Maybe the Moon: Transformation

In my small way I like to transform things--soak labels off jars; clear the glass; remove the brand; shift my angle of vision and see the moon on this grease-blackened-and-browned cookie sheet.

I say this as if I am always the agent ruling my eyes to shift. In fact, often the shift happens by itself. By chance. It's the fashion to call this "creative." But I just go with it. The shift catches me. Sometimes the shift is soft, sometimes violent as when birds shoot up like geysers.

As for soaking labels off jars, that's deliberate. Yet if I make the water hot enough and wait long enough, I don't have to claw or scrape much. And sometimes glue melts and the labels just float off.

This morning when I woke at 3 A.M., thinking it was dawn, I found my notebook and wrote--a dawn of sorts. I got back to sleep. If I hadn't my eyeballs by now would feel as though they were popping out of my head. I'd be wasted. Tell me: how did you sleep last night?

Olivia Manning's "School for Love"

Olivia Manning, 1908-1980

It's an extraordinary novel, School for Love, so much so that I want to keep repeating the title. Thanks to New York Review of Books Classics, Manning's novel, first published in 1951, is finally out in America.

Set in Jerusalem in 1975, School for Love tells the story of orphaned Felix Latimer. On his first night in the freezing house of the monstrous Miss Bohun, described by Jane Smiley in the introduction as, "a marvel, even a paradigm, of hypocrisy," he lies in bed grieving, completely alone until the cat Faro joins him. (Manning knew cats and wrote about them in the nonfiction Extraordinary Cats.)

The School of Love is worth reading if only for Manning's descriptions of Faro and her powers:

He [Felix] stared into nothingness, thinking he would never sleep, never feel warm again. At last Faro jumped on to his bed and he felt her paws, soft and heavy, move with cautious certainty up to his face; her whiskers touched his cheek as she sniffed to be sure of him, then, like an arrow-tip of ice, her nose pointed between the sheets. He raised the covers for her. Slipping like silk into his arms, she curled warm against his body and lay with her chin on his shoulder, purring contentment. He wrapped his arms round her. Comforted, kissing her between the ears, he whispered: 'I love you.' He pressed his face into her fur and said: 'Faro, darling little Faro . . . ' but in a moment, when he meant only to say 'Faro', he found he was saying: 'Mother' and all the tears he had kept back that day streamed down his face until he slept, exhausted.

Manning commands a number of tones, among them, ironic notes, and tender notes. Tonight I lean toward the tender ones. Just the word "Faro"--isn't that soft?

Tuesday Poem: Dimitrova's "Deserts"

Blaga Dimitrova

Deserts

I was born for love--

to give and to receive it.

Yet my life has passed

almost without loving.

So I've learned forgiving:

even the deserts

I have crossed

I feel no scorn for.

I just ask them

with astonished eyes:

What gardens were you born for?

(Translated from the Bulgarian by Heather McHugh)

Tuesday Poem, a community of poets, is based in New Zealand.

Rhapsody

Virginia Woolf

For the next two weeks I'll be with myself. If I'm lucky new poems will come. In the intervals there will be walks to the various nearby ponds and time to read: dip in, float, dive; time to hear the rhapsodists sing. (Please scroll down for more on "rhapsody.") The ocean, which we think of, live near, live from, is in all of these selections.

From Woolf's To the Lighthouse:

So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.

They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water; and then while one waited for that, one watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly, a film of mother of pearl.

Hart Crane

From Crane's "Voyages II":

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark Doty

From Doty's "Almost Blue" (Apologies: line breaks are not accurate because of formatting problems.)--

If Hart Crane played trumpet he'd sound like you, your horn's dark city

miraculous and broken over and over, scale-shimmered, every harbor-

flung hour

and salt-span of cabled longing, every waterfront, the night-lovers'

rendezvous.

Rhapsody:

1. Exalted or excessively enthusiastic expression of feeling in speech or writing. 2. A literary work written in an impassioned or exalted style. 3. A state of elated bliss; ecstasy. 4. Music A usually instrumental composition of irregular form that often incorporates improvisation. 5. An ancient Greek epic poem or a portion of one suitable for uninterrupted recitation.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Tuesday Poem: Alan Dugan's "One used to . . . "

Untitled Poem

One used to be able to say

what Seneca said to Nero:

"However many people you kill

you can never kill your successor."

But now the joke may not

be necessarily true: we might

have done it already. So let's

remember what the poet Oppian said:

"The hunting of Dolphins is immoral

and the man who wilfully kills them

will not only not go to the gods

as a welcome sacrifice, or touch

their altars with clean hands, but will

even pollute the people under his own roof."

Tuesday Poem, a community of poets, is based in New Zealand.

Irises and Weigela

There's a stretch of irises in bloom in front of the house. They have spread from two small clumps. Some time ago I drove two friends to Concord in search of an abandoned garden they had once found and from which they had taken plants. I followed their directions though I didn't believe they would find the garden again, but somehow they spotted the obscured turn-off on to a dirt road. We bumped along and eventually found the garden. A tangle, overgrown, but thru the wild, matted growth we could see Siberian irises, fresh green spears but no bloom. It must have been early May. I had to stand on the spade to get the point into the root-cemented ground.

This is a particularly fierce strain of iris, an old strain. They spread by seed which pops from seed pods in late fall. I let them spread.

The Siberian invasion does not disturb me, but this weigela shrub, planted by the former owners, overwhelms me, heavily festooned, ongepotchket, faputzt. I'll look at it again today now that the heat spell has broken. Yesterday the temperature was in the nineties. Today in the cold I might welcome such hot lushness. You might think I was talking about people.

Tuesday Poem: Miriam Levine, "Surprise"

Surprise

Steam from the shower clouds the mirror

except for the lower left corner above the lit candle.

The dry corner, blue as ice and shaped like a flame,

reflects my hip and smoky taupe tile.

There's even a bit of my hand and a piece of the shower curtain

called "Disco, which has silver facets stamped in the plastic.

I'm leaving my wet body to live on the other side of the mirror--

like looking in through a hole in the second-floor window.

Where am I standing? On a ladder?

Who is that dripping and coated with steam?

She's staring--amazed.

What is she staring at?

That dry bit of mirror,

the shape of a flame.

"Surprise" was published in The Dark Opens, a collection of poems, 2008, Autumn House Press.

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