South Beach Victory Garden

This Sunday morning at the garden allotment, the tomatoes were in flower--there's fruit, too--the cosmos open, and kamatsu and red mustard big for braising.

Compost does it's job, deepening green.

Are cosmos flowers edible?  Must I ask the great god Google?

Katmatsu struts its stuff.  (The stems are struts, all right.)

On the walk home I bought garlic and ginger for miso.  If I get the go-ahead about cosmos flowers, I'l float a few in the soup.  Miso is cooking light.

Are you cooking today?

Trip Up North: Witch Hazel, Crack, etc.

In March, J. shows up on a country road in New Hampshire, D.P. sits in the sun with her paintings in Harvard Square, M.S. picks out a scarf to wear to dinner in Chelsea; witch hazel opens, and three people smoke crack near the Charles River, and blissfully I forget about myself.  Tell me: where are you and what do you see?      

Walking the Streets, Alley's, Too

An independent man may be hard to find.

Wherever they can find coconuts, the men use a long hook to glean them.  Coconuts for sale with their liquid.  They drive a spike into the coconut and insert a straw.  The tourists sip.  It's possible to earn some jingle this way.  An African American drummer, who performs on the street, told me, "There wasn't much jingle."  He didn't have a license to perform on the street, the police said, so he had to keep moving on.  Are the coconut sellers licensed?  I don't think they are.

Business is done from the adapted, repurposed grocery cart.  Identifying marks have been removed--the cart's a long way from Walgreen's or Publix or CVS or Whole Foods, etc., etc.

What is the story behind this arrangement?  What do you think?  The pack of cigarettes angled to the shoe?  Does the pack contain any cigarettes?  I didn't investigate.

The trees I like so much have survived the pruning.

Moss likes the sidewalk.  I like to wander.

Dusk: Flamingo Park

Twilight, dusk, blue hour--many names in many languages for this time between day and night.  Last night's twilight in Flamingo Park was blue and green.  The night-lights did not interfere, only added to the dusky feel.  For once they did not seem unnatural, rather an adaptation.  I sat and watched, heard the pah-pah of the basketball.  How would you describe that sound of the ball hitting the surface?  How do you say "twilight"?  Please tell me, in your language.

J. came by on his bike.  Easy twilight, easy ride: the land is flat here.  Is that why the sky seems so close?  We sat and talked.  He rode off, and I went home to drink Badia "Chamomile & Anise Tea, Te de Manzanilla y Anis."  I'm drinking it again this morning, the empty packet next to my computer as the tea brews.

  

South Beach Again!

Wishing you all a fine year ahead.  2013!  Deadlines, and the usual, have kept me away from the blogosphere.  It's warming to be back in South Beach, where I'm looking down at the darkest green and ahead to blue.

Tell me: where are you and what do you see?

Poems at The Blue Lyra

Many thanks to Matthew Silverman, editor at The Blue Lyra for publishing two of my poems.  The fall issue includes work by B.Z. Niditch, Yvette Moreno, and Yehoshua November.  (I don't know the artist who painted Orpheus playing his lyre near the blue-green ocean.  He's all one here before the maenads tore him to pieces.)

Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky, is in the constellation Lyra.

Orpheus beheaded, by Redon.   

            And as they floated down the gentle current
            The lyre made mournful sounds, and the tongue murmured
            In mournful harmony, and the banks echoed
            The strains of mourning.

                                    — from Metamorphoses, Book 11 (tr. Rolfe Humphries)

Found

Our street is under construction.  Rain washes brick dust into the street.  I doubt I could make anything as rich as these colors and shapes.



We're lucky to have new fire hydrants.  I wonder what they cost.

These marks signify something underground, something to take care not to disturb.

Is there any point to making art when there are such satisfying finds?

Yes.  I'm glad to find this artful sentence from Chekhov: "When one thinks of food, one's heart grows lighter."

Callie Crossley Interviews Photographer Melissa Shook

Melissa Shook spoke about her book "My Suffolk Downs" in a radio interview with Callie Crossley.  It was clear that Crossley had carefully read the book, and clear that Melissa Shook had made the invisible workers at the track visible.  Please tune in.

The talented Melissa without her camera.

Callie Crossley

Autumn White

'Season of mellow fruitfulness,' wrote Keats.  Mellow--we think of orange and red.  Yet there's plenty of white this time of year.   These whites seems to transcend any season: flowers, antique auto, striped crossing, Emily Dickinson's dress.   When winter comes I'll be looking for red.    

White autos are rare in New England.

Stripe on stripe.

A dress that is supposed to have belonged to Emily Dickinson.  You can see it in the family manse in Amherst.  The dress is smaller than it appears in this photo.

Here are some strong lines from Dickinson:

The Mind lives on the Heart
Like any parasite--
If that is full of Meat
The Mind is fat--

Her work always surprises me.

Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes 
Are organized Decays--

'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An elemental Rust--

Ruin is formal--Devil's work
Consecutive and slow--
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping--is Crashe's law--

Time to sweep out the cobwebs!

Drawing with Melissa Shook

 

Melissa Shook and I have been drawing together at the dining room table.  "Parallel play," someone called it.  Play for the sake of play, without ambition, trying to do justice to the tomatoes, onions, and pear.  We never got to the potatoes.



Melissa likes to work with  pen and ink.  The lines build up and gather mass.  The color is from oil pastels.  Melissa brought a dandy set.

She's fearless with brown.

We left the porch door open.  The breeze came in.



The ball chair is good for the back.  Melissa's dog Bogie kept us company.

I was happy with onions.

Onions and a single pear.

I want to you see these marvelous tomatoes!  We ate it with dinner--the large red one.  Another friend joined us.  First big big green olives and Vovray, then corn chowder made from Rebecca Loudon's recipe, followed by the tomato with olive oil, garlic and basil, ice cream sandwiches for dessert.

Bumming Around & Taking Pictures

There are few things better than bumming around.  The other day J. and I went to Mt. Auburn Cemetery.  ''It's so beautiful here," I said to J., "death doesn't seem so bad."  "I keep death and nature separate," J. answered, meaning, I believe, that sky, trees, birds were in one category and death in another.  The sky was dramatic.

Here is a tall ship sailing in stone.

Yesterday A. and I walked through Robbins Park and admired the fans hanging from the trees.

They caught the wind.

And here are a few lines about taking pictures:

Keep still! I say to children

but let cattails shake, asters shiver,

oak creak,  hawks dive,

branches crack, leaves silver,

storms rip, so the world reveals

secrets and my picture blurs.

Reflections: Honor

The reflections of cattails, trees, sky are ephemeral, discarnate, bodiless, weightless, yet accurate and delightful.  When I gaze at them, for a moment I too feel weightless--well, almost weightless.

The arbor vitae seems frosted.  Or is this juniper?  If I had crushed one of these berries to get the scent I would have known.  Juniper is unmistakable.  Sniff gin and you smell juniper.

I hope the zinnias will go on until the first hard frost.  The colors are so intense they seem hot enough to melt frost.  Red admiral butterflies are feasting on the zinnias.  (I'll try to get a picture of them.)

It's lucky to have these sights so close to home.  Classic forms in New England.  Those loops of handles are generous!

The sculpture at the base of the Town Hall flag pole have a wonderful shine.  The child's hand resting on the mother's is a familiar gesture.

There are four words carved at the base: honour, liberty, patriotism, obedience.  We hear a lot about patriotism and liberty ("freedom" is the word favored now) but hardly anything about honor or obedience.  According to Wiki, Samuel Johnson, in his A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), defined honor as having several senses, the first of which was "nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness.  An elegantly written definition.  I wish our public figures possessed such honor.  Mitt Romney was dishonorable when he played up to the Birthers, who insist that Obama was not born in America,  by saying in a recent speech in Michigan, that no one asked to see his birth certificate.  

As for me, I hope to be obedient to a code of honor, and thank Samuel Johnson for his clarity.  "Scorn of meanness."  Meanness here meaning lack of generosity.