My Tree Charlie

There’s a sturdy tree, a Norfolk Island
pine whose name is Charlie; genderwise,
I’m pretty sure that she’s a girl. In any
case, I tend to her as if she were a
croupy child. I’ve given her the finest
spot I can arrange, there being limited
availability of sunny windows
in my little place. She seems to like the
kitchen table, which gets ample daylight
after two p.m. I hydrate her with water
from the tap and feed her evil-smelling
fertilizer; and, when I remember
to, I whisper tenderly in the
direction of where ears might be—you never
know with trees—and play the music of
Franz Schubert, Haydn, Bach, and Telemann—
melodic and conducive to serenity,
for me at least... again, you never know with
trees, and Charlie has her own
peculiarities.

Perhaps I’m overly concerned with
Charlie’s growth and day-to-day vitality—
I hover, I confess—but when I’m tempted
to neglect her (she’s a room away from
where I tend to nest, a daunting twelve or
thirteen steps), she shoots me a reminder
in the form of needles turning brown, and
Charlie sheds at an alarming rate. So
I pretend that she’s my sacred self. It
helps not only for recalling that it’s
time for her to have a drink and that I
have to turn her now and then, but also
for my tendency to see her as an
ornament, ignoring, temporarily,
what makes her Charlie—not inanimate but
living and respiring and essential
as the U.N., my attentive next-door
neighbor, and the light and air we all
depend on if we want to breathe, which
I do, constantly. With this in mind, I
have to hope she doesn’t prematurely
die of some arboreal disease; and
when her time with me, beside my kitchen
window, has to end, as is the way of
things for indoor trees, I’ll know I treated
her with more than kindness but with awe and
reverence, I don’t mind saying, for her
soul, forever fresh and green in
some sweet, fragrant heaven that’s reserved for
noble creatures such as Charlie and her
brother-sister trees.

Wabi-Sabi Autumn

Wabi-Sabi Autumn

Inspired by Whispered Images: Photographs in the Aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi, by Eric Somers, http://www.sandbookstudio.com/photo.html

I notice, this October, skittering shadows

of the brittle leaves that drop from

sycamores in autumn, and I wonder if

the trees shed now-unnecessary foliage

to make compost while they sleep –

protection through the winter,

nourishment in spring for them and their

companions and dependents, birds and

bugs and shrubbery that needs their

shade.

There is along my path an ailing maple,

all except a few limbs bare, but those in

crimson glory, unaware (or, if they

know, not caring) that their brother-

sister branches lack the wherewithal to

bud, the sap too sluggish (or it might be

absent altogether) to remind the naked

branches of their foliating habit when

the air warms and the earth unhardens.

Once I would have grieved or fretted:

What atrocity, what human meddling,

has been visited upon this innocently

thriving urban flora specimen? Today, in

mid-October, I rejoice at the

phenomenon – nature acting naturally

regardless of the stimulus.

Not so long ago I dreaded winter – a

colossal inconvenience and a fearsome

obstacle to my frenetic busyness, to my

insistence that I float from here to there

on friendly breezes, not get bitten by a

north wind that must certainly be vicious

or at least dispassionate to

(unprovoked!) attack a lone pedestrian.

Indeed I took it personally and let it

hinder my activity, when all I really

needed was another sweater and a hat

or else, perhaps, a day of rest and

meditation and of making soup from

scraps of chicken and the half a spinach

salad loosely wrapped in cellophane 

and almost past its fresh-till date.

The grass is showing weariness, and who

can blame it, being hacked and raked

and sprayed at rigid intervals all

summer? But it doesn’t strive, it just

adapts, accepting change according to its

habit. After all, the sun has not retired; it

is only at a greater distance from the

planet than in April, say, or August. It

comes back, requiring none of my

assistance. If I fancy there’s a cosmic

knowing nature has that dormancy is

preparation, I can rest contentedly in

what I sense as temporary, as a time of

restoration, not the end of summers, not

the death of light.

My Life Is Beauty

Summer Afternoon, Shinnecock, by Julien Alden Weir

Meditation on a Summer Afternoon

All the riches of the world exist in shadows

of a walnut tree on sunny summer

afternoons: the small, arresting flutter of

a leaf in a listless breeze; the cleaving

scent of earth and pine and grass and

honeysuckle heavy on the vine; the

rough-and-tumble scratching of a

dozen squirrels in a frantic scramble

branch to branch, and suddenly

they’re statues munching fat, firm

nutmeats, littering with shards of

shell my cluttered yard that I shall

rake another day; plump robins, in

shy trepidation, venturing to search

for succulent gourmet delights, then,

frightened off by someone’s slamming

of a door, they dash away on wing

and call a warning to their mates.

Nearby a brash woodpecker hammers,

hammers more, persists in hammering

upon a maple tree. I clap my hands,

applauding, and to see what he will

do. He quits, and then resumes.

A book of poetry sits idly on my lap,

unlooked at. Pages turn upon a

breath of air; perhaps, I fancy, there’s a

spirit there, enjoying Blake. I listen to my

children at the neighbor’s, splashing in a

plastic pool and laughing with the

unrestraint that grace bestows on

childhood; and down the street, somebody

mows a tidy lawn that’s lined by rows of

peonies, exuberant and lush, absurdly

pink or deep merlot.

Pink peonies (photo by Fanghong)

Something sighs contentedly. Perhaps it’s

I, or else a pixie living in a tribe beneath

the shrubbery. Nothing weighs on me. I

feel so light that I’m surprised to find

myself still sitting on my tattered quilt upon

the grass instead of simply rising, chasing

birds or playing tag with bees. But I am

earthen still, and glad of it, delighted to

be wrapped in humid air; it moves

sufficiently to cool my skin and curl my

hair. The ground is warm, a comfort, womb

of seed and tiny creature curled in sleep,

awaiting dusk.

As shadows must, they lengthen and the

laughter shrills. The time has come. I will

collect the children and go in. I brush away

the thought, just for another minute’s

taste of pure serenity, but also fond

anticipation of the dinner hour—cheddar

cheese and melon salad, I decide, and

lemon pie, and then the bedtime stories

that transport us to exotic climes. The

time has come, but I have evening yet to

savor. Summer comes in such abundant

flavors—warmth and coolness,

thunderstorm, forsythia and clover, early

sunrise, tall and motley hollyhocks—I feast

upon them all.

Assignment 35.1

Every day if you can — but at least twice a week — choose a moment out of the day you have just experienced and write about it metaphorically in the poetic form of your choice. I hope you will do this for the rest of your life. It will prevent your “running on empty,” á la Jackson Browne … or, perhaps even worse, running on autopilot. Entire spans of years of my life, when I was not living poetically or contemplating things by writing poetry, are a blur to me now, and sometimes I go back and try to recapture those lost moments, as in “Meditation on a Summer Afternoon,” above.

Excerpted from the online course How to Write Poetry and Live Poetically at http://preview.tinyurl.com/o5tjeah
See also http://www.hayhouseradio.com and http://www.soniachoquette.com.

Before the groves and gardens sleep

vintagelaceandlavender.blogspot.com

THE MORNING GLORY AND THE ROSE

What if, in spite of an untimely freeze, the morning glory opened early to the sun as she does customarily, never mind the chill at midnight, heedless of the wintry sting at five or six o’clock a.m.? Dawn catches her unfurling eagerly to drink the first fresh pink and orange beams, the sweetest in their purity. Some will think her reckless; she knows better, as do we.

Elsewhere in the garden there are blossoms reticent to show themselves for dread of frostbite, wrapped in all their fragile petal layers, holding tightly to them for protection. Nature, I suppose, possesses wisdom and experience beyond my own; she knows what she’s about.

The rose, perhaps, must cautiously keep watch, his vulnerable core intolerant of icy blasts late in the season. He would ask the April air to mitigate itself in ways felicitous to roses, thus assuredly to demonstrate his gorgeous geometrical array in safety come mid-May. All well and good, I say, for roses.

I would rather imitate the morning glory, braving every sort of wind to hear the stories each arrives relating from the corners of the earth by way of raucous shouting or of sibilance; besides, her beauty is the kind that shows to best advantage when in motion, nodding, tossing, spinning with her sisters in a feral dance that might caress the grass or reach aspiring to the sky.

At last, if I were she, happily would I draw back as shadows lengthen, sagging in the heaviness of afternoon. She makes a virtue of necessity, giving place to let the rose command attention in the quiet of a summer evening, when the wind’s remaining energy ascends in gentle currents to the canopy; it loves to tease the drowsy cottonwood and maple leaves before the groves and gardens sleep.

Then the morning glory -- blissfully exhausted and perhaps, if flowers are at all contemplative, a little pensive -- lets her bright blue dress go limp and drab and, in her self-imposed seclusion inconspicuous, collapses gratefully and rests, the better to embrace tomorrow for all the difference it makes.

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