The tree has many names; Poinciana, for M. Poinci, 17th century governor of the French Antilles, Flame Tree, Mohur Tree, Red Flame, Royal Poinciana, Flamboyant Tree.
I was walking north, a few blocks from club Twist, when I heard a woman shouting. Her voice could have filled a stadium. “I’m going to smoke that pipe. I’m going to do anything I want. If you have something to say to me, I have something to say to you. Do you hear me?” Did I hear her? She might as well have asked if I had heard a passing freight train or a jet breaking the sound barrier. My ears stung; my skull vibrated. The voice went on at the same pitch, unrelenting as the Furies of ancient Greece. Whatever she had smoked in her pipe--crack, crank--it hadn't wiped out her hallucinations. I turned around. The woman advanced at a race-walking pace. I flattened myself against the scorching wall of a restaurant. All along Washington Avenue, people made way for her. I was terrified she would catch me looking at her. What are you looking at? If you have a look for me, I have a look for you.
With her chin jutting up, she turned her handsome head to the side and stared at enemies invisible to us. Her clothes were immaculate—white pants, white tee shirt—but her hair was nappy; it seemed to spring from her head with each shout. She was tall, athletic, well-muscled. One punch from her balled up fist would knock me over. A group of men drinking Cuban coffee outside a grocery story, backed up and let her go by, staring into their tiny paper cups as if they contained a mystery; they looked embarrassed and thoughtful. We all looked embarrassed and thoughtful. About what? The human race. One of our members was out of her mind.
The Mayo Clinic's online article about paranoid schizophrenia is absurdly, blandly reassuring: "But with effective treatment, you can manage the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and work toward leading a happier, healthier life." Could she be helped? One might as well try to stop a volcano. But what do I know?
The psychologist James Hillman calls these sightings of mad people occasions for "soul making." By this he means, occasions for the deepening of the psyche. I would rather the woman were well than I had a more developed soul, as if we had such choices.
The temperature was ninety degrees. Though my sun hat promised complete protection and the tops of my feet were covered--a friend had told me that the Florida sun had raised blisters on her insteps--rather than walk in the hot sun we took the tram tour, and for an hour I tried to shut out the driver's voice. He spoke rapidly, without pausing, stuffing us with information. The man in front of me fell asleep; I envied him, and thought of the person in an Emily Dickinson poem who is known to "close the Valves of her attention--like stone." I couldn't manage to shut the valve all the way. By the time we reached the last stop I was ready to scream. It had been years since I had been forced to listen to anyone.
At seven-thirty last night, the horizon faded; the pale blue sky merged with blue water. In the far north, when the horizon disappeared, and Inuit kayakers could not tell the difference between sea and sky, they would often come down with kayak sickness, a gentle term. Kayak sickness meant losing one's mind. No danger of losing the horizon here in South Beach. Just fix your eyes on the people in the distance; in this case, a model and a fashion assistant waiting for the photographer to load up his camera. If you embiggen the picture below, you will see that the assistant is holding up a reflecting disc to shine more light on the model, as if she needed it--not with that torch of a wig.
I've been reading Bert Stern collection of poems, "Steerage," and thinking about how much we've heard about American individualism; and, in American literature, about writers like Melville, who have what one critic has called, the voice of “the imperial self,”: majestic, heroic, grand. In “Walden,” Thoreau, though a less imperial writer than Melville, still creates a narrator who lives heroically alone in his tiny cabin in the woods and sees few people. He’s a man without family. In actual life, Thoreau walked daily to Concord village to see his mother. In contrast Bert Stern writes about his deep connection to the living and the dead. He sheds his ego and takes on the voices of his ancestors who immigrated to America from Eastern Europe. Through him, we hear his dead mother’s account of the voyage. The family is out to sea; order falls apart; the family loses its center. Sailing in limbo, his mother says, “Nobody talked. We could not look at the sea or the dead sky/ above us. We hung between these. We would be here always.”
In “Lotty is Born” Stern bears the weight of generations: “All suffered to bring me here to this room/ where I write, bigger than the house/ my mother was born in.” Beautifully, in fluid lines, he registers a dissolving self: “I am somebody’s dream . . . let them tell me if they can/ if I am recompense for what they endured.”
A descendent of those who in steerage endured the stink of “of seawater and piss, animals and human sweat,” Stern brings his ancestors into the light. His mother says, “my spirit was waiting for me, dancing on the shore.” The spirit is feminine, like the Shekinah: the principle of immanence, the divine showing itself. I’ve heard the Shekinah described metaphorically as a single green leaf that keeps falling to earth but is never seen to land. Stern refers to the Shekinah in “Hannah Remembers,” notable for its sense of shining, never-ending time: “Evenings that went on forever/ still unfolding.” In “Driving Home from Elizabethtown” the poet is gathered into transcendent light:
. . . I am ready to fall
with the turnings of poplar
and oak. Through the windshield
even the thin rain that takes on
gold light from the sun in its falling
is fuel for the burning.
Stern’s “Wait,” the long poem, which comprises part five of “Steerage,” is a triumph, sweet and mysterious. The Shekinah takes the form of a dying girl who lives inside the man Stern calls “Jacob.” “He called out to her as one might/ throw a flower at a star.” The girl keeps falling, imperiled, but she comes back to life: “she’s close as your skin, still humming her tune.” Stern gives the girl a voice: “She said this. The girl said this/ now was always as it is now.” Nothing is lost. Time is eternal. The poem ends by connecting a tender earthly image—“the turnip’s sweet spheroid,/ its little tail”—with an image of fire and living water: burning stars and icicles dripping as if they were “breathing.”
Besides water-fire-falling-burning poems in which Stern invokes a self’s dissolving in radiant never-ending time, there are poems about closely observed everyday life. (I prefer the spirit-Shekinah and daily-life poems to the fable poems, “What the Teller Knows” and “Early autumn in the Mountains,” which seem unreal to me.) Stern writes about his neighbor, Kenny, a Vietnam war veteran; he watches him capably “sizing boards with a handsaw,/ setting them snug.” But at night, in his dreams, Kenny keeps shooting at a girl who is “hardly a shadow.” Stern describes Kenny’ son, “washing his car,/ a black Camarro/ with V8 engine,” and the everyday of American life with its skateboards and televisions playing all night in store windows.
“Tea,” which I’ll quote in its entirety, demonstrates the lyrical beauty of Stern’s poems. Here, the feminine appears as a muse. “Tea” is also a love poem that recognizes the separateness of the beloved:
That clear song—
was it you while I slept,
slipping down in your jade
silk to feed the stove
with pine and drink your tea
alone, at down, as you like to do?
Stern could be describing his own clear song: tender, lyrical, beautifully phrased.
"Damn braces," wrote poet William Blake. These plants seem to be following his advice. Tree roots break out of concrete constraints; strangler fig roots escape through an iron fence; a poinciana tree pushes through a ficus hedge. 
While news of Iraq has disappeared from the front page, on Ocean Drive in South Beach, near Wet Willy's where people down for Urban Weekend have been partying since Friday afternoon, Veterans for Peace has put up a memorial to those who have died in the Iraq War.
Across the street is the pale yellow and pink Flamingo Plaza, where polo players used to stay in the 1920s, when nearby Flamingo Park was a polo field. The dark green in the foreground: kamali trees, which are said to have originated in Hawaii. Wild tropical storms for the last few days, plenty of sunshine in between storms.
I went out right after breakfast. The little sandwich shop that faces the alley parallel to Washington Avenue was filling up. There's nothing suburban about South Beach. Short sleeves and no sleeves; tattoos on display. Mango smoothies on the menu. The smell of Cuban coffee. 
It was clear there was a poetry community in Brookline, Massachusetts: people were talking to each other! Thanks to Aimee Sands, Susana Roberts and Ann Killough, coordinators of the Sunday afternoon reading series founded eight years ago and based at the Brookline Public Library, there is a vital audience, new comers and regulars.
It rained hard this morning, and it seemed as if the plants were zooming up as the rain fell. As soon as I left the house, taking the brick path near the black oak, the rain let up; it was cool, overcast, fresh, few people about. 
Though I used a cell phone myself, I did not broadcast my conversations and had very little tolerance for those who did until I overheard a young man on Lincoln Road in South Beach. He was a few steps in front of us, as John and I walked on the south side of Lincoln Road, across from Books on Books. 'He's there, he's there,' the man said. I looked toward where he was looking: a handsome man sat reading in full view at a table in the large window of the bookstore's cafe. The man on the cell phone was trying to get up his courage to meet the man. He was very nervous and kept asking for reassurance. 'Yes, but,' he kept saying, astonished that the man had shown up. He backed away from the store; the man in the window did not look up from his book. The cell phone conversation went on, the person on the other end apparently persisting, encouraging.
Today was my first day out of the house since Sunday when I woke up with a cold. I treated myself to lunch at Sofra, a wonderful cafe and bakery in Cambridge on Belmont Street. After I had eaten a savory pastry with fennel, and a delicious macaroon, I took a long walk in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, a gently cheerful place, where it seems the dead have just stopped for a rest under the trees.
If you're in town, stop by the Brookline Public Library for an afternoon of poetry. I'll be reading with Elizabeth Kirschner, followed by an open mike, so bring your own work for what should be a delightful event.
I've been nursing myself through a miserable head cold by drinking hot lemonade and reading Cavafy's poems in the new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn.
Years ago, when I was little, my mother lost her engagement ring, which my father had given her in the 1920s. Though it was much less grand than the ring in the picture above, it was the same style, but with five small diamonds and four tiny dark blue sapphires. My father, who never made much money, must have saved for quite a while in order to buy the ring.
Our readers group chose Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found to discuss at our June meeting. (The person who suggested it will soon be there.) Until I read Beard, I did not know that the motif of Pompeii was the erect phallus. "Cock City," a friend said. There are penis frescos, reliefs, statues, mosaics, penises carved into paving stones, penises on shop signs, winged penis pendants with bells. If I ever thought I could understand an ancient culture, I don't think so now. 
On Tuesday, to celebrate my companion's last radiation treatment at Dana Farber Hospital in Boston, and his coming through with some of his old energy, we decided to lunch at the Museum of Fine Arts, where we would see the "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese" exhibition.
I thought I was long past having a crush on a star, but after seeing the great dancer Antonio Gades I've changed my mind. Gades stars in Carlos Saura's film "Carmen." (There's a clip on U Tube, Antonio Gades: Flamenco/ Carmen.) 
This morning I walked to Spy Pond along the bike path, and as I came to the jutting rock--you can see it in the photo--I thought of the solitary swimmer who dives from that rock. She swims in all weather and goes in until the pond is iced over, which means she swims until the end of November, even as late as the beginning of December. I've watched her arrive, carrying a tote bag, strip down to her bathing suit, and go in. She doesn't shiver when she comes out. She then must go home: she's wearing a wet bathing suit, and it could be 3o degrees fahrenheit. 
The super-saturated red shoes in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) take Dorothy (Judy Garland) safely back to Kansas. A tornado had blown her out of her mid-western home and into the Kingdom of Oz, where a wicked witch threatens to kill her. She is saved by a good witch, who gives her a magic formula: click your shoes together three times and say, "There's no place like home." The film ends happily with Dorothy and her dear dog Toto back home in Kansas. A girl can have an adventure and survive.
Someone has strewn the Arlington Town Hall fountains with orchids. Drenched in water, which is turned on as soon as the danger of frost has passed, they will last for at least a week. In this economic downturn, with many of us cutting spending, eating beans, buying our clothes in second-hand shops, swearing off Starbucks coffee, you might think I would criticize this display. I won't.
