Colors in Swann’s Way, in Order of Ascending Frequency

“There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?” he said to my father. “Especially a blue which is far more floral than atmospheric, a cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky. And that little pink cloud there, has it not just the tint of some flower, a carnation or hydrangea?”

*

Cineraria Blue - Plum-Colored - Fleshly White - Blushing Pink - Eggshell Yellow - Pearl Grey - Golden - Orange Red - Ruby - Silver - Coral - Cabbage Green - Ultramarine - Roseate - Blood-Red - Opalescent - Plum Blue - Emerald-Green - Wine-Colored - Pearly - Scarlet - Dark Green - Crimson - Sky Blue - Orange - Lilac - Brown - Mauve - Red - Azure - Violet - Purple - Green - Grey - Yellow - Gold - Pink - Black - White - Blue 

* 

Blue is the most mentioned color in Swann's Way. There are blue eyes, blue feathers, cuffs and ceilings, blue tiles, and a portrait of a man with a blue mustache, among many other moods and tints.  

I had to look up cineraria, which turns out to be a flower I’ve seen but never heard named before. The “ciner” suggested it could have to do with ash, and indeed the German name is ‘Aschenblume,’ or ash flower, but in reference to the underside of the leaves rather than the petals. 

I love how Proust's characters look at the sunset and imagine flowers blooming. 

The image from a seed packet found at the Smithsonian. You can see it says "cineraria hybrida." There are other varieties I found online that are even more intensely blue, and lack the white ring around the center. 

Grassland

Grassland, a poem by Sarah Sloat from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.

Here's a video of 'Grassland,' one of my older poems, put together by Dave Bonta. I love it. I love the colors and the fiber-optic grass and the birdsong. Hope you'll watch and enjoy.

Stalks

The wind is torn.

In the field behind my house, flowers not on stems but stalks.

As a child driving at night with my parents and uncle, so foggy my uncle threatened to get out and walk, and threw the door open on the highway.

Why has ‘debauch’ been usurped by ‘debauchery?’ ‘Debauch’ being one instance?

Most people have to invent their own pain, but I lived not far from the factory.

Some cut flowers can be revived by submerging in cool water. Warm makes the wilt worse.

As a child I was a fervent devotee of prayer. I had a looming divorce to pray against, and dreaded going to bed, knowing how long it was going to take to bless everyone I loved, or who deserved my love.

A horse is prized for beauty and strength, and to hell with its inner qualities.

“Children go through divorce in single file,” said Judith Wallerstein. It doesn’t matter if their friends got there first.

A gentleman is not an implement, Confucius said.

And the flophouse is no place for a lady.

One made a manger of me

I’ve got two poems up in the new issue of Radar Poetry today, my first publication this year. The poems are Pacific Archives and Indoor Horses. 

I’d submitted to Radar at least twice before having these accepted. I’d wanted to land a poem with them every since I read Mary Lou Buschi’s poems in issue #1. 

Radar has consistently published interesting work and I love the art they’ve used. They let writers suggest art to accompany their poems if they have an idea. For Pacific Archives I really wanted to use this collage by Shannon Rankin, whose work I’ve admired on Etsy. I was so glad she agreed. Radar ended up using some of her other pieces, too.

I was a bit stumped on the art for Indoor Horses, but luckily they knew an artist - Sarah Jacoby - who was willing to do something original. I thank her, too. On an otherwise dreary Friday, I was happy how it all turned out. 

The semi-productive weekend

I thwarted a bamboo plant.

I sat down to finish In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, in which the narrator leaves his mother behind for a seaside holiday that becomes a rhapsodic meditation on adolescent girls. I found it much slower than Swann’s Way, which was gorgeous and even revelatory. 

Wore my monocle in honor. 

So now I’m free to decide whether to go on to volume III of In Search of Lost Time. Leaning towards yes, but perhaps not. First I am reading Monsieur Proust, a memoir by Proust’s housekeeper. I’m a quarter of the way through and feeling like a satisfied voyeur. Proust liked to eat sole, when he ate at all. He did not use soap. It is down to earth.

Also, they say you shouldn’t feel restricted by your age, gender or situation in choosing what to put on, but I don’t buy that brand of soap. Most of the time I feel like a 14-year old boy embarrassed by a propensity for nosebleeds, but that doesn’t mean I want to go about shirtless in shorts and flip-flops. So after many a tortuous I-hate-myself shopping excursion, I was happy to find two shirts that are comfortable and ok for the office. A bigger victory than it seems.  

I wrote a poem that I was happy with. So far. 

Also did a tiny bit of exercise, which is more than I can say for most days - week or weekend. 

Frisson

The morning walk to the tram.
Downhill. Sunshine.
The construction site. The chestnut tree lopped smaller.
But not dead!
Thank god.
The difficult corner, visibility-wise.
Tempting death, like everyday. Tempting being a verb or adjective.
The Doktor’s house, painted pale lilac.
His ivy, his wood deck, his miniature pond.
All pleasant for the patients.
And everyone else.
Fences, fences, dog feces.
Der kleine Park ist schön.
Nice spot for a smoke, if you smoke.
Pigeons. They call this a cluster flock!
Spring gives everything its own frisson.
Even the enormous white portal of the cemetery looks like a dollop of whipped cream.
The foot descending to meet its shadow, and pulling back again.

The past week in pleasure & pain

Listened to: Jolie Holland sing Pure Imagination
Read: Novel Interiors

Lorenza Guzman 

Saw: A man in pink pajamas smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone in an upstairs window along my streetcar route. 

Watched: The German movie Kriegerin, about neo-nazis in the northeast. An eye-opener.

Laughed: The drunken squirrel 

Cursed: Fate

Failed: Rejections
Succeeded: Finished a book review I’ve been promising 

Regretted: Offering someone a thank-you gift who proceeded to treat me like shit. At the end of the shit session, she held out her hand to receive the gift, which I changed my mind about (I regretted the offering, not the withholding). 

Realized: Spite is karma's handmaid. 

Visited: Frankfurt’s Palmengarten, the local botanical garden. 

Learned: There is a type of rose named ‘Aspirin.’

Ate: Meatballs, rucola, mozzarella, peanuts, rolls, tomatoes, crackers, cookies, chocolate, octopus, fontina.
Enjoyed: Lorenza Guzman sculptures 

Word of the week: Mazurka, a dark dynamic word that means Polish folk song
Pithiness: The thoughts written on madhouse walls by their inmates might be worth publicizing. - Lichtenberg

Had the Day off

Pruned the roses and cut back the ropey, dead clematis
Kissed the Rome-bound husband & son goodbye
Delivered wonderdog to her vacation
Took a stab at some found poems before PoMoSco
Went grocery shopping
Read Emily Dickinson’s #420 (There are two Ripenings)
Ate a salad of rucola, tomatoes & mozzarella, like an Italian flag
Bought a song on iTunes
Basked in the sunshine on the terrace
Shook three men’s hands
Posted a Throwback Thursday photo
Learned a childhood friend’s sad fate

I interview myself about some of the books I read this year

Reading is elemental. Which book would you associate with earth?

My favorite, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, because it is tied to the ground and intent on the hearth. Our English heroine is planted on French soil, where she does some serious suffering. 

“I too felt those autumn suns and saw those harvest moons, and I almost wished to be covered in with earth and turf, deep out of their influence; for I could not live in their light, nor make them comrades, nor yield them affection.”

Which book would you associate with fire?

That’s easy: Carol Shields’ Unless. And also with fury. 

“At certain moments, for no reason -the smell of apple wood burning in the fireplace- I become convinced that everything is going to be alright.”

And, skip the water, which book makes you think of ice?

Obviously Virginia Woolf's Orlando, for its skating scene. As a whole, the book moved slowly, but the love affair with Sasha was magic. Where did she disappear to? Sasha, you minx. 

“‘All ends in death,’ Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice. But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them--Sasha stared at him, perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said nothing. But at length the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked, so pulling him to his feet again, she talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely (but unfortunately always in French, which notoriously loses its flavor in translation) that he forgot the frozen waters or night coming or the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her--plunging and splashing among a thousand images which had gone as stale as the women who inspired them--what she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire?”

And with air?

Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis, for its buoyant humor, and “Waiting for Takeoff,” one of my favorite stories in the book, which takes place in an airplane.

"We sit in the airplane so long, on the ground, waiting to take off, that one woman declares she will now write her novel, and another in a neighboring seat says she will be happy to edit it."

Two minutes of morning

Going to the UBahn I walk through a small park, too small really to earn the term, it’s more of a pathway with a bench or two, tall trees and what was once a sandbox, which nonetheless offers two minutes of relief from the apartment blocks and monotone of sky. I would call it a glade because of glide and because it’s leafy and keeps a cool temperature, but a glade, if I am not mistaken, intersects a thicker wood and is neither manmade nor even man-fashioned.

Along the walkway leaves have fallen in such a way that they resemble - also because sometimes they are in the midst of tumbling - sunbeams or patches of sunlight on the ground, and when I am close enough to apprehend what they are it’s both a disappointment and a consolation, a let-down because my expectations are dashed, and a consolation because they’re just as luminous as sunshine, and I have been beautifully fooled.

This morning amid the damp ambient of leaves and mud and cobblestone I see my new boots come slicing, the flat heels so comfortable I’d like launch into a run. I think of the saying “fit like a glove” which amuses because we’re talking shoes, and the German word for glove is ‘Handschuh,’ i.e. “hand shoe,” and somehow an item got mashed on backwards in translation, and it’s frosty and I don’t have gloves. 

When I’m walking in the cold thinking of running I remember the essential thing is to breathe. Have I mentioned how my face is falling apart?

Inhale, exhale.

Or had I rather say collapsing? The lengths, breadths and heights of it?

In, hale. Ex, hale. 

For months I have been considering a chin tuck. 

Inhale.

Abstractedly and noncommittally, now running past houses.

Exhale.

Miniature City

Waiting is a weed that promises blossoms. It endures the worst conditions, growing even near the end of the road.

*

In the bookstore, there’s one customer who regularly reads the last page before deciding on a book, then finds the experience spoiled: The vines are thwacked. The step-mother dies. Making his rounds, the hunter comes. Or doesn’t. 

But life’s not a peephole.

*

Most of the time you are the little man hunched in the snowglobe waiting for a shake. 

Here goes nothing, you say, angling into an anticipated wind.

*

Outside the warehouse, the bus stop bench sits in a tangle of mayweed. You lean back. If not for the search lights, these clouds wouldn’t be lit like this, from underneath.

*

The fields fill, and the trees and the housetops, and the chimneys choke. And the bricks turn red and there’s a heady scent of something that is not smoke.

*

It’s the slow city you built in a bottle that makes these blossoms possible.

*

Roll up, or the week that was

Ate: Ossobuco

Drank: German red wine

Reading: The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

Listened to: The Magical Mystery Tour

Watched: Tootsie, for the umpteenth time

Saw: A thin spot on my husband’s head of rich dark hair 

Discarded: Underwear neither my daughter nor I could claim with confidence

Acquired: New wine glasses, which I did not need

Failed: Draft #17

Triumphed: The dog, hopelessly lugged along on a visit, made friends with our friends’ cat, Madame Curie, then wolfed down all her food

Found: A gorgeous stick stripped of its bark

Received: Half a bar of soap from Ursula (mistress of Madame Curie)

Visited: Arithmeum museum of calculating machines, Bonn

Observed: I really need a driver’s license if I expect to go anywhere. 

Word of the week: Resplendent (“Sitting outside at the End of Autumn,” Charles Wright) 

Pithiness of the week: “The US dumbing-down that is seizing Germany more and more is one of the gravest consequences of the war.” - Albert Schweizer (seen on the wall of one of my husband’s Italian students, an 80-year old former nun who lives in the woods)

Cloudpump

I was back at the Hans Arp museum on the Rhine today. We took a ferry across from Bad Honnef to Remagen, where they built the museum in 2007, joining the new modern building to a renovated train station. I’ve been before and had the same feeling, i.e. that this was the most beautiful museum I’ve ever been in.

This time I had to ask myself more directly: ‘Hey, is this the most beautiful museum I’ve ever been in?’ The answer was a Molly Bloom-like cascade of yeses, all down the hillside and into the river. 

It’s not beautiful because of the artwork, although I love Arp. It’s beautiful because of the way it sits in the hills, a sprawling, wide-windowed structure that for all its alien whiteness seems to belong there. It is embracing/embraced by the grass. I could sing praises of the upshooting elevator all the day long. And the tunnel! Of course it also has the wonderful Rhine flowing below it. 

The only bummer is all the walltexts relating to artwork and exhibitions are only in German, so it would frustrate most non-German speakers, and I wouldn't drive my parents out there. As I often do, I wonder if I should volunteer to translate it all for the good of humanity, but 1) I don’t have time and 2) Ach, the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, I think Arp would be happy to find this building spilling down the hills, and some texts from his "Wolkenpumpe" (Cloudpump) poems way up on the uppermost walls. 

Ways to feel

A technicolor sunset brings a feeling of baffled insecurity. There’s always a shade of atomic orange, tinged with pink or violet and glossy splashes of black. People make posters of this phenomenon, adding inspirational messages. Maybe I’d have appreciated such sunsets in another age? It’s not that they’re not beautiful - it’s just they require so much emotional coping. 

Fremdschämen. Yet another German word you need 8+ words to explain. It describes the feeling of being ashamed for someone else, especially if they themselves are not. It should precede any ingestion of the secret pill that transforms you into a dog, sparing you from belonging to the human race. Silvio Berlusconi is a major producer of this feeling. You can also experience it watching the Eurovision Song Contest. 

Dogs supposedly activate hormones that soothe people and cheer them up. I believe this as long as the person is near suicide or otherwise vulnerable to the charm. However, if it is 9 pm and freezing and time to walk the dog, the hormone trick proves ineffective. 

Rain manages the most intimate. It finds you, it sinks into you, it gets to know your crevices. Like any erotic attention, sometimes it’s welcome, and sometimes you wish it would lay off. 

When I cannot finish a poem despite months even years of trying it makes me feel like I have folded 32,258 origami swans very badly and what should I do should I go out and burn them? 

Wind makes me feel alone, in a good way.

Temp

As it falters the elderly brain switches into a kind of dreamlife where scraps of memory are repurposed, elaborated and reinvented. Haunting, repressed events and experiences from the past resurface in a different guise, people are assigned new motives or confused with other people, and time springs its linear lock.

My stepfather, who turned 87 this month, increasingly engages in reminiscence, reconstructing the past and floating his versions of it. When I saw him in April he asked if I remembered the summer I temped as a receptionist at his office, and how on one day we put my desk out onto the front lawn so I could work in the sunshine. Try as I do I can't remember this, and it is unlikely it ever happened. A receptionist needs above all to answer the phone, and in those days, before the cordless and cell phone, it would have been impracticable. And yet the power of suggestion is strong and I strain to remember what he seems so sure of. Maybe we got the desk out the front door near the entrance and were happy with that? I am kidding myself.

Now five months later, he continues the story and takes it further. Now the desk is not on the lawn but we've dragged it up into the sparse, hilly woods across the road. With the building on Rt. 206 near Somerville, I'm basically ensconced in the peaceful green of the Duke Estate, which was private in those days. This is an impossible and lovely story I wish were true, only better, not the story of a summer temp but a permanent position, that I could go to such a job every day, typing and answering the phone, and didn't have to leave the woods for the world.

Pop quiz for autumn

Is it okay to water plants with seltzer?

What smells better - lavender or bacon? 

Implications aside, do you like watching forest fires? 

What is a good book to read in autumn? 

Earth, wind, fire, water. What’s your suggestion for a fifth element? 

What do you hate about umbrellas?

Inebriate

It was September, cool oozing from the wildflowers.

To be kind, you wished the leaves would fall in water. 

A little absinthe, and I felt like one of those roses revived with aspirin. 

***

thanks to Fleurografie for the two-headed bird.

Akimbo

I have two poems up at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. The first is "Thrall," a poem that languished in my unfinished file for a long time. To end it, I changed the word in the first line that was irksome and replaced it with "thrall," and made that the title.

The second is "Bud," which in contrast is a poem I wrote quickly and was happy with early on. I  was glad, too, because I'm not really known for nature poems. OK, I'm not really known. Useful expression, though, and democratic, and as fitting for an artist known for her brush stroke as for a neighbor known for his philandering.

Reaching the undulating area

I am vaguely afraid of revolving doors. Especially the automatic ones, like those at my office, make me uneasy, since they are out of my control. If I must enter them while they’re in motion, I can’t help but think of joining a game of jumprope. Two people stand at each end, turning the rope, and you have to plunge in, and overcome the fear of getting thwacked. 

Or better, I think of swimming in the ocean. Some people just throw themselves in without worrying. But when the surf is churning, some stand at the edge and calculate when to enter. You don’t want to get stuck at the shoreline when a big wave comes plowing in. You need energy and good timing to make it out past the crashy part, with its shells and stones, to the undulating area. Once in, it’s fun, the peril abates, until it's time to get back out.

There's a word for the fear of waves and wave-like motion: kymophobia. 

Thx to Shannon Rankin for the collage image

tiny kingdoms

A tree is considered too huge and unruly to bring indoors, unless you choose the docile bonsai. We have four bonsais in the house, in various stages of surrender. Tending them is an exercise in patience, but also a show of power. We love them because they’re beautiful. We love them because they make us giants.