"a glint of bronze in the chill mornings"

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground



From "To the Light of September" by W.S. Merwin. Complete poem is here.

Early Autumn White Birch, Maxfield Parrish, 1936

Happy Mabon

"Oh how sweetly, when we are young, it hurts..."

To the Moon
by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

O lovely moon, now I’m reminded
how almost a year since, full of anguish,
I climbed this hill to gaze at you again,
and you hung there, over that wood, as now,
clarifying all things. Filled with mistiness,
trembling, that’s how your face seemed to me,
from all those tears that welled in my eyes, so
troubled was my life, and is, and does not change,
O moon, my delight. And yet it does help me,
to record my grief and tell it, year by year.
Oh how sweetly, when we are young, it hurts,
when hope has such a long journey to run,
and memory is so short,
this remembrance of things past, even if it
is sad, and the pain lasts!

Translated by A.S. Kline

Sleeping Nude in Front of the Mirror, Franz Nölken, 1915

Rilke on sadness

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet


Mournful Foreboding of What is to Come, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, c.1810

"She dreaded a beast and discovered a god."

If I were Psyche how could I not
bring the lamp to our bedside?
I would have known in advance
all the travails my gazing
would bring, more than Psyche
ever imagined,
and even so, how could I not have raised
the amber flame to see
the human person I knew
was to be revealed.
She did not even know! She dreaded
a beast and discovered
a god. But I
know, and hunger
to witness again the form
of mortal love itself.


From "Psyche in Somerville" by Denise Levertov. The complete poem is here.

Psyche and Cupid, Peter Paul Rubens, c.1636

Before the Great Troubling

Before the Great Troubling
by Corey Mesler

There were times of great clarity.
There were days when time
did not imprison, did not
glad-hand the devil.
And there was a feeling that this
would all go on, getting
better and better,
enriching us in ways we could never
foresee. This was the feeling
we lived under as if
it were shade.
There were times, before the great
troubling, when we
were happy to think the world vast
and shapeless, when
we were happy to call modernity
out host. This I remind myself
when it closes in.
This comforts somehow
as if in the past is the seed of a
future where I will
once again walk out into the dark-
ness as if it were my
best dream, as if it held things for me
that I would need, things
as particular and personal as a poem.




Corey Mesler is a gifted poet and fiction writer who also -- along with his wife, Cheryl -- owns a bookstore in Memphis. I interviewed Corey recently for Chapter 16, and he had fascinating things to say. You can read the Q&A here. The beautiful poem above is from his new collection by the same name, which is full of lovely, funny, smart stuff. Go here to order a copy.


Storm at Sea, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1569

Poem ©2011 by Corey Mesler. Used by permission. All rights reserved

"Every Verse is a Child of Love"

 Every verse is a child of love,
 A destitute bastard slip, 
 A firstling -- the winds above --
 Left by the road asleep.

 From "Every Verse is a Child of Love" by Marina Tsvetaeva. More here.


  Nude Child with Open Arms, Giulio Romano (1499-1546)

"...the sun itself disguised"

"The sky to the east was black with bird, the sun itself disguised. Thousands of passenger pigeons beat southward, a flying carpet of them. Catto held his breath. A hundred thousand. might be. They were free. Marveling up at them he felt pure, the innocence of dawn. He watched in welcome every spring, in godspeed every fall. The birds flew in a vast, oval mass, no pairs, no skeins, no wedges, only the great mass of them, and the steady, fading rush across the face of the sun. A dark mass, the blushing breasts obscured, they dimmed the golden morning."

From When the War is Over* by Stephen Becker


A Pair of Passenger Pigeons (''Ectopistes migratorius''),  John James Audubon (1785-1851)

  "Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon"

*I'm in the middle of reading this beautiful novel -- one of those wonderful books that seems to have been unjustly forgotten. More about Becker here.

"The reverberations of Stygian remembrance..."

It is given to mortals to love, to recognize,
to make sounds move to their fingers,
but I have forgotten what I wanted to say
and a bodiless thought returns to the palace of shadows.

The Transparent One still speaks, but of nothing.
Still a swallow, a friend known as a girl, Antigone.
The reverberations of Stygian remembrance
burn like a black ice on one’s lips.


From "I Have Forgotten the Word I Wanted to Say" by Osip Mandelstam. Read the complete poem here.


Passage to the Underworld, Joachim Patinir, 1515-1524

"Leaves scarcely breathing..."

Leaves scarcely breathing
in the black breeze;
the flickering swallow
draws circles in the dusk.

In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.



From Stone 24 by Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Clarence Brown & W.S. Merwin, The selected poems of Osip Mandelstam

Summer, Gustave Doré, 1860-70

Australian poet, edible perfume, etc.

Now my five senses
gather into a meaning
all acts, all presences;
and as a lily gathers
the elements together,
in me this dark and shining,
that stillness and that moving,
these shapes that spring from nothing,
become a rhythm that dances,
a pure design.

From "Five Senses" by Judith Wright. You can read a profile of Wright here, and there's an interesting interview with her here.

******************************************************************

Wright’s poem about the commingling of the senses seems like an appropriate introduction to my first perfume post in -– what? Must be months. To be honest, I doubted I’d ever write about perfume here again. Not that I’ve lost my love for the stuff. I’ve just lost much of my enthusiasm for writing about it, in part because writing about it usually means acquiring it, and I am presently not in a mood to acquire things. Even an extra 2ml vial seems like a major addition to the clutter around here. I have fantasies about mysterious men in trucks showing up some morning and carting it all away, leaving me nothing but my books, my bed and the coffee pot.

That said, pleasure-seeking still trumps my monastic impulse occasionally, so when Julie Rose (who writes wonderfully at Everything is Interesting) contacted me recently about a lovely discovery she’d made at a farmer’s market in Maine, I couldn’t resist checking it out. Seems Julie ran into an old acquaintance named Kathi Langelier who has started a business devoted to handmade herbal products. Kathi’s creations include floral and herbal elixirs that Julie described to me as “basically edible perfume.” This, I had to try. Kathi has been kind enough to send me some samples, including Wild Rose, Ginger, Lavender and Chocolate Love. The base is made with locally sourced raw honey, and the organic essences include lavender and wild rose that Kathi harvests herself. Julie declared them “intoxicating” and I agree. When I opened the bottle of Wild Rose, my first thought was OMG, my rose HG. It has a rich, almost boozy rose fragrance, as potent as any rose soliflore in my perfume cabinet. But, unlike my many rose oils, attars, etc., this rose I can eat. Kathi recommends putting a few drops into tea or water, but you can also take it straight from the dropper, and it’s absolutely delicious. The Lavender is just as delightful, with a combination of flavor and aroma that could satisfy the most powerful lavender jones. The Ginger and Chocolate Love aren’t quite as impressive on the fragrance front, but they certainly taste great, and I’m fascinated by the composition of the Chocolate Love, which includes – in addition to raw cacao – damiana, ginseng, hawthorn berries, maca root and saw palmetto. Quite an herbal aphrodisiac.

You can check out the elixirs for yourself at Kathi’s Etsy site, or on Facebook. Happy dosing.

The Five Senses and the Four Elements, Jacques Linard, 1627