous post) to see what message the pages might contain. I found these words quivering under my fingertips:

Leaning from the steep slope (the chapter title)

I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings.…

*

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external event of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.

-- Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver

The quote was taken from pages 52-53 of If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, original copyright 1979, included in Everyman's Library in 1993. The photo was taken on 8/17/09, slightly uphill from my house. The tree is a black cherry, identified by the ever-helpful Michael Gambino, curator of Trailside Nature Museum at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY. Click on image to enlarge.

My Little Enigma

2009-08-16T17:08:00.008-04:00

As I cruised down a rural road, this mind-catching sign leaped into my peripheral vision. I made a mental note to revisit it on my ride home, to stop and take a picture. Later, when I parked in the empty lot, I noticed a gigantic stuffed panda perched on the upstairs porch of the empty/haunted/work-in-progress restaurant. He had faded to a pale and mellow brown in the August sun. Slouched into his setting, he looked accepting of life’s surreal surprises. He seemed to take in the lush green landscape, to admire the Queen Anne’s lace waving far below, right next to the Enigma sign.

Today’s lesson: Always stop to revel in the little mysteries.

If this is a restaurant-to-be, I’m coming back for the grand opening. (Beautiful: The Grand Opening of the Enigma! Solutions to life’s riddles revealed with a meal …) I love the idea of opening that door, stepping over the threshold, and entering the Enigma, ready to savor a sip and a bite of magic and mystery.

Which carries me rocketing back in time to another odd sign in Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse’s unsettling and dream-swirled novel written in 1929. It’s a hallucinatory tale of many doors, mirrors and masks. (Hesse’s works were the perfect, mind-exploding material for college-age readers. As a young woman I read his books, one after another.) Due to discovering the Enigma sign, I wanted to find a particular, connected section in the book. Presto. I opened the book to the exact page. Of course, I’m sure the book tended to open to where it was frequently opened to in the past, to one of the many dog-eared pages. However, bear with me here, shrug off all doubt. It was so fitting, Steppenwolf opening like a door to the very words I was searching for!

Fellow enigma explorers, read them yourselves. (Forgive several brief omissions in the text.) Here are Herman Hesse’s words:

This time, too, the wall was peaceful and serene and yet something was altered in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made. It looked old without a doubt, very old; apparently this closed portal with its door of blackened wood had opened hundreds of years ago onto a sleepy convent yard …. I paused to examine it from where I stood without crossing over, as the street between was so deep in mud and water. From the sidewalk where I stood and looked across, it seemed to me in the dim light that a garland, or something gaily colored, was festooned round the doorway, and now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written. I strained my eyes and at last, in spite of the mud and puddles, went across, and there over the door I saw a stain showing up faintly on the grey-green of the wall, and over the stain bright letters dancing and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once more. So that’s it, thought I. They’ve disfigured this good old wall with an electric sign. Meanwhile I deciphered one or two of the letters as they appeared again for an instant; but they came with very irregular spaces between them and very faintly, and then abruptly vanished. … Why have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in catching several words on end. They were:

MAGIC THEATER
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood waiting in the mud, but in vain.

Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few colored letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front of me. I read:

FOR MADMEN ONLY!

…. I was freezing and walked on … longing too for that doorway to an enchanted theater, which was for madmen only. At every other step there were placards and posters with their various attractions …. But none of these was for me. They were for “everybody,” for those normal persons whom I saw crowding every entrance. In spite of that my sadness was a little lightened. I had had a greeting from another world, and a few dancing, colored letters had played upon my soul and sounded its secret strings. A glimmer of the golden track had been visible once again.

-- Herman Hesse

When my daughters were small, I referred to the airy passageway between two trees as a “magic door.” We always went through together. It felt like we were entering new woodland universes, being careful never to be separated, following the same path. For years we were in the same world at the same time. Of course, as they grew up, they entered their own kingdoms, kept opening new doors, which led in turn to separate places and whole other sets of beckoning doors.

Lately, after anticipating and attending a small high school reunion, I’ve been reliving the joys and pangs of the past. It’s jarring to look back and marvel at how life would have been so different based on seemingly insignificant choices, or a single locked or unlocked door. I was going to attend the reunion in my hometown with one of my oldest friends, but a death in her family prevented her from coming at all. The night of the party, I entered that shadowy time machine alone. After an initial wave of high school shyness, I was transported somewhere else, somewhere where old friends and acquaintances were all welcoming, with good stories to tell. Each person I saw, each story I heard, set my mind and heart off in another direction. The event summoned my own history with all of its own anecdotes, with its own collection of sweetness and grief. By this stage in our lives, I think we have all had enough life experiences to jettison the masks. I felt like a lot of straight and deep things were said. Delightfully humorous things, too.

Time got billowy there, and although I thought I would have time to connect with everyone, I didn’t. E-mail correspondence began or continued in earnest. People I didn’t know well in high school became new friends. Other people who didn’t/couldn’t attend the reunion made contact. Six of us – three who were at the reunion and three who weren’t – converged from all directions to meet again yesterday. We spent five hours talking. I’m proud of how they’ve all turned out and took great pleasure in their creativity, intelligence, humor, and compassion. Two of them are my oldest friends: one from third grade and one from way back in first. (She still remembers my first classroom entrance after moving to the area midyear. I was wearing red sneakers and crying!) How magical to be able to retrace my steps through so many passages and to still find new possibilities and doors revealed.

Phew. Okay. Let’s move out of range of this tsunami of nostalgia, and on to: THE ENIGMA PRIZE!!! Can anyone out there identify the location of the Enigma sign? I will send the first person to correctly uncover that mystery a FREE signed copy of my skinny chapbook, The Smaller, Paler Version of His Head. I’ll also enclose a miniature mystery. My contact information is in the sidebar of the blog.

Note: the condensed passage was from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, the 1963 revised edition from Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pages 31 - 33. The original translation was by Basil Creighton in 1929; the revised translation was by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz in 1963.

Already?

2009-08-10T09:05:00.003-04:00

Really? I'm not ready. But here it was in unmistakable Technicolor, blazing right under my feet, right on my road, yesterday afternoon.

Click on image to enlarge.

Travel by Dragonfly

2009-08-03T23:17:00.009-04:00

Late this warm August afternoon, dragonflies quivered in the breeze, clinging like iridescent pennants to tall stems. I actually thought the word pennants as I crouched at the edge of the field, watching them. If I was still enough, they let me get very close. Later this evening, I discovered that they really are called Halloween Pennants (Celithemis eponina).

Do you remember those trippy Jimi Hendrix lyrics from "Spanish Castle Magic?"

It's very far away
It takes about half a day
To get there, if we travel by my -- uh -- dragonfly ...

Whenever I hear that song, those lines make me laugh. A little bit of musical magic, a little bit of hallucinatory flight. Travel by dragonfly -- I guess that's what I was trying to do, getting so close I could see the patterns of veins on their diaphonous wings, looking deep into those gigantic mirrored eyes, imagining how the world looks reassembled into a mosaic. Maybe Jimi Hendrix had compound eyes.

Click on image to enlarge. Photo taken late this afternoon at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation.

Cloud Fire

2009-07-28T13:51:00.005-04:00

More than a thousand words! Last evening's towering clouds in Connecticut were magnificent, alive with shifting orange light and an occasional tinsel-flash of horizontal lightning.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The quote was found in The Harper Book of Quotations, Robert I. Fitzhenry, Ed., HarperPerennial, 1993. Click on image to enlarge.

He's Got Duende

2009-07-23T21:00:00.007-04:00

This wild-eyed fellow dominated a room full of antique dolls in a small museum in Vermont. Mesmerizing ... and a bit unsettling to linger in his mischievous gaze. (Really, just try to avert your eyes.) Some inanimate objects possess a strange, spiky energy. Somehow, this clown projects something demonic, a dark invitation. But there's something comical there, too. I couldn't resist him. He's got soul. He's got duende.

For more about duende, visit this previous post: Duende: Words Both Winged and Quilled .

For more about clowns, visit photographer Stu Jenks' blog entry: The Bozos: Bozo Below Uncompahgre Peak . (Scroll down for more Bozo-themed posts.)

At last I'm back, escaped from computer limbo!

Leafy Sanctuary

2009-06-27T11:01:00.008-04:00

The orange-gold of a Baltimore oriole lured our eyes to the very top of this incredible tree. From a distance, the branches formed a solid green dome. Like a leafy Cousin It, the tree kept its secrets to itself. Of course the imagined sanctuary created inside was irresistible. I had to find out what it was like to enter the heart of the tree. Parting those thick tresses, I stepped into a hushed sanctum. The light was gorgeous, brighter than expected, dappled and soothing. Bird whispers resumed. When my friend couldn’t find me, she knew exactly where to look. She found her own door into the sheltering umbrella of spangled green. We just stood there, awed, looking up and listening.

Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge wrote a poem called “Leaf Huts and Snow Houses” that contains these parallel thoughts:

These poems don’t amount
to much, just
some words thrown together
at random.
and still
to me
there’s something good
in making them, it’s
as if I have in them for a little
while a house.
I think of playhouses
made of branches we built
when we were children:
to crawl into them, sit
listening to the rain,
in a wild place alone,
feel the drops of rain on your nose
and in your hair –

Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly

Hauge was born in 1908 in a small Norwegian settlement. In Bly’s words, he “lived all his life on what he could produce from three acres of ground.” “The richness in his small house lay in the handmade spoons and bowls, the wooden reading chair, and the bookcases to which the best poetry from many continents had found its way.” Eighty years later, Hauge died “in the old way,” with no signs of disease. I was enchanted by Bly’s description of the respectful service, followed by this heart-rippling scene:

A horse-drawn wagon carried his body back up the mountain after the service. Everyone noticed a small colt that ran happily alongside its mother and the coffin all the way back up.

The excerpt from “Leaf Huts and Snow Houses” was found on page 264 of The Winged Energy of Delight: Poems from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, Selected Translations by Robert Bly, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2004. The photographs were taken at White Flower Farm, Litchfield, Connecticut, on 6/7/09.

Brassy-Green Beautiful

2009-06-18T23:54:00.005-04:00

Huge and brassy-green beautiful. The voices of these Cricket Hill Garden bullfrogs were so loud that my friend mistook them for the distant grunts of pigs.

Click on image to enlarge.

Perfect Unfurling

2009-06-12T07:52:00.005-04:00

This peony was at the perfect point in unfurling, cupping the soft light. Cricket Hill places decorative umbrellas over some of the blossoms to protect them from withering sunlight. (A bit sadly, this beauty had no real fragrance.) Called Coral Charm, it kept beckoning me back, luring me into its gold-fringed silence.

Click on image to enlarge. The photo was taken 6/7/09 at Cricket Hill Garden in Thomaston, Connecticut.

Cricket Hill Peony

2009-06-07T23:09:00.005-04:00

Up close: an eye-dazzling peony at Cricket Hill Garden in Thomaston, Connecticut this afternoon.

Click on image to enlarge.

Confetti Toss

2009-06-03T10:25:00.004-04:00

The other evening I went for a walk in the wind. Up the hill, the wild air had carried the flowers and loose petals of tulip trees to the ground. Like a pinata-spill, like a confetti-toss, the festive green and orange blossoms were strewn in the road, on the grass, and among the fallen leaves. Some detached petals looked like psychedelic moth wings. I stared up through the glossy foliage to the still-attached flowers, swaying and trembling in the late light. The wind played a hissing, whispered music to watch by.

Click on image to enlarge.

Dream Altitude: Beckian Fritz Goldberg

2009-05-31T20:22:00.006-04:00

Strange, unsettling poem from a strange, unsettling -- and riveting -- book: "Retro Lullaby" from Never Be the Horse by Beckian Fritz Goldberg. (And it's a poem-match for this photograph! Sometimes the perfect poem just flutters to your finger like a lovesick homing pigeon.)

Here's an excerpt from "Retro Lullaby":

After all, my sister said I was a strange child, an
automaton.
My mother said if they talked idly in February
of going somewhere in June, I'd wake in June,
my suitcase packed.

Terrible she said to have a child who never forgot a thing.

But now, of course, I've slipped
my mind forever in some infeasible way, flown

stiff as a toy in my dream altitude and I remember
wondering even in my elation if I'd drop
suddenly and if I did

I don't remember. But if I did, I'd say,
It's ok, you can be my angel. You can be
my human kite.

I relish the simile, "stiff as a toy in my dream altitude." Dream altitude! Later in the poem, Beckian Fritz Goldberg comes to the conclusion that "... childhood stinks big in our lives as death." In this case, the smell is of "moist hay," a scent that brings back the past, that inflates her "postcard of a little stranger," so that "her stupid white hands will come up like two / white pages from the bottom of a lake ...." It's magic the way a simple fragrance can transport us to the past, give us back our lace-trimmed ankle socks and braids.

One of my favorite pieces from the collection is the title poem, "Never Be the Horse," in which a mysterious horse is crossing the ocean, standing in a hull, trying "to dream on the smell of damp oatseed." The full line the title comes from is "Never be the horse God talks to." I love the final two lines: "Months later, a rock rose and then low furzy branches. / Then in each ankle a bell clapped for the mud."

How can you resist a book that contains poems with titles like "With a Ravenous Spike," "Flowering Adam," and "The Tongue of the Sphinx?"

Never Be the Horse won the 1998 Akron Poetry Prize and was published by The University of Akron Press in 1999. The photograph of the Renwal doll was taken 5/23/09 in my yard.

Fall into the Iris

2009-05-20T19:24:00.006-04:00

I almost did yesterday, when I leaned forward, crouching on tiptoe, to take a photograph of the tiger-striped heart of this blossom. Lovely iris vertigo.

The photograph was taken yesterday, one house uphill from mine. Click on the image to enlarge. Go on. Feel free to tumble inside.

Two Flowers, One Plant

2009-05-19T20:28:00.003-04:00

Earlier this evening, as I walked past these twin dandelions in my front yard, unbidden labels floated into my meandering brain: Mind and Soul. As I walked on, other pairs arrived: Dream and Reality, Past and Present, Premonition and Memory, even Poetry and Photography. When I thought more about it, I realized it was possible to switch the two, reading the floral symbols in the opposite way. Why not ethereal Soul on the left and bright gold Mind on the right? Or -- think about it -- Reality and Dream (sigh!), Present and Past (sigh!), Memory and Premonition. Photography and Poetry could work. And rather than the original Past and Present, doesn’t the seed-bearing version of Past also begin to look like the Future? That results in Past and Future merged on the left and Present solo on the right. Off go my untethered thoughts, like dandelion seeds clinging to their flimsy silk umbrellas …

Glowing Opossum

2009-05-18T09:43:00.004-04:00

Okay. He is a bit startling, but this preserved opossum at the Trailside Museum commanded full attention the day I did the Poetry and Wildflowers walk at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. (Hey, as a nocturnal creature, daytime is not his best time.) Back in 1610, promotional literature for the Jamestown, Virginia colony included the first written reference to the opossum: "There are ... Apossouns, in shape like to pigges." This was the spelling used to replicate the sound of the Virginia Algonquian word for the opossum.

Historical information was found in The American Heritage Dictonary of the English Language, Third Edition.

Literary Wildflower Walk This Saturday!

2009-05-08T14:14:00.009-04:00

This Saturday, May 9th, come take a poetry and wildflower walk with me at the Luquer-Marble Wildflower Garden in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York. At stops along the way, you will hear poems that mirror or speak to the natural setting. Selected poems include works by Mary Oliver, Charles Wright, Louise Gluck, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtromer, Linda Pastan, and many others. If you're inspired, share a quote or brief poem of your choice that reflects the season. We'll meet at the Trailside Museum at 1:00 PM. A couple of days ago the primroses were on the cusp of opening, Jacob's ladder and spring beauty were in full bloom, and the Jack-in-the-pulpit and trillium were perfection. (The photograph above is of a Jack-in-the-pulpit found there, with lungwort in the background.)

For additional information, click here:
Poetry and Wildflowers Literary Walk

The program is free to the public, although there is a parking fee to enter the reservation. We'll go rain or shine! The walk is easy, with benches along the way.

Here is a spring excerpt from my poem, "Kisses," originally published in The Bitter Oleander, then in Teaching Bones to Fly, my first full-length collection:

The kiss unfurls feathery green
along each branch,
sets to beating the pale hearts of apples
still hidden in blossoms.
Between our lips:
an orchard in a white dream of fruit.

The Poetry and Wildflowers event is sponsored by Friends of Trailside and Ward Pound Ridge Reservation with additional funding by Poets & Writers, Inc. using public funds from the NYS Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Author's Prayer: Ilya Kaminsky

2009-05-06T08:45:00.007-04:00

One of my favorite Mother's Day activities was attending -- with both of my daughters -- Ilya Kaminsky's reading at the Katonah Poetry Series in 2006. We sat near the front in the Katonah Village Library, mesmerized by this young man's beautiful and powerful poetry and charmed by his generous spirit.

Ilya has given me permission to post "Author's Prayer," the moving opening poem from his collection, Dancing in Odessa, winner of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. I first read this piece on the Born Magazine Web site, a fortuitous discovery itself. Born is an "experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects are brought to life every three months through creative collaboration between writers and artists." If you'd like to experience Ilya Kaminsky's collaboration with artist John Bolster, click here: "Author's Prayer."

Meanwhile, here are his radiant words:

Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

-- Ilya Kaminsky

After discovering this Web site while wandering the Web -- leap to leap -- I was determined to find a way to collaborate on a project myself. This resulted in a wonderful adventure with artist/designer Rick Mullarky and experimental composer Kala Pierson. I'll do a separate post on this experience. (Coming to this blog SOON!) The sunset photo was taken over the weekend in Patterson, NY.

And speaking of Mother's Day weekend, do come to my Poetry and Wildflowers literary ramble at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation this Saturday afternoon. Merely scroll down or click here for details:
Poetry and Wildflowers

Forsythia Glow

2009-05-02T09:49:00.005-04:00

Winter-scarred but pollen-dusted, he marches into forsythia light. Petals caress his shoulders like quivering fingertips.

At least that's how I see it, thanks to my neighbor's lush front yard bushes. They were aglow on Thursday.

For a bit more forsythia gold, visit my flash fiction piece on Wigleaf:

"One-Handed Prayer"

And here's a final yellow note from Theodore Roethke, poet extraordinaire:

Deep in their roots,
All flowers keep the light.

-- Theodore Roethke

The Roethke quote is from page 319, The Harper Book of Quotations, edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry, HarperPerennial, 1993. The photo was taken 4/30/09, in my neighbor's yard.

Ear to the Ground: KGB Bar Reading, 5/22/09

2009-04-30T09:27:00.010-04:00

I had to walk backward to take a second look at this "ear" emerging from the earth. Roots, listening.

Come listen to authors from the Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years anthology at the prelaunch at KGB Bar in NYC on Friday, May 22, 2009, from 7:00-9:00 PM.

Readers include co-editor Kim Chinquee, Anthony Tognazzini, Holly Tavel, Carol Novak, Susan Henderson, and Christine Boyka Kluge.

The anthology is edited by Doug Martin and Kim Chinquee, with an introduction by Brian Evenson. It's published by Snowvigate Press, Inc. and is arriving SOON!

It should be an exhilarating spring night! I look forward to seeing you there.

The photograph was taken at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY on 4/24/09. Click on image to enlarge.

Poetry and Wildflowers

2009-04-27T08:22:00.006-04:00

I hope you'll accompany me for an afternoon of poetry and wildflowers at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation on May 9th:

Join North Salem poet Christine Boyka Kluge for an easy literary walking tour of the reservation's wildflowers and awakening landscape. At stops along the way, hear poems that mirror or speak to the natural setting. If inspired, share a quote or brief poem of your own that reflects the season.

1:00 PM on Saturday, May 9, 2009
Trailside Nature Museum
Ward Pound Ridge Reservation
Routes 35 & 121 South
Cross River, New York

Free to the public (parking fee)

Sponsored by Friends of Trailside and Ward Pound Ridge Reservation with additional funding by Poets & Writers, Inc. using public funds from the NYS Council on the Arts, a state agency.

On Friday, I visited the reservation to see what wildflowers and plants were up. In the Luquer-Marble Wildflower Garden, I was treated to trillium (see photo), lungwort, periwinkle, trout lily, skunk cabbage, daffodils, may apple, etc. Beautiful. As a bonus, the magnolia in front of the Trailside Museum was aglow with huge magenta and white blooms. I'm having a great time collecting writing to parallel nature's show: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" (Dylan Thomas), "Trillium" (Louise Gluck), "Little Lion Face" (May Swenson), etc. Everything is happening fast: popping, unfurling, blossoming. By the 9th it should be glorious. We'll meet rain or shine at the museum. The relaxed literary walking tour should last about 1 1/2 hours. Or however long poetry and the natural setting captivate us. It's Mother's Day weekend -- bring your mom! Or let her bring you. I look forward to seeing you there.

The photo of trillium was taken 4/24/09 in the Luquer-Marble Wildflower Garden.

Looking

2009-04-21T15:51:00.007-04:00

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
-- Brooks Atkinson

And, I find, while looking through the extra eye of the camera, that I flinch with sweet shock at the other worlds revealed. I take delight in that deep focus, that revelation, that unfurling.

Follow the advice of Goethe:

Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music, and if possible, say some reasonable thing.
-- Goethe

Both quotes came from The Harper Book of Quotations, edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry, HarperPerennial, 1993, pages 345 and 344 respectively. The photo of the fern was taken last spring at The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY.

Sky Drain

2009-04-15T09:44:00.009-04:00

Here's another photo from Alder Lake in the Catskills, in Ulster County. (See previous post.) I love the way the sky appears to be serenely slipping down the drain. Time washing over the edge, softly disappearing. It was a very good day.

For your reading pleasure, I've retyped "Sending You," a beautiful poem by Ray Gonzalez from his book, Consideration of the Guitar:

SENDING YOU
I am sending you a piece of sycamore bark.
-- Paul Celan

I am sending you the shadow from
my cottonwood tree, making sure

it extends over the river to reach you.
I include the leaves in my mother’s hair,

the brittle flashes of brown that
stuck to her at my birth.

I am giving you the roots from
excavated ground, their arms

reaching as far as the stone wall
where my fathers scrawled their names.

I have not forgotten the mud
from their swollen feet, rain

washing it off their labor, carrying it
beyond the storm to dry at your door.

I am delivering a cloud floating
in the sky as a memory that will

find you on the other side, passing
you flowers that grew on the earth,

their seeds the touch you needed
when you were the source of love.

I am mailing you a letter, my words you heard
when you were the sunlight that came and went,

transferring your fire into me
in the same way it burned you.

I am sending a piece of those ashes.
They spell my name as they fall into the canyon

washed out by the river, the shadow of my
cottonwood moving in the direction I came.

-- Ray Gonzalez

This poem was reprinted here with the permission of the author, Ray Gonzalez. It appears on page 16 of Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems, BOA Editions, 2005.

Light on the Water

2009-04-10T16:09:00.007-04:00

Yesterday, hiking around Alder Lake in the Catskill Mountains of Ulster County, New York, my younger daughter and I (and her malamute) were treated to this serene and glittering scene with that dark finger of shadow pointing at the center. The image matched a quote I had found a couple days earlier, while skimming through The Harper Book of Quotations:

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.

-- William Maxwell

Pang.

On the way home, I drove toward the full moon -- bright gold, huge, balanced low on the horizon. At one point, a black band of clouds bisected it, then wafted off, like an unveiling. I was listening to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. Have you ever noticed how, on rare occasion, lyrics and song mood magically match your own setting and state? I felt dreamy and pensive; I was reliving the past while admiring the sky and the indigo hills. As I cruised along, mesmerized by the shifting lunar show, "If You See Her, Say Hello" came on:

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, it all went by so fast ...

-- Bob Dylan

This particular old "album" plays like a collection of flash fiction and prose poetry. For example, read this vivid scene from "Idiot Wind":

I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin' 'bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars.
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies.
One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes,
Blood on your saddle.

Or how about these lines from later in the same song:

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I'm finally free,
I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.

The songs get inside your ribcage and tangle your heartstrings. I don't ever tire of certain pieces, of that knotting sensation that wakes, pains, and pleases the heart.

The initial quote was found on page 194 of The Harper Book of Quotations (Third Edition), edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry and published by HarperPerennial.

Dark Feet Dangling

2009-04-06T08:18:00.006-04:00

I love her precarious perch, her split shadow, her dark feet dangling over the next step, pointing the way. She is stalled, fighting vertigo -- pondering -- still believing in an easier descent.

Here are the final stanzas from Denise Levertov's poem, "Broken Pact," from Evening Train:

But mind and heart continue
their eager conversation,
they argue, they share epiphanies,
sometimes all night they raise
antiphonal laments.

Face and body have betrayed them,

they are alone together,
unsure how to proceed.

-- Denise Levertov

The poem can be read in its entirety on page 29. The photo was taken in my yard this spring. Metal sculpture by Thea Kluge. Click on image to enlarge.

Poetry and Truth

2009-04-03T13:18:00.009-04:00

Would I ever find, in the years ahead of me, that true meeting between a hidden life and a hidden language out of which true form would come -- the form of the true poem?

--Eavan Boland
----------
Eavan Boland ponders this question as an Irish poet and woman in Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1994). I read this book with great hunger when I first dove into the thrilling depths of truly writing poetry -- when, after years of savoring poetry, of writing pieces mostly for myself, I decided to devote a serious intensity to writing. In a strange way, this book gave me permission to be who I needed to be artistically, to find and transcribe my own truth. To define my poetry in my own individual way.

This is Boland's thought on her position as a poet:

Gradually the anomaly of my poetic existence was clear to me. By luck, or its absence, I had been born in a country where and at a time when the word woman and the word poet inhabited two separate kingdoms of experience and expression. I could not, it seemed, live in both. (p.114)

She goes on to describe, in a vivid and moving manner, the path of her poetry's evolution within a culture, as a woman. In a way it's her nonlinear autobiography, studded with gems of revelation as she finds her way. For instance:

All good poetry depends on an ethical relation between imagination and image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths. (p. 152)

I love that. And later:

No poetic imagination can afford to regard an image as a temporary aesthetic maneuver. Once the image is distorted, the truth is demeaned. (p. 152)

She ends the chapter with this powerful statement:

If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it and human griefs ordained by it. Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us. (p. 153)

The initial quote was found on p. 119.

The small metal sculpture opens like a matreshka to reveal a single, smaller female figure inside. Is this the unconscious? Poetry? Inner truth, the deeper woman? Rebirth? It seems to illustrate Boland's discussion. It was made of cast bronze by Scott Nelles of Nelles Studios in northern Michigan. Click on image to enlarge.

Shadow Embrace

2009-03-30T09:01:00.008-04:00

I like the way these elongated shadows embrace the tree like needy hooks or fantastic thorns. Aren't there great patterns and textures in the bark? Such an invitation to fingertips. And that March washed-blue sky shining in the background.

There is a blind niche in the azure:
in each blessed noon
one fateful star trembles,
hinting at the depth of night.
-- Osip Mandelstam, tr. by Clarence Brown & W.S. Merwin

Mandelstam wrote a poem (#133) containing this deep and piercing stanza in 1922. It became part of Poems, published in 1928. I found it in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Brown and Merwin, New York Review Books, 2004, translation copyright 1973. (See page 43, third stanza.)

Mandelstam was arrested and exiled in 1934, after he read a work denouncing Stalin. I found it fascinating that his wife, Nadezhda, memorized his writing, so that it would be preserved even if his papers were lost or destroyed. When his exile ended in 1937, he returned to Moscow, but was arrested again and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. According to the book notes, he was "last seen in a transit camp near Vladivostok."

Here is Mandelstam's belief about the necessity of poetry:

The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake forever,
and bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.
-- Osip Mandelstam, tr. by Clarence Brown & W.S. Merwin

(From the introduction, p. xiii.)

The photograph was taken on my hill, just the other afternoon. Click on image to enlarge.

Upside-Down Trees

2009-03-28T22:59:00.005-04:00

This afternoon the southern edge of the pond held clusters of frog eggs. They nestled like black-eyed jewels in the rippling branches of upside-down trees.

Click on image to enlarge. If you look closely, you'll see the black dots inside the eggs, just below the surface of the water (lower left).

Arrival

2009-03-19T19:21:00.004-04:00

Just now, walking up past the pond at dusk, we heard the wood frogs calling. We followed the chorus in. Silence. Then, here and there, the song began again. Overnight, the last of the ice melted, and the frogs are mating. Tomorrow: spring.

The photograph of fungi was taken up at the pond. Click on image to enlarge.

Cloud Between Two Worlds

2009-03-18T09:01:00.008-04:00

Yesterday there was still ice on the pond up the hill, floating like a cloud between two worlds, like a veil between the shifting seasons. Not a wood frog to be found. Only the silent guardian rock, beached like a sailboat at the edge.

Click on image to enlarge.

March Light

2009-03-16T23:49:00.006-04:00

I found this intriguing passage, discussing ways to heighten creativity, in a yellowed paperback, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society:

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied, "Only stand out of my light."

The photograph was taken in my yard a few days ago. (Click on image to enlarge.) The quote was found on page 42. The March light is glorious. Stand back.