blackberry picking

Blackberry Picking

by Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. 

In an Iridescent Time

In an Iridescent Time

by Ruth Stone

My mother, when young scrubbed laundry in a tub,
She and her sisters on an old brick walk
Under the apple trees, sweet rub-a-dub.
The bees came round their heads, the wrens made talk.
Four young ladies each with a rainbow board
Honed their knuckles, wrung their wrists to red,
Tossed back their braids and wiped their aprons wet.
The Jersey calf beyond the back fence roared;
And all the soft day, swarms about their pet
Buzzed at his big brown eyes and bullish head.
Four times they rinsed, they said. Some things they starched,
Then shook them from the baskets two by two,
And pinned the fluttering intimacies of life
Between the lilac bushes and the yew;
Brown gingham, pink, and skirts of Alice blue.


[1959]

the whole carpet

Sing, my heart, about gardens you've never known,
bright and remote, like gardens set in glass.
Water and roses of Isfahan and Shiraz,
sing their praises, second to none.

Show, my heart, that you will always be there.
That they have you in mind, their ripening figs.
That you blend among the blossoms and twigs
with the intensified, near-visible air.

Never make the mistake of believing
you have to renounce in order to be!
Silk thread: you too went into the weaving.

Whichever image expresses your mind,
even a scene from a life of misery,
feel the whole carpet's radiant design!

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Graham Good

the deepest sensuality

The Deepest Sensuality 

by D.H. Lawrence 

 

The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.

grace and felicity

Against Which  

habit smacks
its dull skull
like a stuck bull
in a brick stall 

and my version
of what I know
is like eye surgery
with a backhoe 

on grace
so much beyond
my pitiful gray
sponge of a brain 

I'd not believe it exists
except for such
doses of felicity
as this.


— Michael Ryan

sunflower

Sunflower 

by Frank Steele

You’re expected to see
only the top, where sky
scrambles bloom, and not
the spindly leg, hairy, fending off
tall, green darkness beneath.
Like every flower, she has a little
theory, and what she thinks
is up. I imagine the long
climb out of the dark
beyond morning glories, day lilies, four o’clocks
up there to the dream she keeps
lifting, where it’s noon all day.

souls of those we have lost

I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate thing, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us.

— Marcel Proust

[This grasshopper visited our porch yesterday. My deceased brother Bennett's photography icon was a grasshopper. I think maybe he stopped by to wish me a happy birthday (two days ago).]