Hejira Spring

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Hejira ~

a journey . . .

. . . the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 which marked the beginning of the Muslim era; the Muslim calendar begins in that year

. . . a cross country trip from Maine to Los Angeles by Joni Mitchell

. . . her album of that name written on that journey in 1976

. . . the title track of the album

Albert Camus wrote: "What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country... we are seized by a vague fear, and the instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being... There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it as an occasion for spiritual testing... Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves."

~ Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1942

I love to travel, but I agree with Camus in this note. When visiting places away from home, it is as if I wake up with new, more expectant skin. Especially in the somewhat familiar strangeness of Paris, more than anywhere I have been, every sense is alert, intense, as if I am a china cup full and ready either to spill, or crack in the quake of each encounter.

Joni Mitchell is a traveler, always in some vehicle. She loves the wind from Africa blowing through a village on Crete under the moon, but soon gets back to missing her familiar white linens and California scenery. To, and fro, she goes. I don't know how many times I've listened to this song in the last couple of weeks on my drive to and from work on straight Meridian Road, farms opening like wings on either side. Countless times. It embodies just at this moment of the world how everything is everything, while everything is also nothing, and I think very importantly, how nothing is also everything, in the cycle of our life . . . between the forceps and the stone. Her melancholy minor melody, the dark tones, the strings touched in variance like the fragrance of parfum et fromage, her love of Paris that is always there even if unspoken, her freedom, her longing for the road — sometimes in strength and vulnerability as a hitchhiker, her concert tours where she is not always comfortable in her astonishing success, that clear voice sparked, like a car's red-eyed tail light at dusk on the Champs Élysées, or the lit end of a cigarette.

In Paris in May, the wind blows up the Seine, tearing horse chestnut blossoms from trees like snow, and our eyes fill with allergic tears, blinding every walker heading toward the setting sun. We weep in our human weakness, unable even to look upon the light, blinking, trying to wipe our eyes clean. Maybe it is necessary to filter that radiance from too much visibility. Maybe that much light would take us too early to the stone.

It's nice to listen to her sing in the YouTube below while reading her witnessing words. Or, just load it and close your eyes.

Hejira

by Joni Mitchell

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
There's comfort in melancholy
When there's no need to explain
It's just as natural as the weather
In this moody sky today
In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I'm returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed
I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl

You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line
Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock
They're either going to thaw out or freeze
Listen
Strains of Benny Goodman
Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees
I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality
In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years
We're only particles of change I know I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone
White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
Until love sucks me back that way


© 1976; Crazy Crow Music

Rue St-Louis-en-l’île, Paris, spring 2003

 Musicians on Pont St Louis, Paris, spring 1997

Champs Élysées, Paris, spring 1997

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Six wild mallard eggs for Easter

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Aren't they beautiful?

The mother found this teepee shelter in the black locust wood near the old fallen apple tree to build her nest. She will lay one egg a day until she decides her brood is enough — maybe 10, or as many as 18 eggs. Then she will set her warm body on them for about a month. The ducklings will all hatch the same day, whichever ones survive the coyotes, foxes, hawks and crows. The drake will hang around for a few days, lounging and dabbling in the nearby pond, which is about 200 feet away. He will moult all his beautifully colored feathers and be flightless for about a month, in the eclipse plumage phase. The hen will show her brood the way to the pond, where they will know by instinct how to catch insects to eat. Then she will go moult her feathers and be flightless for a while too. In about 10 weeks after hatching, the ducklings will have feathers that look like their mom's.

We are starting to search for morel mushrooms in this wood, and the woods by the pond. Gotta look out for sprouting poison ivy though.

Here are a female and male mallard from the river on my campus.

Happy Easter!

Poem: Four Crows

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Four Crows:
between winter and spring

The white blanket’s thrown off.
Meadow grass is flattened and combed like hair,
sore with winter, and wise with sleep.

A phoebe imitates a man imitating a phoebe.
Goldenrod stubble pokes up like tossed hangers.
A dry ball of hydrangea tumbles to the barn.

Why didn’t Doe eat it, in such a winter as this?
O her hoof prints are gone now, though I invite
them with my longing eyes

around tree roots that look like arms and legs
lounging in new green bed covers of moss, and the litter
of Russian olive leaves like a thousand just-opened eyes.

Umber pine needles are arrows, and four crows,
suddenly rising up at my approach, point in her direction,
which is everywhere, and nowhere.

My entry for One Shot Wednesday. Follow the link and discover new work by wonderful poets.

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What is faith?

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It's there, hiding, across the Red Cedar River,
under trees, behind the couple walking

Professor Ellison looked even older than he was. He was tall, like Ichabod Crane, lanky, bony, with disheveled gray hair, goatee, and always with enthusiastic drool at the corners of his mouth as he talked fast, but his spirit and enthusiasm were as youthful as any of the college students he taught freshman composition.

His office was next to mine all the way at the end of the long corridor in Wonders Hall. His department had moved him to our wing from his secluded corner of an old building, because they were afraid he might die and no one would find him for days.

But they couldn’t have known him as I came to know him. Seven years in the 1990s I worked as an administrative assistant (secretary) next door to Professor Ellison. His bountiful and energetic joy radiated to all of us who encountered him while he came in for his brief office hours twice a week. What a relief from the stony, dour insolence of some professors. Some students and colleagues found him merely laughable when he rode his old English bicycle with a makeshift basket to campus and to class from his office, wiry gray hair splayed from under his helmet, and even more so on the days he strapped on roller blades. Even I didn’t know whether to laugh in glee, weep in poignancy, or cheer Whoopeee! when I saw him teeter-walk like a toddler plodding, not gliding, on those roller blades down the carpeted hall after dousing his hair under the stream of water from the drinking fountain and mopping it from his head with his sleeves. “Hellooo, Ruuuth!” he crooned as he cautiously leaned on, felt and stepped his hands along the wall, supporting himself all the way to me at our end of the hall as if I were his female trapeze artist partner waiting for him, urging him on, while drool or drinking fountain water ran down his cheeks and chin. His eyes flickered and twinkled like blinking lights at the county fair on those wild and spider-leggy rides. His smile never disappeared, a foul word never dropped from his lips.

It just so happened that it was in those days that I began taking classes to finish my BA via the generous educational assistance offered at my university to secretaries and other union members. I got to take fourteen credits a year for free. I began with two American Lit classes, reading Hawthorne, Irving, Cooper. On I waded deep across the Atlantic into Brit Lit and Conrad, Joyce and Woolf. Finally I came to poetry writing and five classes with Diane Wakoski. I worked on poems on my lunch hour and off and on through the workday tweaking a word here and there, surrounded by inspirational poems from Bishop, Blake, Williams and Bukowski I’d printed and taped on the wall in front of my desk and on the file cabinet. It was a time in my life journey of great spiritual searching and angst, which got written into my poems, a time of losing faith, and hoping to find it again. The writing was the door I went through, the room where I could light altar candles in front of old statues of the past, and whisper chilled prayers for my nearly hollow soul.

Professor Ellison was ceaselessly interested in my class work. We were very fond of each other, plus I was a nontraditional (older) student, unlike his first year freshmen he taught writing, and he eagerly asked first thing every morning about the critical analysis papers I was writing for English classes. He taught me to stop writing I think . . . and just write my thoughts directly. What I write is obviously what I think! As I moved into poetry writing, he was my main reader besides Don, and what a help he was. He didn’t know my story as Don did, and so he was the objective reader every writer needs, to tell you if they “get it” just from your words on the page.

One day, I sat at my desk doing something or other, and Prof. Ellison poked his head in the door with his bright, moist cheer, “Ruth! Have you seen the aconite?!”

“The wha?”

“Aconite, winter aconite! It’s blooming over by the river!”

After his pleasant dismay that I had never heard of nor witnessed this precious secret, Professor Ellison educated me about the tiny yellow flower that grows on vines close to the ground under a tree over by the Red Cedar River, in the Beal garden created and named for the famous botanist Professor William J. Beal. It first pokes its yellow blooms up through snow in February. I promised him I would check it out.

This photo was taken

two years ago in February,

when rain had melted the snow

I did, and there it was, a yellow and green surprise alive in the snow, first sign of spring. It inspired a poem, a little haiku, which I turned in for class, and happily Professor Wakoski thought it was successful. For me, this haiku and its title “Faith,” symbolizes an important turning point in my life, from leaving the religious faith of my past that had darkened into a long winter of confining and frustrating emptiness. As I learned to write, with the generous contributions of three professors, something eternal began to sprout.

Yesterday I walked over from my office (in the English department where I graduated) to the river to find aconite again, and there it was, the same small answer, like my poem.

Faith

Faith is aconite

rising in February

warm in the snow bed.

These photos were taken yesterday.

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morel alchemy

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Joy! There's gold in these here woods! At the end of April here on the farm we start hunting for until-now buried treasure: morel mushrooms. Although they look like it, they aren't brains, or Prometheus' liver, but they do grow again overnight, as big as the palm of your hand in a few hours. At the first silver of morning, we slip into jackets and farm shoes and out to the fallen apple tree, and to the woods by the pond, to comb the grass (and new poison ivy shoots if we're not careful) like Sherlock Holmes.

Morel mushroom cells don't reproduce. These fruits of the mycelium organism under the surface of the ground expand with water, which is why they appear after rain storms. They have the same number of cells when they're big Titan thumbs as they did when they were tinier than a baby's toenail and sprouted from mycelium legs underground.

These filigree toes magically dig up through the woodsy soil into the air where we pinch them from their lacy underground body - sort of like that eagle snatching poor Prometheus' liver, then carefully tuck them into deep pockets, empty them onto the kitchen table, bugs and all, soak them in salt water, throw out the bugs, toss the preciousness in flour, and sauté until the filigree turns to gold.

Morel season is just a couple of weeks, and I can't bear to add them to any other food and lose a single sliver of their identity. Sautéed in butter (or in our case, Earth Balance soy margarine) is the only way we eat them.

And after each small plate of delectableness, when I've absorbed the earthiness into my body through my tongue and blissed-out mouth, I swear I never need to eat anything, ever again.

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Standing

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There is a season

for standing.

It begins

low,

and keeps on slow.

The wind

blows

dirt from your head.

You clean up nice
and when your height

is enough

you'll get the attention of some.

Ahem. Hello, Ladies and Gentlemen.

What I have to say today is . . .

Well, I have nothing to say.

Let me just show you.

~ Ruth M.

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haricots verts - be still, my heart

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I nearly fainted when I saw a large package of haricots verts at the store
- French green beans, thinner than our green bean varieties here.
I get more delirious over haricots verts
than I do over clothes, shoes or jewelry.
Their consistency and flavor are more delicate
in a firm, fresh way, than larger, meatier beans,
their stature like the thinnest, highest stiletto heel to a shoe lover.

When I'm in Paris, at the end of a long day out walking
and a big meal at noon,
I cook them up for supper,
with just cheese, baguette and red wine.
It's comforting to know haricots verts, like all green beans,
are a great source of Vitamins A, C,
potassium, magnesium, folate and riboflavin,
because those nutrients are so good for the heart,
which is important when it's beating hard with excitement
from food. It balances itself out.

This time I blanched them two minutes
with some equally swoon-worthy young asparagus
- asperges in French, doesn't that sound beautiful -
makes me want to sing, or better, listen to "Je t'aime".
Then I rinsed them in cold water and dried them,
stir-fried them in olive oil in the wok until just tender,
in the last half minute adding
a couple tablespoons of fresh minced garlic,
a tiny amount of minced ginger, a couple tablespoons of soy sauce,
and a few dashes of balsamic vinegar.
They're topped with broken walnuts.

When you can't get to Paris in the spring,
you can taste Paris in the spring, right on the farm.
Everything is starting to vibrate.
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season of the black locust - "the poverty tree"

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In a morning walk to the meadow, feet soaked with dew, I was surprised to find trees in flower that I hadn't seen closely yet in our five previous springs at the farm. Don't ask me how that is possible, but it's true. It wasn't that the dozen or so trees hadn't blossomed, because I had smelled their eye-closing fragrance. But I had not really noticed the blossoms closely or even remembered the trees' name.

I didn't know this is the season of the black locust.

See how like pea blossoms they are, falling in racemes. In fact black locust trees are in the Faboideae subfamily of the pea family Fabaceae. At times these blossoms are swarmed by bees; black locust is one of the prime sources of honey in the U.S.

We could call them bees' peas. Wish I'd caught a bee in the frame.





It's named black locust because of its dark bark, which rises in deep furrows. You know how Abe Lincoln famously chopped wood? Well it was black locust logs he chopped - probably for fence posts and the famous log cabin, because it's very sturdy wood. The locust part was named mistakenly for what sustained St. John the Baptist in the wilderness - but this tree is native to North America. The correct tree of "honey and locust" fame is the locust tree of Spain - Ceratonia siliqua (carob tree).





Because the tree grows where nothing else will (it has nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its root system), poet Gerald Stern said:

My identity with that tree has something to do with Judasism and with persecution. The tree is short-lived--forty years maybe--it's asymmetrical, considered ugly, worthless. Farmers value it only as a source of fence posts. People, when they buy land, chop them down to replace them with shade trees--I love that tree, I identify with it; it's my poverty tree. I sometimes see the concentration camp number on the forearm, or forelimb.

x x x x - from Making the Light Come, by Jane Somerville

See how the black branches stand out when the white blossoms are spread full. It sure isn't ugly if you ask me.



You're right to exclaim: How did you miss that!



Robinia pseudoacacia information gathered at wiki.

Here is a sweet poem by Gerald Stern in his choppy, talky style:

The Preacher [As if the one tree you love]

As if the one tree you love so well and hardly
can embrace it is so huge so that with-
out it there might be a hole in the universe
explains how the killing of any one thing can
likewise make a hole except that without
its existence there was neither a hole nor not a hole
I said to my friend Peter and after he left
I walked to the tree again and put my arms
around the trunk or almost did for I was
embracing it preparatory should I say
to its dying for it was one of the many
dying trees along my river mainly
sycamore and locust—

Finish reading the long-ish poem here . . .

mushrooms, mycelium & swine flu

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While trees are popping chartreuse leaves at the end of April, after a couple of rainy days and warm nights, we slide our farm clogs on and head into the two little woods behind us to scour the ground for morel mushrooms.



I have to wear my reading glasses so the dried leaves and mushrooms don't blur into one another. With clear vision, I can see how hideously brain-like they look. To one who detests mushrooms - disgusting! To one who adores them - tantalizing!

Don found these clusters of morels hidden beneath brush Friday;
I had gone over the same spot that morning and missed them.

We have never had the luck of some who fill bags and bags with morels. We know a lady who refuses to eat them but will hunt and pick for hours in her woods to harvest them, then give them away with a smile. The most we've found any given year is around 70. Don found the season's first six last week - the ones in the top photo, the biggest being around 2". Then Friday he found the clusters in the photo above.

The season lasts about two weeks, and there is much lore on where to find them (at the foot of an old apple tree, or around fallen elms among them) and how to pick them and not pick them. The clumps of morels Don found Friday were under the jagged edge of the old fallen apple tree. When we picked them, we broke them off and left the base in the ground so they'll continue to propagate.

You can tell real morels from poisonous imposters by their hollowness.

We soak morels in salty water to float out dirt and bugs, then dip them in milk, dredge in flour, and sauté in a little mixture of oil and butter (oil keeps the butter from burning), tossing on some salt and pepper. They are delicious and rival truffles, which sell for hundreds of dollars a pound. (Part of the problem with truffles is that being so expensive, you only get thrifty bits of them in a dish concocted by a clever chef who spreads them out, otherwise who could afford to eat them? And in such small samples, you don't get to really experience their flavor and texture.)

Did you know there are estimated to be one to two million species of fungi? Only about 150,000 of those form mushrooms. Of those, I don't know how many thousands are edible. And of those, only a fraction are cultivated and sold for consumption.

Like humans, fungi "breathe" oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. In fact animals, including humans of course, are closer to fungi in makeup than to plants, protozoa or bacteria.

Beneath these treasures of the ground is a lacy web of mycelium, the root system of fungi. These webs of fibers lie beneath forests and fields all over the planet, and some of them stretch for miles. The largest known living organism in the world is a fungus called honey mushroom, discovered in Oregon in 2000. It's 2,200 acres, that's 3.5 miles across - about 1,665 football fields, yet only one cell wall thick.

In an interview in The Sun magazine, Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, and at fungi.com, explains from 30 years of research how mycelia are essential to the survival of our planet.

Stamets explains that mycelia quite naturally clean up pollutants in the soil. They also feed plants. And what is truly remarkable - when coupled with plants, they make them more resistant to heat and erosion. Grasses laced with mycelia are heat resistant up to 160 degrees fahrenheit, whereas without the fungus, they would wither above 120 degrees.

Stamets suggests we should couple mycelia with corn and other crops to make them "naturally" drought resistant, which sounds better than genetically modifying crops, but I wonder. If the fungi and plants aren't naturally coupled, are we messing with something that shouldn't be messed with? Maybe Stamets and other scientists have an answer.



I leave you with an exciting 18-minute YouTube video of Paul Stamets' TED talk almost exactly one year ago on May 8, 2008: 6 Ways Mushrooms can save the world. It is extraordinary and well worth your time to hear about the network of mycelia in the earth beneath you, and how these organisms benefit us, could help clean up our planet and even provide eco-fuel. There is a segment about their use against flu viruses, and I am very curious to find anything on the Internet connecting fungi with the current Swine H1N1 flu outbreak, since he mentions this strain specifically in the video. You'll get the feeling from his rapid speech that he is trying to tell as much as he possibly can about his favorite subject in too short a time.

Easter

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In the Christian tradition, Easter Sunday is a happy celebration, when life triumphs over death. Winter gives way to spring. Baby animals are born. Christ rises from the dead. Yet as the calendar brings Easter around, I mostly remember the death part from church days, based on Christ’s words, Take up your cross and follow me.

A couple weeks ago my friend Gayla showed me a book she is reading titled Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire “offering a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, from its first centuries to the present day, asking how its early vision of beauty evolved into a vision of torture, and what changes in society and theology marked that evolution.” What? In the first centuries Christianity focused on beauty? One part of the book explains that before a certain century (can't recall which) there is no art to be found depicting the crucifixion.

Thankfully I didn't grow up during the Inquisition or anything remotely close to it, but there was the cross before us every day. Daily choices between this and that gave opportunity to sacrifice desires and find instead a chance to serve God, people or a greater cause. In other words: death to self. Or: What I feel doesn't matter as much as what God wants. Understandably the result was that feelings and desires became the enemy.

As a person who scored 50 to zero in the feelings vs. thinking section of the Myers Briggs personality profile - that's 50 on the feelings end of the spectrum and -0- on the thinking end (no comments from the peanut gallery, please) - this teaching that my feelings didn't count for much was painful. I never quite got the hang of it. For instance, I couldn't run on the track team when the coach invited me, because track practice was on Wednesday nights, and we had prayer meeting at church that night. As a preacher's kid, you have to be in church whenever the doors are open, as an example to the congregation. Eventually, questions about the whole ball of wax led me away from church, back to what I had always felt down deep, even as a child: that I wanted the roots of spirituality, the cosmic “laws” undergirding all of Nature, not the human rules interpreted from sacred texts in any one religion, and often used to control people's behavior.

As beautiful as religious celebrations can be, when you stop following, it’s tempting to throw them out because they no longer bear the same weight of meaning, or because they have been co-opted by commercial enterprise to sell the next stack of goods in grocery store aisles. This Easter, I am trying to tune out old mental tapes and mantras and re-discover the essence at the heart of this holiday that reflects the cycles and laws of Nature. Some symbols remain - eggs, a sunrise, a baby chick - because they are Nature's markers for release from the dark of winter and death. Do I sound Pagan and goddess-y? Well maybe you do too if you color Easter eggs or fill baskets with chocolate eggs for your kids, or even use the word “Easter” since that word came from the Pagan goddess of birth and renewal “Oester” (or the Babylonian “Ishtar”). Check out this site about Easter, eggs and bunnies and their Pagan roots.

The point of Easter is: It's a new day. Live it fresh, live it alive, live it in harmony. No enemies allowed.

the color intensifies

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In the dense green of August 2003 we fell in love with the farm in one moment. We pulled into the drive for the realtor's open house after nearly giving up finding it, and stopped, speechless. The property enveloped us with itself and asked kindly to let it take care of us.

Then, after weeks completing the sales of our old house and the new one, in November we moved. Since that first August visit, autumn winds had blown maple leaves against the house in thick piles. The ground was hard and the grass gone dormant. Simple lines of land, barn and outbuildings, and bare trees that had billowed with green when we first met them, presented an altered scene.

Was I wistful for the lush green of first love? No, I was glad for the change.

Something had already shifted in me. We had wanted more of Nature, close up, which was why we were moving to the country. At the same time I was going inside too, the way you do in winter. With the light opening to me through the quiet winter landscape, looking back at it through the window was just the thing for contemplation, letting it in slowly, as if suspended. It felt like a relief to get to know the farm in its unadorned state.

Now, each year after winter's span from Thanksgiving to Christmas and past the frozen calm of January and February, the next season comes in degrees, thankfully. Before spring shivers and erupts into full riots of color - iris tongues sprout an inch, and the birch sapling sheds its tissue skin, igniting into sunny orange flames (the color was really that saturated).

I'm ready for warmth, but am I ready for the riot? If I get outside often in these warming, lengthening days, I can slow down the transition for myself. Something I want:

- - - S - l - o - w - - - s - p - r - i - n - g - - -

two rain haiku

winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis) on my University's campus

haiku #1

FAITH

Faith is aconite

rising in February

warm in the snow bed

-Ruth M.

Normally aconite would rise in snow in February. This week it rose in rain, which I photographed, above. I wrote the haiku several years ago, when there was snow on the ground. I would not have known about aconite if it weren't for the composition professor whose office was next to mine. Professor Ellison provided expert and generous help with my writing assignments while I completed a BA in English part time. One snowy February day, he poked his bright face that defied gravity's wrinkles through my door and asked if I had seen the aconite blooming over by the river yet? "Aconite?" said I, clueless. "What's that?"

When I found out what it was, and saw it, I wrote this haiku. It's a simple poem, but the concept of a flower blooming in February in Michigan is profound.

Aconite is part of the buttercup family. Buttercup is a much more pleasant and fitting word than aconite - IMHO.

haiku #2

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

Writing his imagist haiku-like poem, Ezra Pound whittled thirty lines down to 14 words. He wrote it after being deeply moved by the beauty of faces in a crowd at the Paris Métro station La Concorde. "In a Station of the Metro" was one of the first poems I studied in poetry class. Now when I see black tree limbs in the rain, Mr. Pound's image comes to mind, then the words. This tree, below, is my favorite beech here on campus. The photo above is our spirea bush at home.

Sunday morning walk

Before the house is awake,

the birds have been calling
for hours.







The bamboo
had a shower

and waits
for the sun

to dry itself.






























Dandelions' gossamer
feathers
remind me of
Don's Polish hen heads.







The grapes have begun to form on the vine.

Iris heads are
reaching up, out

of their skin.

Pelargonium in a pot,
honeysuckle by the pond
magenta-size the air.

Columbine
dances its

insect dance.

A lady is at

home
in the

Russian Olive.

Lilies of the Valley

ring in white.

And back to the house where Bishop is still asleep.