Circling • (the calendars)

9.
March, sodden, bled away to April.
On my birthday i had a dream.

A tooth had loosened
to a taste like iron.

With two fingers I gripped the crown
and pulled it out.
No blood, but tiny sepals,
faint green leaves
that slowly blossomed in the sun
awakening me

to one last snow,
its glare in sunlight
harsh, a kind of trial.

APRIL FIRE

1
What is it we
desire in spring,
or are we merely a part
of desiring?
In early morning,
birdsong trills
like running water.
Something in us grows
from darkness.

Below these trees,
huge fountains that stand,
already the worms begin
to slide
their alphabet

over white roots,
white tendrils
that slowly unfurl,
grow, and divide
finer than a woman's hair,

while the orange of robins
moves like flame
across the lawn.

Mark Irwin

from Against the Meanwhile (c) 1988 Mark Irwin. published by Wesleyan University Press.

these two bits are but a wee excerpt from a very long poem called Circling, which travels the year. here, obviously, we're at the same moment in the poem as we are on the earth. perhaps more will follow.

and these calendars, ones for which i can find no further pa- ges, or no more information, keep me on the prowl through the back musty rooms of shops and museums, searching. rooting.


i hope you've not yet tired of my series. i've got more!

from The Real Poem • (the calendars)

Even now
I remember something

the way a flower
in a jar of water

remembers its life
in the perfect garden

the way a flower
in a jar of water

remembers its life
as a closed seed

the way a flower
in a jar of water

steadies itself
remembering itself

long ago
the plunging roots

the gravel the rain
the glossy stem

the wings of the leaves
the swords of the leaves

rising and clashing
for the rose of the sun

the salt of the stars
the crown of the wind

the beds of the clouds
the blue dream

the unbreakable circle.

from Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud

a man for all seasons: 1913

AFTER READING TU FU,
I GO OUTSIDE TO THE DWARF ORCHARD

East of me, west of me, full summer.

How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.

Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.

Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.

What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?

Tomorrow is dark.

Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.

Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.

Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

-- Charles Wright

From Chickamauga, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Copyright © 1995 by Charles Wright. All rights reserved.

I'm 62
Another day ignorant.
Here comes the sun anyway.
So beautiful I could just pee my pants.
Frost wore diapers after 70
his daughter told his biographer
he'd get so excited.
It doesn't get easier.
I just filleted a yellow perch
I caught an hour ago in the bay.
Its lone gut unfolded
like origami,
one sandshrimp after another.
You see what I mean?
I live alone to spare myself,
another, the intensity of feelings
even a little bird brings on
eating the bread crumbs
I put out the night before.

-- Tom Crawford
Orion Magazine

good this year too!

(and this also serves to illustrate the fact
that at the same time, the old
victorian stylings were still around)

spring

THE WAVE

As when far off in the middle of the ocean
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface, then rolling on
Gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks
With a prodigious roar, and what was deep
Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls
Of sunken sand and living things and water —
So in the springtime every race of people
And all the creatures on earth or in the water,
Wild animals and flocks and all the birds
In all their painted colors, all rush to charge
Into the fire that burns them: love moves them all.

Virgil

translated by Robert Pinsky
The Threepenny Review

1896: a big year (the calendars)

we've talked about the publisher volland,
and how it was one house (mainly children's books and postcards)
that seized upon the new principles of japonisme
and created much beauty through it.

let us now add the name of prang to this list.
with the japonisme in his nature publications, christmas cards,
and calendars, he too became known as avant garde
as did the artists with whom he worked.

on feb 26, 2010, 20.9 inches of snow falls
from the storm in Central Park,
pushing the city's total for the month to 36.9 inches
and easily beating the previous high of 30.5 inches,
set in March 1896.

The Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson,
rules that segregation is not discriminatory
provided that African Americans
have accommodations equal to those of whites,
establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine.

the magazines die jugend and house beautiful were born,
chekov writes the seagull, and
Oscar Wilde's play Salomé premieres in Paris.

jones' operetta the geisha opens in london,
h g wells writes the time machine,
and utah becomes a state.

james m black writes When the Saints Go Marching In,
puccini writes la boheme, and
john philip sousa writes stars and stripes forever.

x-rays, and helium, and radioactivity are discovered,
and Brooks Brothers creates the button-down collar for dress shirts.

By 1896, the Postal Service is making deliveries
to certain rural and urban homes six days a week.

in 1896 cracker jax and tootsie rolls are introduced
and athens holds the first of the modern olympics.

f schuyler mathews further demonstrates
his talent and versatility
with this calendar.

and we look like this:

green

an education in colors

welcome to the world of f. schuyler mathews,
botanist, gardener and calendar maker.

today is just the introduction; next comes the calendar.
these images are from his book
the golden flower: chrysanthemum,
and the words from his
field book of american wildflowers.

The chief beauty of the flower garden is its color. If we are inclined to consider color as only one of the essential elements of its beauty which attract us, we make a mistake; it is the color of the tulip, the rose, the dahlia, and the chrysanthemum which is the attraction as surely as we possess eyesight. The appreciation of beautiful forms and artistic arrangements, the perfume of the flowers, and their varied characteristics, are all matters of secondary interest compared with the golden yellow, the sapphire blue, the ruby red, and the royal purple which gladden our eyes when the spring flowers begin to bloom.

Imagine a garden bereft of every color but green; and suppose every flower presented to our eyes a variation of that one hue; what would we think then of the garden's beauty ? Would the bees find the flowers and continue to gather honey? I think the answers to such questions will compel us to place color first on the list of the attractions in a garden, and underline the word as well.

But it is necessary to understand exactly what the color is which we call red, or blue, or yellow. For the sake of something tangible I shall call the Portia carnation pure red, the zenith blue of the sky pure blue, and the wild mustard at its yellowest best, or the lemon-colored African marigold, pure yellow; the outside surface of the buttercup's petal is also near the pure yellow. The scarlet runner is exactly an orange-scarlet, the President Hyde chrysanthemum is a perfect golden yellow, and the bluest bachelor's button is blue inclined toward the ultramarine tone. There are powerful tones of purple in the cinerarias ranging right toward crimson and toward ultramarine blue ; the daffodils give us a wealth of golden orange, and also yellow tints reaching as far as greenish yellow, and among the petunias we may find varieties crimson and solferino in hue.

A perfect knowledge of the individuality of a certain color is, without doubt, a matter of education. When once we know that the scarlet vermilion of the artist's paint-box or the Madame Crozy canna is pure scarlet, when that color is before our eyes for days in succession and our memory of it is established beyond doubt, then we may be sure that we hold in our hands a key which will unlock the secret door of all knowledge of color.

a man for all seasons: 1912

A LIST OF PRAISES

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,


Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.


Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.


Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.


Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over.


Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.


Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river.


Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only.


Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains


And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

Anne Porter


From Living Things by Anne Porter,
published by Zoland Books,
an imprint of Steerforth Press
of Hanover, New Hampshire.
Copyright © 2006 by Anne Porter.

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