Monthly Archives: September 2024

The wide and luminous eye.

poetry, time, ,

IN POSITION

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven’t got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you’d think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller – well, it’s not so.

The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you

every face of your life in a fluid design –
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by

time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them – love,
your very life, should they need it – will not

and cannot come back; it wasn’t a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in this

shimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You’re alone. And slowly you begin to discern

the queer outline of what’s to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.

-Lauris Dorothy Edmond (1924 – 2000)
New Zealand

Waikato River, New Zealand

From a neglected garden.

food and cooking, my garden, , , , , ,

In spite of my absence for various reasons, the garden continues to carry on valiantly its business of growing and changing by the hour. I love walking around and picking off a few dead flowers, or noticing seeds forming, even when I can’t give it the more thorough care it needs.

A couple of years ago I managed to transplant one of the vigorous Showy Milkweed plants (above) next to where the Narrow-Leaf Milkweeds grow. You can’t see the latter very well in the background, which is a good thing, because their leaves have mostly had the life sucked out of them by aphids and have turned black. But every spring, they come back stronger than ever.

Tatsoi greens and lobelia

The leafy green Tatsoi really took off in this pot where I stuck it in next to lobelia, and is begging to be thrown into a stir-fry a.s.a.p. Those I set out in the planter boxes are languishing; that soil must need amending.

The dwarf pomegrantes are mostly a fun member of the garden in that for most of the year have flowers, often with hummingbirds drinking from them; or foliage bright and beautiful catching one’s attention in spring and fall; and their darling fruits, that don’t get very large, and in this climate don’t get enough heat for their seeds to develop sweetness. But they are so cute right about now. This one is about an inch and a half in diameter.

Every day I pick figs; the evening of my return from the mountains I gathered two dozen, and yesterday nineteen. Soon I hope to make that Autumn Fig Cake I told you about one time. And the Juliet grape tomato plant is prolific. I eat the tomatoes in the garden and in the kitchen, and took enough with me to the cabin that I could eat a few every day for ten days, and they were always sweet.

I harvested all but one of the little butternut squashes I grew this year, and planted some Sugar Ann snap peas in their place. Ideally those will start bearing about February, if the winter isn’t too cold and if I can keep the snails from devouring the plants between now and then.

My native sneezeweed is of the less showy sort, but it welcomed me when I returned from my mountain retreat with a particularly lovely array of blooms, not plain at all.

No doubt about it, my garden loves me, and forgives my neglect.
It makes me want to do better in the future.

Did they also fade away?

poetry, ,

FLOWER

A withered flower lies forgotten
Inside a book, before my eyes:
My soul awakes, all of the sudden,
And I begin to fantasize:

Where did it grow? Among which plants?
How long ago? And picked by whom,
By foreign or familiar hands?
Did it already start to bloom?

Placed here in tribute to a date,
Or to a fateful separation?
Or to a stroll under the shade,
Alone, without a destination?

Is he or she alive today?
Where did they find their hidden nook?
Or did they also fade away,
Just like this flower in the book?

-Alexander Pushkin
     Translated by Andrey Kneller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo source

A cat-sized hole.

poetry,

A SMALL-SIZED MYSTERY

Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “Excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “Excuse me.”
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.
Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
In this world where much is missing,
a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.
Yet your whole body turns toward it
again and again because it is there.

-Jane Hirshfield

 

The picture is from some time back,
when I welcomed the many stray-ish cats in the neighborhood,
and fed them what cat food was left over after our cat died.
This one was particularly bold, but not friendly at all.