Peg Duthie's Blog, page 51

"You go back and pick up the pieces"

From Europe 2009 - set 3 - Prague
Photographer in Prague, 2009

Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows
until they learn that floating, that immensity
waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust.

- William Stafford, Afterwards

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bumblebees nuzzling the heliotrope

After this morning's shift, I picked up a spicy tuna wrap and headed to the Japanese garden at Cheekwood to eat it.


View from the pavilion


Fountain by the pavilion

( bee and butterfly under the cut )

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Capsicum annuum

The Light show has gotten most of the hype this year, but for me, the real find at Cheekwood has been the Black Pearl peppers in the Color Garden. I am going to investigate planting some next year.

On the Fourth of July, some of the newer leaves were green. Most of the foliage was black, as were the berries:




Last Friday -- just a few weeks later -- some of the berries had become red jewels (my camera doesn't capture how they shone like gems in the afternoon sun):





Meanwhile, at the entrance to the garden, one of the sentries sat pretty:



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horsies: MMFC and St Phalle

The Monzante Memorial Fundraising Challenge: a number of teams (headed by various handicappers and other racing fans) are raising $$ in memory of Monzante, a horse who died at a Louisiana track last week. Some teams are offering rewards such as free picks or cookies.

* * *

Thanks to the current clutch of work, I've been paying scant attention to the ponies, but I've had this passage from Niki de St Phalle's Harry and Me on my "to share" stack for some time. This takes place around 1950:

When I rejoined Harry at Harvard, he and my brother John (who was also studying there) would go out very early in the morning to the racetrack where they were working as hot walkers. That is to say, they would walk the horses through a routine to cool them down after their morning runs. Harry enjoyed this very much. he was earning a bit of extra money while learning all about the racetrack from my brother, which fascinated him. John had quickly become quite an expert on the topic. His enthusiasm for horse racing was so great that it was difficult to walk into his room, which was brimming over with countless stacks of the Morning Telegraph, John's favorite paper for tracking the odds on the horses.

At some point John felt it necessary to take on yet another job ... with an airline, which I believe was to earn the extra money he needed to finance his obsession with the track. Despite the excessive amount of time John spent on "the horses," John did manage to do very well on his studies. Nonetheless, Harvard's administrators eventually cottoned on to the fact that he was only showing up for his classes to take the exams. They chose to suspend John from Harvard for a year -- in spite of his outstanding academic performance.

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In memoriam: Stephen M. Wilson (1970-2013)

Having been decidedly out of the loop, I learned about Stephen M. Wilson's death on May 22 only yesterday, via Linda D. Addison's preface to the 2013 Dwarf Stars compilation. My first exchange with Stephen was back in 2007, his first year of co-editing the anthology.

He was amused to hear that my microcosms honoraria were enough to cover a couple of beers. He published ten pieces by me, including this one:

She’s building a periodic table of death, / the better to unearth / uncounted ways of letting go.// Peg Duthie

May 10, 2010

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boots

I just transcribed some of the 26 notes to myself I recorded while driving from Virginia to Georgia. One was a riffs on boots and roots, thanks in part to a container at the Chesapeake Arboretum:



( Read more... )

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porcupine, camel, and doggies

From the University of Chicago alumni magazine (July/August 2013): "Uldis Roze, SB'59...wants us all to know that porcupines fluoresce under UV light."

I went to my 31st class at Hot Yoga East Nashville this morning. On the one hand, tree pose today was a struggle. On the other hand, I was able to bend back far enough during camel pose to touch my heels -- the very first time I've managed that. Go me!

Happiness is being able to coo at my sweet doggie (and my other best friend) while sifting through old snapshots. In a Prague post office, May 2009:
From Europe 2009 - set 3 - Prague

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light maintenance

[a first draft -- sparked by Luisa A. Igloria's photo In the Turkish Coffeeshop]

On the wall of a friend's garage,
antique Post-its, laminated for posterity
by layers of packing tape,
detail how to keep the door happy,
in a language we eventually
deciphered as Turkish.
We first told the translator
Dikkat yilda 2 kaz,
which yielded care
of two geese per year,
which sounded (sadly)
a touch too fairy-tale,
so then we tried Dikkat
yilda 2 kez yapilacak,
which generated attention
to be paid twice a year.

I'm kidding about the "sadly" -- my friend
would find the tending of geraniums onerous,
never mind the flappings of fowl. As would I,
though I've tickled myself these past few days
thinking, what if our mysterious Turkish mentor
had indeed meant "geese"? Something as simple
as "keep the door shut
so the birds stay warm"
or perhaps as wild
as brushing the three finest belly feathers
across the fringe of a welcome mat
at least twice a year,
the better to pay heed
to what the doors and windows
let in and keep out --

visitors, vermin, gusts of air,
slivers and slabs and slashes of light --
everywhere I go, within these days of sorrow,
I cannot help but catch my breath
at how things fall upon and toward each other --
at sunlight striking a page or paving stone,
at how the text tattooed on Jelena's back
literally met the life-line on my palm
when I spotted her through a bend.
At how the leaves
on the café chandelier
are casting a wind-knotted veil
across the face of a queen
Caro's drawing for a Tarot deck.
I cannot tell you what the cards will say.
I cannot promise that the door will last
even if we lavish upon it
the best in grease or geese that money can buy.
Even when we care for things with all our heart
sometimes they cannot help but fall apart and fall away.
But though the winds and wolves blow down a hundred houses,
what is there to do next but to keep paying attention?


-- pld, 7/16/13

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set me as a seal upon thine arm, as a seal upon thine heart

As I wait for "Voodoo Blue" to set, a few notes:

Signal boosting, because she asked: JJ Hunter's How Are You in Haiku

I have resumed my (somewhat-out-sequence) listening to various episodes of the Moby Dick Big Read, thanks to 7.5 hours on the road today. Melville is both ridiculous and hilarious. I am so glad that I was not his copyeditor.

My friend Donna has a fine riff about the book over at Radish Reviews. In the meantime, here's one of the passages that cheered me along I-81 today:

The skeleton dimensions [of a sperm whale] I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.

Also? Praise be for the recording app on my phone. Listening to Moby Dick sparked some poem ideas (both original and found), as did just having to concentrate on the road (i.e., not having the luxury of scribbling out the simmerings in my head) for 441-odd miles.

Also? I haven't managed to memorize Modah ani yet, but my thoughts drifted to it a lot during the drive. Sorrow is a sharpener, and so is simply being away from my usual groove. The clouds looked unnaturally picturesque -- there was a weirdly clean upper border to them, as if someone had drawn an exacto blade through part of the sky. There were yellow wildflowers (for whatever values of "wild" you want to ascribe to anything along the highway) near the Tennessee-Virginia border. My thoughts skittered from my parents' ashes to shape-note singing to wondering if I'll ever get to experience an Enfoirés concert in person to my personal boycott of ATP-only tennis tournaments, to sketches of poems I want to finish drafting by September. This wild and precious life. So much to ask about where things are going, including the beloved creatures that have ceased to be on this plane.

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good night, sweet Mike

...who was also loud and entertainingly opinionated Mike, especially about acting and singing:



That's you on the left, 16 summers ago. I knew something was up when the usher insisted on seating me right in the middle of the front row. That's how I'm going to remember you -- you and Steve, gleefully scheming and getting away with said schemes. It wasn't my birthday any of the times you guys took me to the Mexican restaurant where the staff makes a huge production out of birthdays, which is the type of place I typically avoid like the plague. (I do love big hats, but that sombrero did nothing for my complexion -- not that that mattered in the least, since you and Steve were laughing too damn hard each time the staff cheerfully marched up to our table and serenaded me.)

Here's a better picture from that Forever Plaid production, with you in the very front.

I do hope that the angels around you are singing in tune -- or at least as well as those waiters at the Mexican restaurant. :_)

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