At the Pond

Anxious, after a difficult day, I went out before dinner last night and took the uphill walk to the pond, just a few blocks from my house.  The sky was overcast, the streets wet from rain, the air cool and damp.  Few people were on the street, and few cars.  Rush hour was over.

My heart beat fast as I climbed, slowed as I strolled.  When I got to the pond, I listened for the red wing blackbirds, which nest there, but they had settled in for the night.  

The pond picked up what light there was.    

Celia Gilbert's "Something to Exchange"

Celia Gilbert has a new book of poems.  They are super-sensitive, elegiac, beautifully phrased. Here are two:

Mimosa

I lifted the flowers from their green tissue.

Mimosa pudica:

tiny balls like ancient granulated gold,

balls that over time will grow fluffy;

when stroked its feathery leaves curl up shyly.

How could I thank him for

this acknowledgment?

He bought them for me,

thinking of me, I thought,

wanting to say things he couldn't say,

to give pleasure he couldn't give.

So, I existed.

In the somber kitchen, standing at the low sink,

I filled a vase, trimming the stems

before plunging them into the water

imagining the moment

when the stem goes faint, then quickly revives,

more open than before,

water wicking through its veins.

Father in His Summer Suit

Home from work, Father, in his summer suit,

comes down the country lane.

Honeysuckle spills over the hedges.

He takes a blossom and nips the foot

of its open-mouthed trumpet,

letting me taste one translucent drop.

"This is what we did when were were children,"

he says.

I scuff the soft dirt with bare feet

doubting he had been like me,

but try out the new skill.

In the shadows stood our summer house,

with its screened porch and squeaky glider.

All summer I tippled, drunk

on the connection to people long ago

who foraged in the wild--

and to my wild father--

so newly discovered.

Gilbert, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the author of three other collections of poetry: "An Ark of Sorts," "Bonfire," and "Queen of Darkness."  She is also a printmaker and painter.  That's one of her monotypes on the cover of her new book.  

Responses to Places

Our reading group met yesterday to talk about Mary Beard's "The Fires of Vesuvius."  Opinion was divided between those who thought the people of ancient Pompeii were like us and those who thought they were notably different.  I think they were essentially different and agreed with A. who said, 'This is a world before Christianity.' There was no shame for the body.  What were they ashamed of? I wondered.  Lack of civic virtue and loyalty to Rome, the failure to present a bella figura?

Beard writes that there were more statues in Pompeii than people.  'Did they ignore these statues, the way we ignore ours?' A. asked.  How could they?  They sacrificed to gods represented by these statues.  Certainly it would be difficult to ignore larger than life-size statues like this one of Apollon in front of a temple.  L. compared the great quality of statues to our great number of cars.  But we don't sacrifice to cars.  We don't have bare-chested slaves slit the throat of a magnificent bull, put the animal's flesh and bones on the fire, and watch the smoke rise to the heavens in tribute.  

P. thought Beard was very good about the paintings of Pompeii but wanted her to react more passionately to the ruined city.  An unfair comparison, but I thought of Ruskin's response to Venice:

"The long range of columned palaces . . . each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tesselation . . . It was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history . . . . Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive . . . and that all which in nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea (quoted in Mark Doty's "Seeing Venice").

Here's more Ruskin on Venice: "The beginning of everything was in seeing the gondola-beak come actually inside the door at Danieli's, when the tide was up, and the water two feet deep at the foot of the stairs; and then, all along the canal sides, actual marble walls rising out of the salt sea, with hosts of little brown crabs on them, and Titians inside" (Praeterita, Works, 35.295).  In one sentence he gets the strange improbable character of the place: gondola-beak! Art so close to the natural sea as to seem a part of it, but not quite.

The long passage Doty quotes is remarkably rich, the sentences taking us out to a horizon, as if they were a fleet of boats.

I'm thinking now of another response to place, in which the eye travels out, the one Dickens gives to Pip in "Great Expectations":

"Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.  My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.  At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried . . . and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip."

Do you know of other writing about place similar to these flights?  Please let us know.

Charioteer

The statue was discovered in 1979 on Motya, a small island off the coast of Sicily. Although the Greek fifth century work has been called a representation of the god Apollo, most agree it is a sculpture of a victorious charioteer, once crowned with a marble wreath.  One scholar says that the face and genitals were damaged on purpose.  I am glad the rest survived mutilation to astonish us with virile beauty.  Agon is the Greek name for an athletic contest or struggle.  The charioteer has survived the agony of the games.

I have a picture of him tacked up above my desk.  My serene pin-up.

Poetry During the Recession

This morning I walked to Massachusetts Avenue, to my local bagel place to buy bagels and cream cheese for my poetry group and found these signs in the window.  Next door, there was a for-rent sign stuck on the window of the bakery and restaurant, Sweet Sue's, now out of business.  

The Starbuck's in Arlington Center, a few blocks away, is advertising special deals on coffee; a shoe shop, and the Rio, the Brazillian restaurant, have both closed.  Shops put out racks of clothing on the sidewalk to attract customers.  The library is full of people reading newspapers. The cost of the daily New York Times is $2.00.  

I may be cutting my own hair and shopping at thrift shops but I'm not giving up buying bagels for my poet friends. We ate as we read each other's poems and offered suggestions.  These sessions are always helpful.  I have three new poems: "Teens," "Sea Urchins," and "Lychee Nuts."  They need a little tinkering, which I'll get to soon.  One of JD's poems begins, "The boy plays the piano/ as if he's learning to masturbate."  A poem by AF begins, "The first poem I sold/ I bought a pair of shoes."  So poets lavishly spend their time.  

Pleasures of Travel

I've been reading "Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples" by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller.   In limpid, weightless prose, Hazzard writes an ode to Italy, where she has learned "that the ability to rise to the moment, to the human occasion, is linked to a sense of mortality intrinsic, in Italy, to all that pleases us."

In Naples, we are "initiated" into a mystery: "this sense of life profoundly informed by awareness of death that values the smallest pleasure as god-given, fatalistically attributing misfortune to the gods' sterner associate, Il Destino."

No one writes better about traveling alone:

"Never to have made the lonely walk along the Seine or Lungarno, or passed those austere evenings on which all the world but oneself has destination and companion, is perhaps never to have felt the full presence of the unfamiliar.  It is thus one achieves a slow, indelible intimacy with place, learning to match its moods with one's own.  At such times it is as if a destination had awaited us with nearly human expectation and with an exquisite blend of receptivity and detachment."

"The moment comes: we intersect a history, a long existence, offering it our fresh discovery as regeneration."

Steegmuller writes about his being mugged and seriously injured in Naples.  The Italian doctors are skillful, personal, warm.  He misses them when he returns to New York, where, "If there was a question to be asked, one learned to have it ready and to speak quickly . . . . One doctor in particular was like an indifferent priest opening and closing the slide of his confessional on a busy Saturday night."  The hospital attendants speak to him "across an artificial barrier of polysyllabic indirection."  Steegmuller's experience is not unique.  There are now specialists in "doctor-patient communication."  One such specialist "urges doctors to build rapport with their patients by greeting them warmly by name, asking briefly about important events in their lives, maintaining eye contact, focusing on the patient without interruption, and displaying empathy through words and body language" (New York Times, June 9, 2009). Directions for programming robots to act human.

Must we leave America to find what Steegmuller calls "the immediacy of care and human fellowship," and Hazzard, "a slow, indelible intimacy with place"?

Obama's Cairo Speech, Jews, Egypt, Gaza

In today's "New York Times," (June 9, 2009, page 23), Andre Aciman writes: "for all the president's talk of  'a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world' and shared 'principles of justice and progress,' neither he nor anyone around him" spoke about "the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century.

With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) 'proud tradition of tolerance' of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world."

"Nor did he bother to mention that with this flight and expulsion, Jewish assets were--let's call it by its proper namer--looted.  Mr. Obama never mentioned the belongings I still own in Egypt and will never recover."  Aciman goes on: "We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own."

Andre Aciman, the author of the memoir, "Out of Egypt," left Egypt with his family when he was fourteen.

Just before reading Aciman's op-ed piece, I watched a clip from today's "Guardian," which showed refugees whose homes were destroyed in the Israeli attack on Gaza.  Their situation is dreadful.

It's usual to ask at this point, Will the conflict ever end?  I'd like to conclude this post on a different note. Perhaps the effects of global warming will literally submerge these problems.  No, of course not; some will say, it will make things worse.  In a recent New Yorker article, Elizabeth Colbert is certain of the next mass extinction.  Humans may disappear, as apparently frogs are now disappearing.  Safe for now in my study, having had a cup of green tea, a pleasant rain falling, I can entertain the prospect with philosophic calm.