Category Archives: poetry

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.

The mother and daughters of acorns.

poetry, trees, , , , , , , , ,

When I drove up into the mountains this month, it was through the area burned by the Creek Fire in 2020. The year following that devastation I’d also passed that way and shared a picture or two here. This time, four years later, I mostly noticed a couple of the plants are thriving in the changed landscape. Along the road scores of milkweeds were lined up, and lots of young oak trees. I didn’t manage to take a picture of a little oak, but I got close enough to the milkweeds to see two kinds of bright insects on them.

The oaks in this case were the daughters of acorns that sprouted soon after the tall canopy above them had burned off. I read that “…fire directly promotes the establishment of oak seedlings by reducing competing understory vegetation, releasing needed soil nutrients and reducing numerous pathogens.” source

I think the ones I saw might be black oaks, Quercus kelloggii; the photos I found online.

EPIGRAM 9.312

Refrain, sirrah, from cutting the oak,
the mother of acorns;
refrain,
and lay low the old stone-pine,
or the sea-pine,
or this rhamnus with many stems,
or the holly-oak,
or the dry arbutus.
Only keep thy axe far from the oak,
for our grannies tell us that
oaks were the first mothers.

-Diodorus Zonas, 1st century BC, Italy

Translated by William R. Paton, The Greek anthology, Vol III

Oak, by Ivan Shishkin, 1865

In The Odyssey Homer refers to a legend that men were sprung from oaks or rocks,
e.g. “But tell me of your family, since you did not spring
from a tree or a stone as in the ancient tales.”
Homer’s Odyssey XIX.

You are still summer.

calendar, poetry, summer, , ,

TO THE LIGHT OF SEPTEMBER

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

-W.S. Merwin

The Cornfield – Alfred Sisley

The sound of her deathless deep.

home, ocean, poetry, , , ,

SOFT SOUND

When in some coastal townlet, on a night
of low clouds and ennui, you open
the window – from afar
whispering sounds spill over.

Now listen closely and discern
the sound of seawaves breathing upon land,
protecting in the night
the soul that harkens unto them.

Daylong the murmur of the sea is muted,
but the unbidden day now passes
(tinkling as does an empty
tumbler on a glass shelf);

and once again amidst the sleepless hush
open your window, wider, wider,
and with the sea you are alone
in the enormous and calm world.

Not the sea’s sound… In the still night
I hear a different reverberation:
the soft sound of my native land,
her respiration and pulsation.

Therein blend all the shades of voices
so dear, so quickly interrupted
and melodies of Pushkin’s verse
and sighs of a remembered pine wood.

Repose and happiness are there,
a blessing upon exile;
yet the soft sound cannot be heard by day
drowned by the scurrying and rattling.

But in the compensating night,
in sleepless silence, one keeps listening
to one’s own country, to her murmuring,
her deathless deep.

-Vladimir Nabokov

White Night. Night Dawn – Arkady Rylov, 1915