Watched

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.

The Face of the World

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

Unclasped

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.

Already?

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.

Alignment

I love the way these two leaves found each other and aligned themselves when they fell from different trees. As I walked past, their perfect shapes and contrasting colors caught my eye. I literally stopped, walked backward a few steps, and reached down to claim them. I had almost kept going, but couldn’t resist gathering them for closer admiration. I relish the way they pop against the gray patterns in the wood.

Rainer Maria Rilke had this to say about falling leaves in the beginning of his poem entitled “Autumn,” from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Robert Bly:

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling. …

There’s something shivery about picturing that, about Rilke’s flesh and blood hand moving through the air, about all of us falling together through time.

Some days everything you read and write falls together, converges on one theme or idea. In a strange volume of photographs and essays by Jonathan Williams called A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude, there are a couple pages on Frederick Sommer. The essay ends with a quote from Sommer that cinches the falling and alignment thoughts:

I have five pebbles, not too different in size and weight, yet a randomness about them. If I drop them on the carpet they will scatter. Now we could run an experiment and we would find that we cannot put these pebbles in shapes that would be as elegant and as nicely related and with as great a variety as every time they fall. It is better than anything we could do. I have great respect for the way I find things. Every time something falls I look. I cannot believe the relationships. The intricacy. You hear a noise and you say “What is that?” Respect for the affirmation of the unexpected.

*

Off on another shivery tangent, here’s a photo I’ve been specifically saving for you, for Halloween. It’s the scary, mask-like face of a statue discovered on a street corner in Rhinebeck, New York.

The little candy bars are in the house.

Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke was published by Harper & Row in 1981. The full text of "Autumn" can be found on page 89. A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude was published by David R. Godine in 2002. The essay about Sommer, as well as his portrait, can be found on pages 88-89.

The leaves were found on my road and photographed on 10/26/08. The statue was photographed in Rhinebeck on 10/07/08. Click on images to enlarge.

Fall Falling

Mesmerized, I watched this leaf pirouette earthward, slowly, magically. It descended so dreamily that it seemed to levitate. As I got closer, I noticed that it was still tethered to its tree by a strand of spider silk. It swayed back and forth like a tiny camouflage-print kite at the whim of the wind.

Today: autumn.

Photo taken 9/17/08 at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, Cross River, NY. Click on image to enlarge.

Stirring the Mirror Signing at Katonah Fall Festival

For those of you in the area, please join me for a book signing at Awakenings during the Katonah Fall Festival and Street Fair this Saturday, September 29th. I'll be there, pen in hand, with copies of my new book, Stirring the Mirror, from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM, possibly later if the crowds are promising. Awakenings is at 215 Katonah Avenue. I'll have copies of my first book, Teaching Bones to Fly, also from Bitter Oleander Press, available as well. Scroll down to the August 13th entry for a photo of the cover and blurbs for Stirring the Mirror.

Here's an excerpt from "Giving Away Bones," a prose poem in Stirring the Mirror:

GIVING AWAY BONES

I stood at the corner giving away my bones. My ribs went to the little girl who needed a cage for her ferret. My toe bones went to a gambler to replace his unlucky dice. My spine went home coiled around the neck of a snake charmer. As I plucked out each one, I felt delightfully emptier, translucent as breath. I simply stepped out of my ivory corset.

The only piece I had trouble leaving was my skull. It stared at me with cavernous sockets like twin black wells. I appreciated the way it had cradled my brain, holding my thoughts in its bowl. But at last I kissed its brow, placing it on the desk of an artist, something to hold her bouquet of paintbrushes.

You might think my organs were left lonely and cold, but they were already gone by then -- untangled, shriveled by sun, then pinkish-gray dust blown away on the wind. Inhaled by passing clouds. All that remained of me was something like a peeled mirror, a human image without dimension, distilled to particles of light. Like a paper doll, I turned sideways and disappeared....

(This piece first appeared in The Bitter Oleander, then in No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets, an anthology from Tupelo Press edited by Ray Gonzalez, 2003.)

I look forward to seeing you at the Fall Festival!