A Snafu Day

A day spent fixing serious computer problems is not my idea of economical pleasure, even with the assistance of a great tech guy.

At least I took this cellphone snap while walking Gracie.

And I think the machine is happier.

For now.

I Feel Like This Every Spring

Oh, the iris. I can never find the words for wet silk of petal, shimmering cells, impossible comings and goings of color and line and shape, flow, furl unfurling and re-furling, a painterly fantasy of blossom. At least today, I found a poem with language as beautiful as the blossom.

Ikebana

by Cathy Song

To prepare the body,

aim for the translucent perfection

you find in the sliced shavings

of a pickled turnip.

In order for this to happen,

you must avoid the sun,

protect the face

under a paper parasol

until it is bruised white

like the skin of lilies.

Use white soap

from a blue porcelain

dish for this.

Restrict yourself.

Eat the whites of things:

tender bamboo shoots,

the veins of the young iris,

the clouded eye of a fish.

Then wrap the body,

as if it were a perfumed gift,

in pieces of silk

held together with invisible threads

like a kite, weighing no more

than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums.

Light enough to float in the wind.

You want the effect

of koi moving through water.

When the light leaves

the room, twist lilacs

into the lacquered hair

piled high like a complicated shrine.

There should be tiny bells

inserted somewhere

in the web of hair

to imitate crickets

singing in a hidden grove.

Reveal the nape of the neck,

your beauty spot.

Hold the arrangement.

If your spine slacks

and you feel faint,

remember the hand-picked flower

set in the front alcove,

which, just this morning,

you so skillfully wired into place.

How poised it is!

Petal and leaf

curving like a fan,

the stem snipped and wedged

into the metal base—

to appear like a spontaneous accident.

A WCW Kind of Day

No ideas but in things.

Natura Morta

Roadside Ditch Natura Morta

James Galvin

No one can draw fast enough

To capture the cut

Iris before its form falls

From its former self.

But when we passed a patch

In the ditch,

She told me to stop and she stepped

Down, opening her clasp

Knife. She spared one iris

With an impressionistic

Cocoon on its stem

And cut the flower beside it.

Once home

She rendered in a careful hurry.

She drew into the night as the iris died.

I woke grafted to her

In a vague, translucent hammock of dread.

Generosity

1.
I walked three strides from the parking lot gate toward the dam. Suddenly, the air shimmered with newly emerged Lancet Clubtails. Another few feet, and more flew toward the treeline and protection. Despite rain and clouds and more rain on the way, despite a temperature in the 60s, these hardy Odonates had decided, en masse apparently, to make their debut.

Such is the generosity of nature.

2.
A friend wondered if I might like to try out her Nikon DSLR. She said, "I don't really need it any longer. I use my iPhone for everything and you take the pictures of my new knitting patterns anyway. Come over if you'd like to try it out."

I went over, but thought I couldn't use the camera. "How do you adjust the viewfinder?" I asked. "I can't focus on anything."

"I don't think you can. I never tried."

"Ah, then it probably won't work for me."

But she convinced me to try it out, and so I did.

I shot the cats successfully.

I leaned into the irises.

I shot at least one clubtail fairly well, though not in complete focus.

I struggled to capture a Violet Dancer, the first I've seen this year, but with a true macro lens, I'm sure I could do it.

Most importantly, I learned in five minutes how to adjust the diopter.

She called again after I sent a couple of snaps in an email. "I've found all the lenses. Come on over!"

"I'll bring my checkbook," I said.

Such is the generosity of friends.

First Wild Iris of Spring

I stumbled on it, looking at something else, and then there it was, assertive, flapping like the national flag of spring, and I thought of this:

The Wild Iris
by Louis Gluck

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.
flickered over the dry surface.


Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater. 

Outside/In

What's outside becomes art in my mind's eye.

Stone with Crustose Lichens at Lake Cheston

                                                                                  Gustav Klimt














Wild Iris on Virginia Avenue

              Vincent Van Gogh

Thanks to the Gardener on Otter Falls

Iris
and
peonyand
irisand
peony --eye candy.