How does your garden grow?
Filthy Landscape, Charles Simic
The season of lurid wildflowers
Strewn on the meadows
Drunk with kissing
The red-hot summer breezes.
A ditch opens its legs
In the half-undressed orchard
Teeming with foulmouthed birds
And smutty shadows.
Scandalous view of a hilltop
In pink clouds of debauchery.
The sun peeking between them
Now and then like a whoremaster *.
* This is presently my shiny and decadent love affair.
the book of odes I have, which I've always thought to be complete, is less than so. Upon closer inspection, it is noticeable pages have been torn from the rest -- and most probably by me, too.
Ode to the apple (translated by Ken Krabbenhoft)
You, apple,
are the object
of my praise.
I want to fill
my mouth
with your name.
I want to eat you whole.
You are always
fresh, like nothing
and nobody.
You have always
just fallen
from Paradise:
dawn's
rosy cheek
full
and perfect!
Compared
to you
the fruits of the earth
are
so awkward:
bunchy grapes,
muted
mangos,
bony
plums, and submerged
figs.
You are pure balm,
fragrant bread,
the cheese
of all that flowers.
When we bite into
your round innocence
we too regress
for a moment
to the state
of the newborn:
there's still some apple in us all.
I want
total abundance,
your family
multiplied.
I want
a city,
a republic,
a Mississippi River
of apples,
and I want to see
gathered on its banks
the world's
entire
population
united and reunited
in the simplest act we know:
I want us to bite into an apple.
Ode to the artichoke, Pablo Neruda (translated by Ken Krabbenhoft)
The soft-hearted
artichoke
put on its warrior suit
and, straightbacked, built
a little dome.
Underneath
its scales,
it was
impenetrable.
Right next to it
crazed vegetables
bristled
and twisted themselves into
creepers, cattails,
or histrionic bulbs.
Beneath the earth
slumbered red-whiskered
carrots,
the earth
sucked dry the vines
that draw wine from the soil,
cabbages
spent their time
trying on skirts,
and oregano labored
to fill the world with perfume,
and all the while sweet
artichokes
in their corner of the garden
dressed for war,
like shiny
pomegranates,
and just as proud.
One day
they marched
through the market,
side by side
in wicker baskets,
to make their dream come true:
to be soldiers.
All lined up,
they were never more warlike
than that day at the fair.
The men
in white shirts
who stood amidst the vegetables,
they were
the artichokes'
officers.
Tight formation,
the drill sergeant's screams,
drumroll
of a falling crate.
But
then
along comes
Maria
with a basket on her arm.
She picks up
an artichoke
fearlessly,
she looks it over, she holds it
up to the light as if it were an egg.
She buys it
and sticks it
in her bag
along with a pair of shoes,
a cabbage and a
bottle
of vinegar;
back
in the kitchen,
she drops it in the pot.
The is how
the career
of the armored vegetable
we call an artichoke
comes to a peaceful end.
For the final act
we reveal
its delicious flavor,
plucking it leaf by leaf,
and devour
the peaceable dough
that lies at its green heart.
Eating the world, James Tipton
I was born with my mouth open...
entering this juicy world
of peaches and lemons and ripe sun
and the pink and secret flesh of women,
this world where dinner is in the breath
of the subtle desert,
in the spices of the distant sea
which late at night drift over sleep.
I was born somewhere between
the brain and the pomegranate,
with a tongue tasting the delicious textures
of hair and hands and eyes;
I was born out of the heart stew,
out of the infinite bed, to walk upon
this infinite earth.
I want to feed you the flowers of ice
on this winter window,
the aromas of many soups,
the scent of sacred candles
that follows me around this cedar house,
I want to feed you the lavender
that lifts up out of certain poems,
and the cinnamon of apples baking,
and the simple joy we see
in the sky when we fall in love.
I want to feed you the pungent soil
where I harvested garlic,
I want to feed you the memories
rising out of the aspen logs
when I split them, and the pinyon smoke
that gathers around the house on a still night,
and the mums left by the kitchen door.
I want to feed you the colors of rain
on deserted parking lots,
and the folds of delirious patchouli
in the Indian skirt of the woman
on Market Street in San Francisco,
and the human incense of so much devotion
in tiny villages in Colorado and Peru.
I want to serve you breakfast at dawn,
I want to serve you the bread
that rises in the desert dust, serve you
the wind that wanders through the canyons,
serve you the stars that fall over the bed,
serve you the Hopi corn one thousand years old,
serve you the saffron in the western sunset,
serve you the delicate pollen that blows its lullaby
through each lonely wing of flesh;
I want to serve you the low hum of bees
clustered together all winter
eating their honey.
I've been reading too much of Neruda, Cisneros, et al. Isabel Allende's Aphrodite. Boundaries between love and appetite; texture, flavour, scent. "The process of making a good soup," Allende reveals, "follows the same steps as those for making love; in both, you must immerse yourself in the sensual pleasure of mixing, smelling, tasting, licking, adding, witholding, doubting, adding a little something more." Why, then, is it such a chore when I am in the kitchen? Why must people choke on spittle as if the fact itself were torturous? (I learned, too, I am a sort of faisandé, most prepared "when it is just at the point of turning bad, right before the neighborhood birds start pecking at it and the first worms appear.")
Gardening & wine magazines, cookbooks, constitute my spring and summer reading, as well. What the hell!, my sister demands. All right, so I am unfamiliar with the subjects. Oh, but the riches, the images (photographs & language), more than explain my interest.
A package of seeds tumbled from The Beekeeper, labelled 2005 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. K 93698-17. Sow in prepared garden soil in full sunlight. Press seeds lightly into soil; keep evenly moist until all plants are established. Wildflowers in the Beekeeper mix: cornflower, annual sunflower, purple coneflower, cosmos, annual baby's breath, annual gaillardia... Though useless in the garden, I am enamoured of dirt beneath half-moon fingernails. When I live in a flat again, anywhere, I want strawberry pots crammed with the fruit, with different herbs, with edible life. What I have in my room now is a bowl of cacti, as it is only they who are durable enough to suffer and survive my presence. I'd photograph the beauts, save for the superstition regarding that very act.
In my mother's garden, the peonies (that fragrance!) have disappeared. Weeks ago they were swollen, broken (stems: bones, neck, spine), crushed by the weight of their own beauty & wind & rain. The sister thought to document the snow whiteness:
Lately, I've taken to eating honey with my bread. A marvelous collection has resulted:
Following the Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers - Douglas Whynott
A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them - Sue Hubbell
Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind - Stephen Buchmann with Banning Repplier
Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World - Holley Bishop
Sweetness & Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee - Hattie Ellis
Pink dirt, red brick, bedroom window, shrub, shed, jungle.
* * *
I want to someday finish Genghis Blues. Paul Pena & Kongar-ol Ondar in San Francisco and Tuva; throatsinging cackling through short wave radio via a Moscow reception, then sung & heard & sung again live. A sheep-slaughtering ceremony, wherein the soft lambswool belly is slit -- and too slowly for me to bear -- to allow a hand's purchase on the aorta, which is ripped out to produce a heart attack. A shaman speaks a language so old even he doesn't understand what meaning is held by the sounds he utters. Rivers visited, songs about them spilling into their very waters. Blues. Greens. Blindness. Madness. Adventure.
Since yesterday afternoon I've been rewinding in my head, in a sick sort of reverie, the trainstation end of Love in the Afternoon:It's nothing, really. It's the soot. Always happens to me in railroad stations. I'm susceptible. You don't have to worry about me, Mr. Flanagan; there have been so many men before, there will be so many after this. It's going to be another one of those crazy years. While you're in Cannes, I'll be in Brussels with the banker. He wants to give me a Mercedes-Benz -- a blue one, it's my favourite colour. And while you're in Athens, I'll be with the duke again in Scotland. But I don't know whether I'll go yet; there's another man who's asked me to spend the summer with him in Deauville. He owns racehorses, he's very rich. He's number twenty--I mean number twenty-one; you're number twenty. So you see, Mr. Flanagan, I'll be perfectly all right.
I do not accept any ending beyond Flanagan's face following Ariane's pathetic bravado. Rescues are not always as sensible or welcomed as one might imagine. Some realities and fantasies, too, are beyond keeping. (What a disappointment was the novel inspired by and named for Audrey Hepburn's elegant staircase of a neck.) Offhand, only the gift of Joni Mitchell in Love Actually hurts as much as that, as any, farewell at the trainstation.
My guardian angel is afraid of the dark. He pretends he's not, sends me ahead, tells me he'll be along in a moment. Pretty soon I can't see a thing. "This must be the darkest corner of heaven," someone whispers behind my back. It turns out her guardian angel is missing too. "It's an outrage," I tell her. "The dirty little cowards leaving us all alone," she whispers. And of course, for all we know, I might be a hundred years old already, and she just a sleepy little girl with glasses.
&
Lover of endless disappointments with your collection of old postcards, I'm coming! I'm coming! You want to show me a train station with its clock stopped at five past five. We can't see inside the station master's window because of the grime. We don't even know if there's a train waiting on the platform, much less if a woman in black is hurrying through the front door. There are no other people in sight, so it must be a quiet station. Some small town so effaced by time it has only one veiled widow left, and now she too is leaving with her secret.
--Charles Simic
What life were we expecting? Ships sailed from distant harbors without us, the telephone rang and no one answered, someone came home alone and stood for hours in the dark hallway. --Philip Levine
(It is impossible.)
A tweak in today's plans; now, a series of little distractions (because I can't yet use work in that manner). I will see Jay Bolotin's The Jackleg Testament exhibition, a "woodcut motion picture" with print portfolio, at the Contemporary Arts Centre of Cincinnati. In the film, Karin Bergquist is the voice of Eve: how earthenly right that is! (Downloads for my purchase of Karin's "Lasso a Falling Star" yet remain -- please let me know, should you want this song. She and other artists performed at a 6 September 2003 art show and benefit concert on behalf of St. Elizabeth in Norwood, Ohio.) Also, the booksale on Fountain Square hosted by Friends of the Public Library. 5$ a bagful! I shall hunt a list of titles for people. Then, perhaps, Eden Park and Findlay Market.
Edit, 9pm:
Excerpts from The Testament:Once upon a time there was a new forest. That forest was very special. There was angels in that forest. But one thing made that forest dizzy one day and it was very dangerous too and hopeless. You'd cry. But you're going to hear about it -- and that would make you feel better. --A Child
Don't think twice -- nay, once -- upon the wonders of the world. That's my job. Mine! Mine! Mine! --Nobodaddy
Did you gather any knowledge of the Vulgar? --Eve
A play would be delightful, so delicious! Is there room for a concession booth -- fresh fruit and such? Oh, my liege, would you indulge me? I have a penchant for the marketplace, you know. --The Serpent
Ripe fruit? --The Serpent
I've landed now, pricked by a prick. --Eve
I am not what I am
These scales have come removable
Yet I've craved [also reconciled] this form...
It satisfies and suits me
One picks up rumours in the shit and bile
Slick and pissed upon
One gathers wisdom on one's belly
Down amongst the refuse and the crumbs
The droppings of the BOOZWAZHEEE --The Serpent
Though I don't know how wanted it is (it's not the same story as the film that shares its name), I brought home from the booksale with me a copy of Christie Dickason's Indochine. Remembrances thrive, everywhere.
* * *
The brother and his sweetheart added a new member to the family. Her name is Lily and she is feisty, terrorising Kaiser and human toes (also nips noses, ears & lips; nibbles hair):
Song
& new desktop wallpaper. :)
The season of lurid wildflowers
Strewn on the meadows
Drunk with kissing
The red-hot summer breezes.
A ditch opens its legs
In the half-undressed orchard
Teeming with foulmouthed birds
And smutty shadows.
Scandalous view of a hilltop
In pink clouds of debauchery.
The sun peeking between them
Now and then like a whoremaster *.
* This is presently my shiny and decadent love affair.
the book of odes I have, which I've always thought to be complete, is less than so. Upon closer inspection, it is noticeable pages have been torn from the rest -- and most probably by me, too.
Ode to the apple (translated by Ken Krabbenhoft)
You, apple,
are the object
of my praise.
I want to fill
my mouth
with your name.
I want to eat you whole.
You are always
fresh, like nothing
and nobody.
You have always
just fallen
from Paradise:
dawn's
rosy cheek
full
and perfect!
Compared
to you
the fruits of the earth
are
so awkward:
bunchy grapes,
muted
mangos,
bony
plums, and submerged
figs.
You are pure balm,
fragrant bread,
the cheese
of all that flowers.
When we bite into
your round innocence
we too regress
for a moment
to the state
of the newborn:
there's still some apple in us all.
I want
total abundance,
your family
multiplied.
I want
a city,
a republic,
a Mississippi River
of apples,
and I want to see
gathered on its banks
the world's
entire
population
united and reunited
in the simplest act we know:
I want us to bite into an apple.
Ode to the artichoke, Pablo Neruda (translated by Ken Krabbenhoft)
The soft-hearted
artichoke
put on its warrior suit
and, straightbacked, built
a little dome.
Underneath
its scales,
it was
impenetrable.
Right next to it
crazed vegetables
bristled
and twisted themselves into
creepers, cattails,
or histrionic bulbs.
Beneath the earth
slumbered red-whiskered
carrots,
the earth
sucked dry the vines
that draw wine from the soil,
cabbages
spent their time
trying on skirts,
and oregano labored
to fill the world with perfume,
and all the while sweet
artichokes
in their corner of the garden
dressed for war,
like shiny
pomegranates,
and just as proud.
One day
they marched
through the market,
side by side
in wicker baskets,
to make their dream come true:
to be soldiers.
All lined up,
they were never more warlike
than that day at the fair.
The men
in white shirts
who stood amidst the vegetables,
they were
the artichokes'
officers.
Tight formation,
the drill sergeant's screams,
drumroll
of a falling crate.
But
then
along comes
Maria
with a basket on her arm.
She picks up
an artichoke
fearlessly,
she looks it over, she holds it
up to the light as if it were an egg.
She buys it
and sticks it
in her bag
along with a pair of shoes,
a cabbage and a
bottle
of vinegar;
back
in the kitchen,
she drops it in the pot.
The is how
the career
of the armored vegetable
we call an artichoke
comes to a peaceful end.
For the final act
we reveal
its delicious flavor,
plucking it leaf by leaf,
and devour
the peaceable dough
that lies at its green heart.
Eating the world, James Tipton
I was born with my mouth open...
entering this juicy world
of peaches and lemons and ripe sun
and the pink and secret flesh of women,
this world where dinner is in the breath
of the subtle desert,
in the spices of the distant sea
which late at night drift over sleep.
I was born somewhere between
the brain and the pomegranate,
with a tongue tasting the delicious textures
of hair and hands and eyes;
I was born out of the heart stew,
out of the infinite bed, to walk upon
this infinite earth.
I want to feed you the flowers of ice
on this winter window,
the aromas of many soups,
the scent of sacred candles
that follows me around this cedar house,
I want to feed you the lavender
that lifts up out of certain poems,
and the cinnamon of apples baking,
and the simple joy we see
in the sky when we fall in love.
I want to feed you the pungent soil
where I harvested garlic,
I want to feed you the memories
rising out of the aspen logs
when I split them, and the pinyon smoke
that gathers around the house on a still night,
and the mums left by the kitchen door.
I want to feed you the colors of rain
on deserted parking lots,
and the folds of delirious patchouli
in the Indian skirt of the woman
on Market Street in San Francisco,
and the human incense of so much devotion
in tiny villages in Colorado and Peru.
I want to serve you breakfast at dawn,
I want to serve you the bread
that rises in the desert dust, serve you
the wind that wanders through the canyons,
serve you the stars that fall over the bed,
serve you the Hopi corn one thousand years old,
serve you the saffron in the western sunset,
serve you the delicate pollen that blows its lullaby
through each lonely wing of flesh;
I want to serve you the low hum of bees
clustered together all winter
eating their honey.
I've been reading too much of Neruda, Cisneros, et al. Isabel Allende's Aphrodite. Boundaries between love and appetite; texture, flavour, scent. "The process of making a good soup," Allende reveals, "follows the same steps as those for making love; in both, you must immerse yourself in the sensual pleasure of mixing, smelling, tasting, licking, adding, witholding, doubting, adding a little something more." Why, then, is it such a chore when I am in the kitchen? Why must people choke on spittle as if the fact itself were torturous? (I learned, too, I am a sort of faisandé, most prepared "when it is just at the point of turning bad, right before the neighborhood birds start pecking at it and the first worms appear.")
Gardening & wine magazines, cookbooks, constitute my spring and summer reading, as well. What the hell!, my sister demands. All right, so I am unfamiliar with the subjects. Oh, but the riches, the images (photographs & language), more than explain my interest.
A package of seeds tumbled from The Beekeeper, labelled 2005 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. K 93698-17. Sow in prepared garden soil in full sunlight. Press seeds lightly into soil; keep evenly moist until all plants are established. Wildflowers in the Beekeeper mix: cornflower, annual sunflower, purple coneflower, cosmos, annual baby's breath, annual gaillardia... Though useless in the garden, I am enamoured of dirt beneath half-moon fingernails. When I live in a flat again, anywhere, I want strawberry pots crammed with the fruit, with different herbs, with edible life. What I have in my room now is a bowl of cacti, as it is only they who are durable enough to suffer and survive my presence. I'd photograph the beauts, save for the superstition regarding that very act.
In my mother's garden, the peonies (that fragrance!) have disappeared. Weeks ago they were swollen, broken (stems: bones, neck, spine), crushed by the weight of their own beauty & wind & rain. The sister thought to document the snow whiteness:
Lately, I've taken to eating honey with my bread. A marvelous collection has resulted:
Following the Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers - Douglas Whynott
A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them - Sue Hubbell
Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind - Stephen Buchmann with Banning Repplier
Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World - Holley Bishop
Sweetness & Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee - Hattie Ellis
Pink dirt, red brick, bedroom window, shrub, shed, jungle.
* * *
I want to someday finish Genghis Blues. Paul Pena & Kongar-ol Ondar in San Francisco and Tuva; throatsinging cackling through short wave radio via a Moscow reception, then sung & heard & sung again live. A sheep-slaughtering ceremony, wherein the soft lambswool belly is slit -- and too slowly for me to bear -- to allow a hand's purchase on the aorta, which is ripped out to produce a heart attack. A shaman speaks a language so old even he doesn't understand what meaning is held by the sounds he utters. Rivers visited, songs about them spilling into their very waters. Blues. Greens. Blindness. Madness. Adventure.
Since yesterday afternoon I've been rewinding in my head, in a sick sort of reverie, the trainstation end of Love in the Afternoon:It's nothing, really. It's the soot. Always happens to me in railroad stations. I'm susceptible. You don't have to worry about me, Mr. Flanagan; there have been so many men before, there will be so many after this. It's going to be another one of those crazy years. While you're in Cannes, I'll be in Brussels with the banker. He wants to give me a Mercedes-Benz -- a blue one, it's my favourite colour. And while you're in Athens, I'll be with the duke again in Scotland. But I don't know whether I'll go yet; there's another man who's asked me to spend the summer with him in Deauville. He owns racehorses, he's very rich. He's number twenty--I mean number twenty-one; you're number twenty. So you see, Mr. Flanagan, I'll be perfectly all right.
I do not accept any ending beyond Flanagan's face following Ariane's pathetic bravado. Rescues are not always as sensible or welcomed as one might imagine. Some realities and fantasies, too, are beyond keeping. (What a disappointment was the novel inspired by and named for Audrey Hepburn's elegant staircase of a neck.) Offhand, only the gift of Joni Mitchell in Love Actually hurts as much as that, as any, farewell at the trainstation.
My guardian angel is afraid of the dark. He pretends he's not, sends me ahead, tells me he'll be along in a moment. Pretty soon I can't see a thing. "This must be the darkest corner of heaven," someone whispers behind my back. It turns out her guardian angel is missing too. "It's an outrage," I tell her. "The dirty little cowards leaving us all alone," she whispers. And of course, for all we know, I might be a hundred years old already, and she just a sleepy little girl with glasses.
&
Lover of endless disappointments with your collection of old postcards, I'm coming! I'm coming! You want to show me a train station with its clock stopped at five past five. We can't see inside the station master's window because of the grime. We don't even know if there's a train waiting on the platform, much less if a woman in black is hurrying through the front door. There are no other people in sight, so it must be a quiet station. Some small town so effaced by time it has only one veiled widow left, and now she too is leaving with her secret.
--Charles Simic
What life were we expecting? Ships sailed from distant harbors without us, the telephone rang and no one answered, someone came home alone and stood for hours in the dark hallway. --Philip Levine
(It is impossible.)
A tweak in today's plans; now, a series of little distractions (because I can't yet use work in that manner). I will see Jay Bolotin's The Jackleg Testament exhibition, a "woodcut motion picture" with print portfolio, at the Contemporary Arts Centre of Cincinnati. In the film, Karin Bergquist is the voice of Eve: how earthenly right that is! (Downloads for my purchase of Karin's "Lasso a Falling Star" yet remain -- please let me know, should you want this song. She and other artists performed at a 6 September 2003 art show and benefit concert on behalf of St. Elizabeth in Norwood, Ohio.) Also, the booksale on Fountain Square hosted by Friends of the Public Library. 5$ a bagful! I shall hunt a list of titles for people. Then, perhaps, Eden Park and Findlay Market.
Edit, 9pm:
Excerpts from The Testament:Once upon a time there was a new forest. That forest was very special. There was angels in that forest. But one thing made that forest dizzy one day and it was very dangerous too and hopeless. You'd cry. But you're going to hear about it -- and that would make you feel better. --A Child
Don't think twice -- nay, once -- upon the wonders of the world. That's my job. Mine! Mine! Mine! --Nobodaddy
Did you gather any knowledge of the Vulgar? --Eve
A play would be delightful, so delicious! Is there room for a concession booth -- fresh fruit and such? Oh, my liege, would you indulge me? I have a penchant for the marketplace, you know. --The Serpent
Ripe fruit? --The Serpent
I've landed now, pricked by a prick. --Eve
I am not what I am
These scales have come removable
Yet I've craved [also reconciled] this form...
It satisfies and suits me
One picks up rumours in the shit and bile
Slick and pissed upon
One gathers wisdom on one's belly
Down amongst the refuse and the crumbs
The droppings of the BOOZWAZHEEE --The Serpent
Though I don't know how wanted it is (it's not the same story as the film that shares its name), I brought home from the booksale with me a copy of Christie Dickason's Indochine. Remembrances thrive, everywhere.
* * *
The brother and his sweetheart added a new member to the family. Her name is Lily and she is feisty, terrorising Kaiser and human toes (also nips noses, ears & lips; nibbles hair):
Song
& new desktop wallpaper. :)
